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Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists

44 points by Mabusto 2y ago

Hello HN! I have a group of friends who are professional artists and they are not big fans of generative AI. I've tried my best to explain what it is and isn't and a few of them are interested in taking a more serious course on the subject. Most of the learning material is either very technical and geared towards programmers or too vague and hand wavy to be practical to someone who wants to incorporate generative AI into their artistic workflow. Most of them are familiar with text2img models, but ideally I'd like something that explains _how_ diffusion models work, their probabilistic nature, how they're trained on images/text and maybe even a high level description of what the different parts of a setup in, say, ComfyUI are doing (LoRA, VAE, CLIP, UNet models). I admittedly have a tough time judging the technical expertise of people, but I think some of the resources I've personally found great for explaining the basics (3blue1Brown, Andrew Ngs course, ComputerPhile videos) are still too technical and impractical. What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete?

givinguflac 2y ago
I’ve found this to be a fabulous resource: https://letsbuild.ai/ https://letsbuild.ai/ Specifically the reading and tutorials sections may be of interest to you. Edit: honest question, why the downvotes? Am I not contributing to the conversation?
52-6F-62 2y ago
[flagged]
- ilaksh 2y ago
  In this view the purpose of creating art is self-development? I suspect we could drill down into what you are trying to say for a whole thread but the result is just going to be a specification for pretension.
  - 52-6F-62 2y ago
    In all views. It certainly isn't a checkbox. Why don’t you shelve the pretentious corporate rhetoric yourself and re-read what I’ve suggested. Get off the computer and pick up a pencil, or mound of clay, or whatever, and give it a few years of regular practice. Theres nothing pretentious about that. It will do everything and I will need to say nothing.
    - ilaksh 2y ago
      "In all views". "It will do everything and I will need to say nothing". Those are the pretentious parts of your reply. It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point. Sure, it can be developmental for an individual.
      - text0404 2y ago
        > It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point then it's likely that you're discussing people who don't consider themselves artists. i used to know some folks who did graphic design for advertisements - they didn't consider that art, as the point of the banners etc that they made was to attract attention and get people to spend money on a client's website, not to express themselves in some meaningful way. they were under no delusion that they were creating anything that could be considered near the same category as a Picasso (for example).
        ilaksh 2y ago
        Text to image is a very efficient way to express yourself meaningfully.
        text0404 2y ago
        disagree. it's a very (environmentally) inefficient way to mass produce meaningless, generic pictures which are poor stand-ins for authentic expressions the human condition.
      - 52-6F-62 2y ago
- echelon 2y ago
  > Obsolete… The fucking hubris There are some real dangers here that need to be navigated. Junior artists who get their start doing commissions are not going to have that path anymore. Reddit's job boards for junior artists are a literal desert now. In a sense, the activation energy gradient to producing good results has lowered such that the economic reward for up and coming artists has deteriorated. > Why don’t you let the artists maintain their own practice, rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours? Artists who get their start in AI early can build recognition and clout within the community. They'll potentially be at a big advantage. a16z is investing in non-technical artists to bootstrap production and community. There's actually a lot of interesting stuff happening when you dive in to AI art.
  - dartos 2y ago
    For now. It’s just market forces being unsure about the future of hiring artists. Companies are like lemmings, they just follow one another. Artists already know that gen AI is just another tool in the toolbox. We’re just waiting for MBAs to also realize this. GenAI making artists obsolete is a dumb idea. No MBA is going to be trying to coax a GenAI model into making an image.
    - echelon 2y ago
      I don't think I made my argument clear. This isn't about companies not paying artists, it's about peer-to-peer opportunities contracting and the market shrinking at the bottom. https://www.reddit.com/r/artistforhire/ https://www.reddit.com/r/artistforhire/ This is hardly the only community for this, and it's evaporated into a ghost town. Prices have decreased an order of magnitude. This is one of the ways up and coming artists without professional training get started earning money from their skill set. You should see also how Fiverr has filled up with GenAI artists that are pricing out traditional artists. Fiverr isn't typically a place for highly skilled work - it's for newbies and developing world opportunities. And now the money is thinning out.
      - dartos 2y ago
        Oh yes absolutely. Contract art for individuals looking for a custom image has been devastated by GenAI. This makes a little more sense as the bar for quality is much lower than a widespread commercial product and most individuals are willing to compromise on that to get a good desktop wallpaper quickly for free. Even local events have been using AI banner images.
- cdrini 2y ago
  He said he's trying assuage his friends' concerns that artists are obsolete. Ie op agrees that artists are not obsolete.
  - uludag 2y ago
    I think there's a condition though. That if they learn generative AI tools then they won't be obsolete. If op was just of the view that there's nothing special about generative AI, then the post would read very different.
    - cdrini 2y ago
      I think they think that generative AI might help give his artist friends a competitive edge against other artists, which would help make them more hirable, hence assuaging their concerns of obsolescence. My guess would be OP thinks generative AI won't make artists obsolete, but might make being an artist more competitive. But I reckon we're just speculating on their internal state.
  - 52-6F-62 2y ago
    Obsolete for what purpose? I dont think any aspiring artist, professional or otherwise, was ever deeply concerned about their future prospects in creating corporate graphics or mechanical pop songs. It was a fast buck, that’s all. Attempting to seduce them into committing ever more of their creative efforts in the service of a machine that only seeks to churn out more artifacts misses the entire point of ever starting, and especially continuing, an artistic practice of any kind. The entire purpose is in the act of creating and the efforts involved in honing a craft that entirely relies on your commitment. It doesn’t get any simpler or less pretentious. The road to mastery is the entire bloody point. Trying to encourage your own friends to short circuit that only serves in getting you to the artifact faster, and in the process neglects anything of any value from the entire process. Is that really being a friend? Unless you think the only thing that matters here is the artifact. Then you’re lost.
    - achenet 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago
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- bee_rider 2y ago
  > What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete? It seems like your post is mostly based on assumptions about the poster, and a misreading(?) of this one word. There’s no hubris in wanting to assuage people’s fears that their skills might become obsolete. > The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator. They claim to be engaging (talking to friends) to the extent that they can be without already being a working artist. Maybe they are lying, but all we have is a post on the Internet, so if we assume the author of the post is a liar, we don’t have much to go by. > You will never understand this unless you engage. Trying to circumvent it again and again will only result in circumambulating the point and will miss it every time. No matter how shiny the artifact that results. Do you actually work in art? I don’t. But what do you mean by engage? I’ve taken some art classes. It was fun. But this was a cultivated experience, I was paying the instructor to have fun and explore ideas. On the other hand, you can poke around online and find people who will complain about the day-to-day bullshit of their art jobs. I worry that, almost by definition, the easy paths to engagement are almost by-definition not going to give a good view of what the day-to-day bullshit experience looks like. People romanticize engineering and programming as well. The beauty of getting a tangible solution, sprung from your mind, that impacts the world. At the end of the day, a lot of houses and dinners were bought by the need to throw together boring assed corporate inventory management systems. Most work is the sort of stuff that nobody wants to do, after all. That’s why they pay you for it, rather than going the other way.
- IanCal 2y ago
  > Obsolete… The fucking hubris Oh, you didn't read the whole post. I'd recommend you do, it'd help with understanding and replying. > , rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours? The OP is literally saying they're asking. There are more constructive ways of engaging. Let's try something simple. Have you ever used a pre-existing piece as part of your composition? Would it matter if that was not created manually? What's the least creative part of what you do, are there any bland things you could fill in (e.g. paint these clouds or grass for me).
- Vaslo 2y ago
  "The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator." So if you make your art for "you", why should I care about it? If this is how artists feel then bring on the AI.
  - handfuloflight 2y ago
    If you make it for you, don't show it to me.
- keiferski 2y ago
  Sorry, but graphic designers (who are the group of artists most affected by genAI) don't think this way, and I have a hard time believing you're actually interacting with any and discussing this issue, because this take is what I'll call "the trendy online anti AI art" viewpoint. In the real world, graphic designers are pretty pragmatic people that tend to master whatever toolset they can get their hands on.
  - dr_dshiv 2y ago
    This is what I came here to say. Tech has been pretty central to the tools of professional graphic artists (which include video games) for a long time. I notice a lot of non-professional artists running to the rescue of artists. I suspect this is in part because there are a lot of young people who have pursued a degree in art and have been frustrated by the mismatch of their expectations in the commercial world. There is a lot of romanticism. I myself went to art school (MFA). Actually I was really grossed out by the big Art gallery scene. It professes to be open minded, anti establishment and non commercial but it is extremely narrow in politics, hugely elitist and deeply oriented around big money. That’s ok, but I wouldn’t claim that Art has any moral superiority.
- dang 2y ago
  Can you please avoid the flamewar style on HN? You're welcome to express your views, but not like this—it's against the intended spirit of the site. If you want to express your substantive points thoughtfully, that would be fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ilaksh 2y ago
The technical explanations are going to be technical. Based on what you said it sounds like you want to search through ComfyUI tutorials to find the one that seems just right to you. AI will eventually basically make artists obsolete just like every other job. You should focus on the creative possibilities of the present. Things like tools or ComfyUI nodes or whatever that allow you to do things like "auto complete" digital paintings based on live sketches, change a style, generate variations, etc. Focus on the capabilities of the tools in terms of enhancing or producing art or testing ideas. Show how an artist can train a Lora on their art and then use a scribble ControlNet to instantly go from sketch to a manifestation of a finished digital painting in their own style and evolve it with each stroke.
- echelon 2y ago
  > AI will eventually basically make artists obsolete just like every other job. No it won't. We've hit a wall and the low hanging fruit are gone. OpenAI hit a wall and is searching for enterprise customers to maintain their valuation, and Google and Facebook are calling them out on it. Meanwhile, text is entirely inadequate for manipulating visual things effectively. AI will supercharge artists that embrace it. Text-to-art is not good enough and real artists will be working with layers, node editors, and in 3D/video modalities.
  - ilaksh 2y ago
    There have always been downturns in the velocity of increase in capability of technology like a series of s-curves, but at a zoomed out level it's still an exponential that continues as we constantly innovate. The trajectory we are on is for AI to be able to do most intellectual jobs in less than ten years and most physical jobs in less than 20. That is speculation but it is based on many decades of increasing performance and capabilities. Text does have limitations but AI tools and models are not limited to text to image and new models and systems will be created. I agree that AI will help artists in the short term. But we should anticipate that humans will eventually just be a bottleneck in the creative process.
- coldcode 2y ago
  If you make art in postcards, then maybe you will be replaced. Diffusion based AI image generation is limited to a little over 1 megapixel, or double if you use an expander, or you can infinitely grow an initial image with more of the exact same sort of thing. 1 MPx printed at 300 dpi is similar in size to a postcard. Diffusion being able to generate meaningful printed images at 50-200 Mpx is impossible. My art is made at that size (that's 7200 to 14400 pixels per side approximately @ 300 dpi). I don't use AI. I do use my own code. Try making a Jackson Pollack using AI, AI can only effectively make objective images, given it requiring linking similar images via limited text descriptions. Making headers for newspaper articles or blog posts on the web might be OK if you don't care much. Check out https://www.quantamagazine.org https://www.quantamagazine.org to see how real artists do things. Their header images are really imaginative given the subject matter, something AI today can't do. It might be instructive to take their articles and try to make header images for them. If you make videos, then its 1080p which can be done by AI. But video has its own issues with video diffusion generators having limits on continuity. They are getting better, but the longer the clip, the less control you have and the longer it takes to fiddle with the prompt(s). It won't ever replace real movies unless you enjoy the SciFi channel or Sharknado. That would require an entire new kind of AI which we don't have today.
freeone3000 2y ago
That’s the point of generative AI, though, isn’t it? You put in text, you get out an image, no more need for discernment or skill or labor. No amount of explanation of vector math will change the fact that article headers can now be generated from the article, or you can say “give me a spaceman on a planet looking at twin moons” and a Steam game header is generated with some basic cropping. Incidental and corporate art, which is how a lot of professional artists make a living, is in real danger of being automated away.
- echelon 2y ago
  > That’s the point of generative AI, though, isn’t it? You put in text, you get out an image, no more need for discernment or skill or labor. The best tools in this space are spatial editors and node editors. Text is weak sauce. Also, you can't use text modalities for film and 3D. It has to be art tooling to get good results. Artists will always have a job. They'll just be doing way more than they were before.
  - dartos 2y ago
    You still need a prompt, but the spatial tools and controlnet models are where the magic is. I think style transfer + pose detection + edge detection gives artists a bunch of new tools to play with. OP I would look into learning comfyui
  - fergonco 2y ago
    We will always need to work in the fields. With agricultural machinery we'll be doing way more than we were before. if the amount of new offer is not paired by demand, there will be pain.
  - chefandy 2y ago
    The fact that this comment is gray says everything that you need to know about this entire comment thread. A tiny slice of people that know what they're talking about and a giant stack of people drunk on dunning-krueger-fueled overconfidence in their understanding of art, on philosophical, practical, and professional levels thinking they've got the authoritative word because it's just so dang loud in the echo chamber. The tendency for technical people to think they can outmaneuver subject matter experts on their own terf with a few a priori thought experiments has always annoyed the hell out of me, but I can confidently say there has never been a more frustrating time to be both a professional artist and software developer.
spacecadet 2y ago
I stumbled on this, I think here on hacker news, and appreciate the amount of effort the author put into providing visualizations. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/ https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/ Whats the goal here? Do your friends express interest in using AI within their practice? Technical or not, an artist doesn't need to understand it to achieve that... Many years ago before I better understood it, myself and other artist used generative AI to create elements of our works and no one knew or cared that we did.
echelon 2y ago
Banodoco Discord is ground zero for AI film and focuses on open source models and resources. Their results are a year ahead of SOTA models as a result of their workflows and effort. https://banodoco.ai/ https://banodoco.ai/ Invoke AI has incredible open source image editing tooling and a fantastic YouTube and Discord that pair with it. https://youtube.com/@invokeai https://youtube.com/@invokeai Curious Refuge (paid) has a great community and paid lessons for AI filmmaking. https://curiousrefuge.com/ https://curiousrefuge.com/ Reddit is overflowing with AI art communities, many of them technical in nature. https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/ https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/ There are a lot of offshoots of these, and Discord will provide the best resources once you get plugged in.
bloomingkales 2y ago
I believe the photoshop ai integration will be the most seamless starting point. I personally am waiting to get a 4090 to do more graphical work later locally.
- chefandy 2y ago
  The photoshop integration is one of the only tools that was developed even considering what people that work with images want to do with it.
tikkun 2y ago
> What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete? Step 1 - get them to sign up for AI image tools. * Midjourney is best for quick images * Playground AI is good if they need to modify images but the quality doesn't need to be perfect * Leonardo AI (now owned by Canva) is a good full suite * Photoshop AI feature is best if they already work in photoshop Then show them how to use these tools! That might require you signing up for these tools first and learning yourself. Step 2 - For learning about how AI image generators work here's my video list. 1) AltexSoft - has a low viewcount but it's a great overview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rke0V_VkF3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rke0V_VkF3c 2) Jay Alammar - it's technical but also visual and he explains it well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXmacOUJUaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXmacOUJUaw 3) Gonkee - again, technical, but visual, great - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFztPP9qPRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFztPP9qPRc Workflow example: good for seeing the workflow of SD as of May 2023 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ldxCh3cnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ldxCh3cnI Too technical for what you're looking for: Computerphile, Ari Seff, Jia-Bin Huang Step 3 - For assuaging their fears about becoming obsolete - I think the following is a great podcast episode. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs-labour-market/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs... But their fears might be valid. A test is perhaps: if their boss spent a few days learning to use AI image generators, would they still need them? For some artists the answer would be no, for many the answer would be yes. It'll change over time as the tools get better, but that's a pretty good proxy. If they're doing things that require more iteration, interacting with users and humans and the physical world, nuanced judgement, in-person work, safer. If they're doing things that are contract based, no iteration, get a request and deliver a result, much less safe.
- thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing. My sister has been asking about AI for art, shes a canvas painter, she likes to play around and get inspiration or play with her own ideas and seeing what the model does with them.
dale_glass 2y ago
I would skip all the tech talk and go to the practical, artist-friendly systems first of all. This would for instance be the Krita plugin and InvokeAI. Both heavily cater to an user with little interest of getting into the weeds of VAEs and UNet models, and is much more at home using a drawing tablet. Krita is closer to being artist-targeted since it's primarily a drawing application with an AI add-on. InvokeAI is more on the opposite side, an AI tool with primitive but still usable ability to guide the AI by sketching stuff on a canvas.
camillomiller 2y ago
It seems that you, like everyone else with a purely technical background, are missing the mark completely about art and Generative AI. The point of art (unless it's purely craft) is in the process, which is exactly what gen AI makes (or claims it's making) obsolete. Every single time someone says something along the line of "optimizing" the art process with the AI is missing the mark. The reason why this doesn't appear to be clearer, is that this field if filled with tasteless technology-driven engineers that think they can explain or reduce everything to numbers. Go talk to your friends, and go to their exhibitions. Witness and celebrate their process. They don't need "courses" on such a misplaced and self-entitled technology.
1209412comb 2y ago
I don't think these artists need to go through a full course of how these modeling works under neath. It's a lot of effort if you don't already have a good background in STEM. I don't think they would gain more appreciation for GenAI even if they see how hard to make these models. There are a lot of other interesting Computer Generative Art that are not Diffusions. Maybe those a more genuinely interesting to your artist friends.
datadrivenangel 2y ago
Generative AI will become a tool like gradients or object creation. Complex things to do by hand, that can be done algorithmically. The details of how it works mostly won't matter unless you're trying to get really specific with how a plugin works. For a filter in Photoshop, you don't find many tutorials on the underlying algorithms, you usually find guidance on when and why to move the slider.
sophrocyne 2y ago
Hey all. I'm the CEO of Invoke - appreciate everyone who has mentioned us in the thread. To OP -- We work with professional artists regularly, and I'm seeing things pick up as more begin to understand the potential for creative control. Artists mainly want to be afforded creative flexibility and control, and need an interface that feels natural for their workflow. Invoke is OSS, we release continued training/education on a weekly basis (free, on YT) and we'll be releasing a simplified installer soon.
raincole 2y ago
> I'd like something that explains _how_ diffusion models work, their probabilistic nature, how they're trained on images/text and maybe even a high level description of what the different parts of a setup in, say, ComfyUI are doing (LoRA, VAE, CLIP, UNet models). These things hardly matter for artists. Most artists don't even know how a Gaussian blur filter works and they can still produce astonishing artworks.
Pigalowda 2y ago
Understanding the pathophysiology of how your terminal illness is killing you is a coping mechanism for death termed “intellectualization”. Not everyone finds solace in this strategy. Understanding how the blade is forged as it pierces you may be a mundane final thought. But if you survive I suppose you can use that knowledge to pierce others and destroy their planned futures. Let them pivot or let them starve? Pivoting to some hybrid of generative AI with human edits is appealing to software developers but soulless and essentially anethema to many others.
wruza 2y ago
I can share my insights of going from 0 to “can do” in the last year. ideally I'd like something that explains _how_ diffusion models work, their probabilistic nature, how they're trained on images/text How they work is probably out of scope of an artist. They’ll figure it out given some knobs, and honestly you cannot explain any of it, you have to get the feeling. Cause it’s not only probabilistic, but island-y. What worked yesterday may noy work today. You have to train yourself on these parameters. Comfy Is basically a bash-like visual programming. Cool for developers and repeatable workflows, but overkill and overwhelming for a beginner. Problems. The most problems come from python management. Python versions, libraries, plugins breaking the env, etc. you have to prepare some pre-built folders (or cloud images) for them. So that it just works. Then I’d download a few popular checkpoints andshow them the inpaint (mask) tab in a1111. I think that this tab will create a good first impression required for further interest. As a sort of a poor artist myself, it was amazing to see how SD can take two sprites and inpaint them together across a masked edge. Or replace a segment with a completely new content. (Although for them it may look meh) Txt2img is not that wow, cause everyone is already tired of it. Can’t point to resources, sorry, I learned from the internet by googling all my questions.
muzani 2y ago
It's emotional. Fix that first. I can draw well. But I don't associate my identity with it. So I am not an artist. I write well but I am not a writer. I am happy to delegate these forms of work to AI, the same way I'll delegate laundry to washing machines. For someone who calls themselves an artist, their identity is centered around their ability to draw. Photographers will use editing tools. Most don't mind tools. A photo editor enhances the photo, the core still comes from composition, lighting, etc. I would start here. Show that it could be useful first. How can AI white balance dozens of photos? A favorite use of AI among artists is doing different resolutions, expanding a small image into a capsule or cover image.
- NoOn3 2y ago
  True Artists don't feel it like work they feel it something like selfexpression creativity. :)
  - chefandy 2y ago
    the very idea that art requiring a significant amount of deliberate action is a problem to be overcome and not part of what makes it fulfilling-- like artists have just been practicing to so they can produce more work more quickly-- betrays a foundational lack of understanding of why people do it.
    - muzani 2y ago
      To put it one way, some mine blocks as art, some carve sculptures as art. Some build walls as art, some build buildings as art. The ones building buildings and carving statues want machines to do the work of gathering the resources. Those who make games and movies want graphics and audio. To the pixel artists, getting their drawing in a game is part of the art, but to the game dev, working with a pixel artist may be a chore. We'll see a lot of reshifting of these forms of art - the pixel artist will be able to use AI to make games or variations and such, and may find art in becoming an art director instead.
      - 2y ago
keiferski 2y ago
This is a great question and unfortunately the hostility here and from your friends is an omnipresent, shortsighted thing. These tools are very powerful, but quite finicky. I haven't found any particularly good courses, however I do enjoy this YouTuber, who covers Midjourney and some other generators: https://www.youtube.com/@WadeMcMaster https://www.youtube.com/@WadeMcMaster The key thing you should try to do is this: make them understand that genAI is a toolset, akin to Photoshop.
chefandy 2y ago
I’m a technical artist, so wielding tech to make art is my thing. I come from a dev background but just graduated from art school this year. I reckon there are some hurdles to overcome before seeing a lot of non-technical generative AI imaging uptake among advanced and professional artists. A) most of these tools UIs aren’t useful to traditional artists in any part of the direct creation process yet, B) the prompt-based workflow, conceptually, doesn’t fit into traditional art processes so it’s essentially starting from scratch, and C) some vocal denizens of the DIY NN scene have done a fine job of making it as unappealing as possible to traditional artists. I know plenty of artists— both commercial artists and professional fine artists— that use simpler generative tools like midjourney for mood boards, reference, etc. but don’t know a single one that directly uses the output to make art. One big problem is that the UIs of all local stable diffusion front ends are not designed for people to make art— they’re designed for people to operate a neural network image generator. From a technical perspective, that’s the same thing, but from an interface design perspective, it is a very different goal, and it shows. For people that are enamored with the technology, or for people with a technical background that are used to wielding a bunch of abstract acronyms and don’t have to build up a bunch of base knowledge, that’s great. For people that just want to express themselves and already have another way to do so, it’s a huge, annoying impediment. (And while it’s done with the best of intentions (usually,) assuming non-technical artists will be as enriched by the technical knowledge and tools much as technical people without art expertise comes across as pretty conceited.) Another problem is that getting an image generator to create things in a way that makes sense in a normal artistic process is difficult. Art, generally, is about building things from broad stroke base to the finest finishing details with direct, granular control, and deciding/discovering what that finished piece will look like while you go, with all of the kismet and happy accidents that go with that process. You don’t usually make huge changes after you’ve polished it up because you probably wouldn’t have gotten that far with an element that didn’t work. When you start with something that has all of the “finished product” detail implemented already, that entire process is turned upside down. It’s distracting. Think about the way Bob Ross worked his way through a painting— do you think he would even want a workflow where he used words to describe a completed painting and then decided things he wanted to change about it? Not being an artist, encountering that tool is incredibly freeing. When you’ve put a bunch of time and practice into figuring out how to wield that artistic perspective and then use the tools you prefer to build and develop your visions from raw ingredients, it’s restrictive, disorienting. The thing you’ve been organically growing into for years that makes your art yours— the way you make basic shapes, flicks of the pencils or brush, ways that you might subconsciously separate tiny little background elements from each other, all of which are equally applicable with digital tools— is missing from this piece and has been replaced with an amalgam of many other artists hands. That’s the reason many people like generative image stuff: you don’t have to understand all of the tiny little components that make a piece what it is and just think about the objects and comparatively very-broad-stroke style. You’ve lost the verbs and adverbs from your process and are left only with nouns and adjectives. Also, while obviously not representative of the user base on a whole, the active, vocal community of stans that can’t distinguish between Reddit and the rest of their interactions have done a great job of alienating traditional artists. Their gleefully predicting the obsolescence of traditional artists— using tools built with their work without permission, no less — makes it tough to tap into that excitement. A lot of us have mouths to feed, mortgages to pay, and cancer to treat, and while many disciplines are not as vulnerable as many think, people like concept artists are actively being screwed over because tech money decided they want to get paid for our hard-won skills instead of artists. This alone makes it a tougher sell than it should be.
dr_dshiv 2y ago
This is an awfully political thread. It might be helpful to distinguish between capital-A “ART” and professional “art” — like animators, illustrators, UI designers, etc.
- chefandy 2y ago
  What, exactly, distinguishes those two categories?
  - dr_dshiv 2y ago
    One is about creating utility for others and the other is about personal expression or beauty for its own sake

44 points by Mabusto 2y ago

givinguflac 2y ago

I’ve found this to be a fabulous resource: https://letsbuild.ai/ https://letsbuild.ai/ Specifically the reading and tutorials sections may be of interest to you. Edit: honest question, why the downvotes? Am I not contributing to the conversation?

52-6F-62 2y ago

[flagged]

ilaksh 2y ago
In this view the purpose of creating art is self-development? I suspect we could drill down into what you are trying to say for a whole thread but the result is just going to be a specification for pretension.
- 52-6F-62 2y ago
  In all views. It certainly isn't a checkbox. Why don’t you shelve the pretentious corporate rhetoric yourself and re-read what I’ve suggested. Get off the computer and pick up a pencil, or mound of clay, or whatever, and give it a few years of regular practice. Theres nothing pretentious about that. It will do everything and I will need to say nothing.
  - ilaksh 2y ago
    "In all views". "It will do everything and I will need to say nothing". Those are the pretentious parts of your reply. It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point. Sure, it can be developmental for an individual.
    - text0404 2y ago
      > It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point then it's likely that you're discussing people who don't consider themselves artists. i used to know some folks who did graphic design for advertisements - they didn't consider that art, as the point of the banners etc that they made was to attract attention and get people to spend money on a client's website, not to express themselves in some meaningful way. they were under no delusion that they were creating anything that could be considered near the same category as a Picasso (for example).
      - ilaksh 2y ago
        Text to image is a very efficient way to express yourself meaningfully.
        text0404 2y ago
        disagree. it's a very (environmentally) inefficient way to mass produce meaningless, generic pictures which are poor stand-ins for authentic expressions the human condition.
    - 52-6F-62 2y ago
echelon 2y ago
> Obsolete… The fucking hubris There are some real dangers here that need to be navigated. Junior artists who get their start doing commissions are not going to have that path anymore. Reddit's job boards for junior artists are a literal desert now. In a sense, the activation energy gradient to producing good results has lowered such that the economic reward for up and coming artists has deteriorated. > Why don’t you let the artists maintain their own practice, rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours? Artists who get their start in AI early can build recognition and clout within the community. They'll potentially be at a big advantage. a16z is investing in non-technical artists to bootstrap production and community. There's actually a lot of interesting stuff happening when you dive in to AI art.
- dartos 2y ago
  For now. It’s just market forces being unsure about the future of hiring artists. Companies are like lemmings, they just follow one another. Artists already know that gen AI is just another tool in the toolbox. We’re just waiting for MBAs to also realize this. GenAI making artists obsolete is a dumb idea. No MBA is going to be trying to coax a GenAI model into making an image.
  - echelon 2y ago
    I don't think I made my argument clear. This isn't about companies not paying artists, it's about peer-to-peer opportunities contracting and the market shrinking at the bottom. https://www.reddit.com/r/artistforhire/ https://www.reddit.com/r/artistforhire/ This is hardly the only community for this, and it's evaporated into a ghost town. Prices have decreased an order of magnitude. This is one of the ways up and coming artists without professional training get started earning money from their skill set. You should see also how Fiverr has filled up with GenAI artists that are pricing out traditional artists. Fiverr isn't typically a place for highly skilled work - it's for newbies and developing world opportunities. And now the money is thinning out.
    - dartos 2y ago
      Oh yes absolutely. Contract art for individuals looking for a custom image has been devastated by GenAI. This makes a little more sense as the bar for quality is much lower than a widespread commercial product and most individuals are willing to compromise on that to get a good desktop wallpaper quickly for free. Even local events have been using AI banner images.
cdrini 2y ago
He said he's trying assuage his friends' concerns that artists are obsolete. Ie op agrees that artists are not obsolete.
- uludag 2y ago
  I think there's a condition though. That if they learn generative AI tools then they won't be obsolete. If op was just of the view that there's nothing special about generative AI, then the post would read very different.
  - cdrini 2y ago
    I think they think that generative AI might help give his artist friends a competitive edge against other artists, which would help make them more hirable, hence assuaging their concerns of obsolescence. My guess would be OP thinks generative AI won't make artists obsolete, but might make being an artist more competitive. But I reckon we're just speculating on their internal state.
- 52-6F-62 2y ago
  Obsolete for what purpose? I dont think any aspiring artist, professional or otherwise, was ever deeply concerned about their future prospects in creating corporate graphics or mechanical pop songs. It was a fast buck, that’s all. Attempting to seduce them into committing ever more of their creative efforts in the service of a machine that only seeks to churn out more artifacts misses the entire point of ever starting, and especially continuing, an artistic practice of any kind. The entire purpose is in the act of creating and the efforts involved in honing a craft that entirely relies on your commitment. It doesn’t get any simpler or less pretentious. The road to mastery is the entire bloody point. Trying to encourage your own friends to short circuit that only serves in getting you to the artifact faster, and in the process neglects anything of any value from the entire process. Is that really being a friend? Unless you think the only thing that matters here is the artifact. Then you’re lost.
  - achenet 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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bee_rider 2y ago
> What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete? It seems like your post is mostly based on assumptions about the poster, and a misreading(?) of this one word. There’s no hubris in wanting to assuage people’s fears that their skills might become obsolete. > The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator. They claim to be engaging (talking to friends) to the extent that they can be without already being a working artist. Maybe they are lying, but all we have is a post on the Internet, so if we assume the author of the post is a liar, we don’t have much to go by. > You will never understand this unless you engage. Trying to circumvent it again and again will only result in circumambulating the point and will miss it every time. No matter how shiny the artifact that results. Do you actually work in art? I don’t. But what do you mean by engage? I’ve taken some art classes. It was fun. But this was a cultivated experience, I was paying the instructor to have fun and explore ideas. On the other hand, you can poke around online and find people who will complain about the day-to-day bullshit of their art jobs. I worry that, almost by definition, the easy paths to engagement are almost by-definition not going to give a good view of what the day-to-day bullshit experience looks like. People romanticize engineering and programming as well. The beauty of getting a tangible solution, sprung from your mind, that impacts the world. At the end of the day, a lot of houses and dinners were bought by the need to throw together boring assed corporate inventory management systems. Most work is the sort of stuff that nobody wants to do, after all. That’s why they pay you for it, rather than going the other way.
IanCal 2y ago
> Obsolete… The fucking hubris Oh, you didn't read the whole post. I'd recommend you do, it'd help with understanding and replying. > , rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours? The OP is literally saying they're asking. There are more constructive ways of engaging. Let's try something simple. Have you ever used a pre-existing piece as part of your composition? Would it matter if that was not created manually? What's the least creative part of what you do, are there any bland things you could fill in (e.g. paint these clouds or grass for me).
Vaslo 2y ago
"The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator." So if you make your art for "you", why should I care about it? If this is how artists feel then bring on the AI.
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  If you make it for you, don't show it to me.
keiferski 2y ago
Sorry, but graphic designers (who are the group of artists most affected by genAI) don't think this way, and I have a hard time believing you're actually interacting with any and discussing this issue, because this take is what I'll call "the trendy online anti AI art" viewpoint. In the real world, graphic designers are pretty pragmatic people that tend to master whatever toolset they can get their hands on.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  This is what I came here to say. Tech has been pretty central to the tools of professional graphic artists (which include video games) for a long time. I notice a lot of non-professional artists running to the rescue of artists. I suspect this is in part because there are a lot of young people who have pursued a degree in art and have been frustrated by the mismatch of their expectations in the commercial world. There is a lot of romanticism. I myself went to art school (MFA). Actually I was really grossed out by the big Art gallery scene. It professes to be open minded, anti establishment and non commercial but it is extremely narrow in politics, hugely elitist and deeply oriented around big money. That’s ok, but I wouldn’t claim that Art has any moral superiority.
dang 2y ago
Can you please avoid the flamewar style on HN? You're welcome to express your views, but not like this—it's against the intended spirit of the site. If you want to express your substantive points thoughtfully, that would be fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ilaksh 2y ago

The technical explanations are going to be technical. Based on what you said it sounds like you want to search through ComfyUI tutorials to find the one that seems just right to you. AI will eventually basically make artists obsolete just like every other job. You should focus on the creative possibilities of the present. Things like tools or ComfyUI nodes or whatever that allow you to do things like "auto complete" digital paintings based on live sketches, change a style, generate variations, etc. Focus on the capabilities of the tools in terms of enhancing or producing art or testing ideas. Show how an artist can train a Lora on their art and then use a scribble ControlNet to instantly go from sketch to a manifestation of a finished digital painting in their own style and evolve it with each stroke.

echelon 2y ago
> AI will eventually basically make artists obsolete just like every other job. No it won't. We've hit a wall and the low hanging fruit are gone. OpenAI hit a wall and is searching for enterprise customers to maintain their valuation, and Google and Facebook are calling them out on it. Meanwhile, text is entirely inadequate for manipulating visual things effectively. AI will supercharge artists that embrace it. Text-to-art is not good enough and real artists will be working with layers, node editors, and in 3D/video modalities.
- ilaksh 2y ago
  There have always been downturns in the velocity of increase in capability of technology like a series of s-curves, but at a zoomed out level it's still an exponential that continues as we constantly innovate. The trajectory we are on is for AI to be able to do most intellectual jobs in less than ten years and most physical jobs in less than 20. That is speculation but it is based on many decades of increasing performance and capabilities. Text does have limitations but AI tools and models are not limited to text to image and new models and systems will be created. I agree that AI will help artists in the short term. But we should anticipate that humans will eventually just be a bottleneck in the creative process.
coldcode 2y ago
If you make art in postcards, then maybe you will be replaced. Diffusion based AI image generation is limited to a little over 1 megapixel, or double if you use an expander, or you can infinitely grow an initial image with more of the exact same sort of thing. 1 MPx printed at 300 dpi is similar in size to a postcard. Diffusion being able to generate meaningful printed images at 50-200 Mpx is impossible. My art is made at that size (that's 7200 to 14400 pixels per side approximately @ 300 dpi). I don't use AI. I do use my own code. Try making a Jackson Pollack using AI, AI can only effectively make objective images, given it requiring linking similar images via limited text descriptions. Making headers for newspaper articles or blog posts on the web might be OK if you don't care much. Check out https://www.quantamagazine.org https://www.quantamagazine.org to see how real artists do things. Their header images are really imaginative given the subject matter, something AI today can't do. It might be instructive to take their articles and try to make header images for them. If you make videos, then its 1080p which can be done by AI. But video has its own issues with video diffusion generators having limits on continuity. They are getting better, but the longer the clip, the less control you have and the longer it takes to fiddle with the prompt(s). It won't ever replace real movies unless you enjoy the SciFi channel or Sharknado. That would require an entire new kind of AI which we don't have today.

freeone3000 2y ago

That’s the point of generative AI, though, isn’t it? You put in text, you get out an image, no more need for discernment or skill or labor. No amount of explanation of vector math will change the fact that article headers can now be generated from the article, or you can say “give me a spaceman on a planet looking at twin moons” and a Steam game header is generated with some basic cropping. Incidental and corporate art, which is how a lot of professional artists make a living, is in real danger of being automated away.

echelon 2y ago
> That’s the point of generative AI, though, isn’t it? You put in text, you get out an image, no more need for discernment or skill or labor. The best tools in this space are spatial editors and node editors. Text is weak sauce. Also, you can't use text modalities for film and 3D. It has to be art tooling to get good results. Artists will always have a job. They'll just be doing way more than they were before.
- dartos 2y ago
  You still need a prompt, but the spatial tools and controlnet models are where the magic is. I think style transfer + pose detection + edge detection gives artists a bunch of new tools to play with. OP I would look into learning comfyui
- fergonco 2y ago
  We will always need to work in the fields. With agricultural machinery we'll be doing way more than we were before. if the amount of new offer is not paired by demand, there will be pain.
- chefandy 2y ago
  The fact that this comment is gray says everything that you need to know about this entire comment thread. A tiny slice of people that know what they're talking about and a giant stack of people drunk on dunning-krueger-fueled overconfidence in their understanding of art, on philosophical, practical, and professional levels thinking they've got the authoritative word because it's just so dang loud in the echo chamber. The tendency for technical people to think they can outmaneuver subject matter experts on their own terf with a few a priori thought experiments has always annoyed the hell out of me, but I can confidently say there has never been a more frustrating time to be both a professional artist and software developer.

spacecadet 2y ago

I stumbled on this, I think here on hacker news, and appreciate the amount of effort the author put into providing visualizations. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/ https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/ Whats the goal here? Do your friends express interest in using AI within their practice? Technical or not, an artist doesn't need to understand it to achieve that... Many years ago before I better understood it, myself and other artist used generative AI to create elements of our works and no one knew or cared that we did.

echelon 2y ago

Banodoco Discord is ground zero for AI film and focuses on open source models and resources. Their results are a year ahead of SOTA models as a result of their workflows and effort. https://banodoco.ai/ https://banodoco.ai/ Invoke AI has incredible open source image editing tooling and a fantastic YouTube and Discord that pair with it. https://youtube.com/@invokeai https://youtube.com/@invokeai Curious Refuge (paid) has a great community and paid lessons for AI filmmaking. https://curiousrefuge.com/ https://curiousrefuge.com/ Reddit is overflowing with AI art communities, many of them technical in nature. https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/ https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/ There are a lot of offshoots of these, and Discord will provide the best resources once you get plugged in.

bloomingkales 2y ago

I believe the photoshop ai integration will be the most seamless starting point. I personally am waiting to get a 4090 to do more graphical work later locally.

chefandy 2y ago
The photoshop integration is one of the only tools that was developed even considering what people that work with images want to do with it.

tikkun 2y ago

> What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete? Step 1 - get them to sign up for AI image tools. * Midjourney is best for quick images * Playground AI is good if they need to modify images but the quality doesn't need to be perfect * Leonardo AI (now owned by Canva) is a good full suite * Photoshop AI feature is best if they already work in photoshop Then show them how to use these tools! That might require you signing up for these tools first and learning yourself. Step 2 - For learning about how AI image generators work here's my video list. 1) AltexSoft - has a low viewcount but it's a great overview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rke0V_VkF3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rke0V_VkF3c 2) Jay Alammar - it's technical but also visual and he explains it well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXmacOUJUaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXmacOUJUaw 3) Gonkee - again, technical, but visual, great - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFztPP9qPRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFztPP9qPRc Workflow example: good for seeing the workflow of SD as of May 2023 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ldxCh3cnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ldxCh3cnI Too technical for what you're looking for: Computerphile, Ari Seff, Jia-Bin Huang Step 3 - For assuaging their fears about becoming obsolete - I think the following is a great podcast episode. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs-labour-market/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs... But their fears might be valid. A test is perhaps: if their boss spent a few days learning to use AI image generators, would they still need them? For some artists the answer would be no, for many the answer would be yes. It'll change over time as the tools get better, but that's a pretty good proxy. If they're doing things that require more iteration, interacting with users and humans and the physical world, nuanced judgement, in-person work, safer. If they're doing things that are contract based, no iteration, get a request and deliver a result, much less safe.

thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago
Thanks for sharing. My sister has been asking about AI for art, shes a canvas painter, she likes to play around and get inspiration or play with her own ideas and seeing what the model does with them.

dale_glass 2y ago

I would skip all the tech talk and go to the practical, artist-friendly systems first of all. This would for instance be the Krita plugin and InvokeAI. Both heavily cater to an user with little interest of getting into the weeds of VAEs and UNet models, and is much more at home using a drawing tablet. Krita is closer to being artist-targeted since it's primarily a drawing application with an AI add-on. InvokeAI is more on the opposite side, an AI tool with primitive but still usable ability to guide the AI by sketching stuff on a canvas.

camillomiller 2y ago

It seems that you, like everyone else with a purely technical background, are missing the mark completely about art and Generative AI. The point of art (unless it's purely craft) is in the process, which is exactly what gen AI makes (or claims it's making) obsolete. Every single time someone says something along the line of "optimizing" the art process with the AI is missing the mark. The reason why this doesn't appear to be clearer, is that this field if filled with tasteless technology-driven engineers that think they can explain or reduce everything to numbers. Go talk to your friends, and go to their exhibitions. Witness and celebrate their process. They don't need "courses" on such a misplaced and self-entitled technology.

1209412comb 2y ago

I don't think these artists need to go through a full course of how these modeling works under neath. It's a lot of effort if you don't already have a good background in STEM. I don't think they would gain more appreciation for GenAI even if they see how hard to make these models. There are a lot of other interesting Computer Generative Art that are not Diffusions. Maybe those a more genuinely interesting to your artist friends.

datadrivenangel 2y ago

Generative AI will become a tool like gradients or object creation. Complex things to do by hand, that can be done algorithmically. The details of how it works mostly won't matter unless you're trying to get really specific with how a plugin works. For a filter in Photoshop, you don't find many tutorials on the underlying algorithms, you usually find guidance on when and why to move the slider.

sophrocyne 2y ago

Hey all. I'm the CEO of Invoke - appreciate everyone who has mentioned us in the thread. To OP -- We work with professional artists regularly, and I'm seeing things pick up as more begin to understand the potential for creative control. Artists mainly want to be afforded creative flexibility and control, and need an interface that feels natural for their workflow. Invoke is OSS, we release continued training/education on a weekly basis (free, on YT) and we'll be releasing a simplified installer soon.

raincole 2y ago

> I'd like something that explains _how_ diffusion models work, their probabilistic nature, how they're trained on images/text and maybe even a high level description of what the different parts of a setup in, say, ComfyUI are doing (LoRA, VAE, CLIP, UNet models). These things hardly matter for artists. Most artists don't even know how a Gaussian blur filter works and they can still produce astonishing artworks.

Pigalowda 2y ago

Understanding the pathophysiology of how your terminal illness is killing you is a coping mechanism for death termed “intellectualization”. Not everyone finds solace in this strategy. Understanding how the blade is forged as it pierces you may be a mundane final thought. But if you survive I suppose you can use that knowledge to pierce others and destroy their planned futures. Let them pivot or let them starve? Pivoting to some hybrid of generative AI with human edits is appealing to software developers but soulless and essentially anethema to many others.

wruza 2y ago

I can share my insights of going from 0 to “can do” in the last year. ideally I'd like something that explains _how_ diffusion models work, their probabilistic nature, how they're trained on images/text How they work is probably out of scope of an artist. They’ll figure it out given some knobs, and honestly you cannot explain any of it, you have to get the feeling. Cause it’s not only probabilistic, but island-y. What worked yesterday may noy work today. You have to train yourself on these parameters. Comfy Is basically a bash-like visual programming. Cool for developers and repeatable workflows, but overkill and overwhelming for a beginner. Problems. The most problems come from python management. Python versions, libraries, plugins breaking the env, etc. you have to prepare some pre-built folders (or cloud images) for them. So that it just works. Then I’d download a few popular checkpoints andshow them the inpaint (mask) tab in a1111. I think that this tab will create a good first impression required for further interest. As a sort of a poor artist myself, it was amazing to see how SD can take two sprites and inpaint them together across a masked edge. Or replace a segment with a completely new content. (Although for them it may look meh) Txt2img is not that wow, cause everyone is already tired of it. Can’t point to resources, sorry, I learned from the internet by googling all my questions.

muzani 2y ago

It's emotional. Fix that first. I can draw well. But I don't associate my identity with it. So I am not an artist. I write well but I am not a writer. I am happy to delegate these forms of work to AI, the same way I'll delegate laundry to washing machines. For someone who calls themselves an artist, their identity is centered around their ability to draw. Photographers will use editing tools. Most don't mind tools. A photo editor enhances the photo, the core still comes from composition, lighting, etc. I would start here. Show that it could be useful first. How can AI white balance dozens of photos? A favorite use of AI among artists is doing different resolutions, expanding a small image into a capsule or cover image.

NoOn3 2y ago
True Artists don't feel it like work they feel it something like selfexpression creativity. :)
- chefandy 2y ago
  the very idea that art requiring a significant amount of deliberate action is a problem to be overcome and not part of what makes it fulfilling-- like artists have just been practicing to so they can produce more work more quickly-- betrays a foundational lack of understanding of why people do it.
  - muzani 2y ago
    To put it one way, some mine blocks as art, some carve sculptures as art. Some build walls as art, some build buildings as art. The ones building buildings and carving statues want machines to do the work of gathering the resources. Those who make games and movies want graphics and audio. To the pixel artists, getting their drawing in a game is part of the art, but to the game dev, working with a pixel artist may be a chore. We'll see a lot of reshifting of these forms of art - the pixel artist will be able to use AI to make games or variations and such, and may find art in becoming an art director instead.
    - 2y ago

keiferski 2y ago

This is a great question and unfortunately the hostility here and from your friends is an omnipresent, shortsighted thing. These tools are very powerful, but quite finicky. I haven't found any particularly good courses, however I do enjoy this YouTuber, who covers Midjourney and some other generators: https://www.youtube.com/@WadeMcMaster https://www.youtube.com/@WadeMcMaster The key thing you should try to do is this: make them understand that genAI is a toolset, akin to Photoshop.

chefandy 2y ago

I’m a technical artist, so wielding tech to make art is my thing. I come from a dev background but just graduated from art school this year. I reckon there are some hurdles to overcome before seeing a lot of non-technical generative AI imaging uptake among advanced and professional artists. A) most of these tools UIs aren’t useful to traditional artists in any part of the direct creation process yet, B) the prompt-based workflow, conceptually, doesn’t fit into traditional art processes so it’s essentially starting from scratch, and C) some vocal denizens of the DIY NN scene have done a fine job of making it as unappealing as possible to traditional artists. I know plenty of artists— both commercial artists and professional fine artists— that use simpler generative tools like midjourney for mood boards, reference, etc. but don’t know a single one that directly uses the output to make art. One big problem is that the UIs of all local stable diffusion front ends are not designed for people to make art— they’re designed for people to operate a neural network image generator. From a technical perspective, that’s the same thing, but from an interface design perspective, it is a very different goal, and it shows. For people that are enamored with the technology, or for people with a technical background that are used to wielding a bunch of abstract acronyms and don’t have to build up a bunch of base knowledge, that’s great. For people that just want to express themselves and already have another way to do so, it’s a huge, annoying impediment. (And while it’s done with the best of intentions (usually,) assuming non-technical artists will be as enriched by the technical knowledge and tools much as technical people without art expertise comes across as pretty conceited.) Another problem is that getting an image generator to create things in a way that makes sense in a normal artistic process is difficult. Art, generally, is about building things from broad stroke base to the finest finishing details with direct, granular control, and deciding/discovering what that finished piece will look like while you go, with all of the kismet and happy accidents that go with that process. You don’t usually make huge changes after you’ve polished it up because you probably wouldn’t have gotten that far with an element that didn’t work. When you start with something that has all of the “finished product” detail implemented already, that entire process is turned upside down. It’s distracting. Think about the way Bob Ross worked his way through a painting— do you think he would even want a workflow where he used words to describe a completed painting and then decided things he wanted to change about it? Not being an artist, encountering that tool is incredibly freeing. When you’ve put a bunch of time and practice into figuring out how to wield that artistic perspective and then use the tools you prefer to build and develop your visions from raw ingredients, it’s restrictive, disorienting. The thing you’ve been organically growing into for years that makes your art yours— the way you make basic shapes, flicks of the pencils or brush, ways that you might subconsciously separate tiny little background elements from each other, all of which are equally applicable with digital tools— is missing from this piece and has been replaced with an amalgam of many other artists hands. That’s the reason many people like generative image stuff: you don’t have to understand all of the tiny little components that make a piece what it is and just think about the objects and comparatively very-broad-stroke style. You’ve lost the verbs and adverbs from your process and are left only with nouns and adjectives. Also, while obviously not representative of the user base on a whole, the active, vocal community of stans that can’t distinguish between Reddit and the rest of their interactions have done a great job of alienating traditional artists. Their gleefully predicting the obsolescence of traditional artists— using tools built with their work without permission, no less — makes it tough to tap into that excitement. A lot of us have mouths to feed, mortgages to pay, and cancer to treat, and while many disciplines are not as vulnerable as many think, people like concept artists are actively being screwed over because tech money decided they want to get paid for our hard-won skills instead of artists. This alone makes it a tougher sell than it should be.

dr_dshiv 2y ago

This is an awfully political thread. It might be helpful to distinguish between capital-A “ART” and professional “art” — like animators, illustrators, UI designers, etc.

chefandy 2y ago
What, exactly, distinguishes those two categories?
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  One is about creating utility for others and the other is about personal expression or beauty for its own sake