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I am lucky enough to be in the beta for Midjourney and its been an interesting journey for sure.
Will AI take over from artists in my personal opinion? maybe the zillions of bad clipart you can download from different sites yes, but genuine art pieces no I don't think so. Talking to other people in the art industry that I know the general concensus is its a fantastic concept creation tool. I am definitely using it to explore concepts and colour schemes. I was enjoying the whole process enough to actually subscribe to get access to more render time, and I hate subscriptions :)
For fun I described a cricket game and got this
I then finetuned it a couple of times with different variations
Final image I settled on :)
Watching the images getting created on a scroll feed is better than watching TV :)
You made my point better than I ever could have done. "Creating" art will become a passive exercise, like watching TV.
"Artists" will become like DJ's - people without any musical skills who pretend to be doing something musically creative.
Only if that is all I'm doing :) Currently I'm creating a series of images to use as a base for environments in VR. I plan on creating OBJ and use Tilt Brush to paint images around it, and then make it a walkable experience with sounds - only thing missing will be texture that you can feel with your hands. Full artistic immersion.
Interesting. None of that will even matter when AI gets more advanced. AI will do it better and much faster.
Please be clear, I am not saying that you are not a creative artist right now. You are obviously very skilled. If you read my comments, I am talking about the near future. I believe that artists like yourself are lost in fascination with AI, and that you won't know what hit you when AI completely flips the script.
I had a mentor who drew a cartoon of a man plunging over a cliff. He had a big smile on his face. The caption was "Feeling great for now."
Go through my posting history. I am not a person who by nature makes negative predictions. But my 30 years of intense study on the human experience tells me that AI will likely be a disaster. I see the people in charge of AI development, and I cringe. They don't know what they don't know. For them, AI is "my precious."
So, congratulations on your career as a Daz PA. If AI development goes as I believe, both you and Daz will be a footnote of history within the next 10 years.
But I will still be an artist - no matter how fast or advanced the AI gets. If all I'm doing is making art for sale and profit, then yea I might be a footnote.
But that's not why I'm an artist - I have the years behind me and the years ahead of me with the sheer joy of creating. Making something with my own hands and getting lost in the flow of creating - losing time and being happy. Even if I'm the only one who ever experience it, AI can't take that away from me.
When I switched from traditional oils and watercolours to computer graphics I got a lot of the same feedback from "traditional" artists, or that doing images in Daz Studio is not "art" because its made with other people's assets. But it is art to the artist creating it - you're transforming something with your own interpretation.
Being an artist to me is more than just selling stuff for profit, its being in your own mindspace creating something, expressing an idea, or feeling - and hopefully an audience will appreciate it - but ultimately the artist experience is for me and I will keep on doing it, the same as a kid will draw on a blank piece of paper if you put it in front of them with crayons. Its human nature to create :)
I am enjoying this discussion - its making me think about what being an artist means to me, and its easy to lose track of that in the hustle of earning a buck or 2 :)
Yes, that is why I will still be rendering with Carrara in 10 years (if I am still alive). I make no money with my art. The fact that AI takes over the art world will not stop me from continuing to experience the creative process.
However, I don't find that your experience of transitioning from traditional artist tools to computer 3D is a valid comparison. In that process, humans are sitll controlling the artistic process, and more importantly, still experiencing the creative process. When AI takes over, we have plenty of evidence already that show how easily that people are entrained to accept a new technological experience. Kids will no longer color. Initially, they will learn to speak their desires into a terminal. Eventually even that facade will fall and AI will dictate the content to the passive viewer.
If that sounds dystopian, it is already happening on the internet and in the gaming world of virtual reality. The idea that more and more stimulation is good, is fool's gold. That would take a while for me to explain. Maybe at a later date.
Engineers are blindly careening down a path and merely hoping that AI won't quickly lead to something dark. Look at the profiles of the engineers in the forefront of AI. In a world where polarity and conflict is increasing, these engineers are some of the most polarized people on the planet. Sadly, they have no idea how to create balance in their personal lives, much less engineer it in a machine. In short, they have a very shallow understanding of the human experience, and as a result have no clue the magnitude of the bomb they are about to detonate.
But there will be plenty of people smiling right up until the end.
I am smiling yes - will never make excuses for that, but I am far from being a passive viewer blindly following new tech. Exploring it yes. Seeing possibilities yes. Enjoying the heck out of the creative process - hell yea.
I would like to read more about the evidence of what happens when AI takes over so any links are welcome :)
Pretty busy today. Hopefully can respond soon, assuming the intelligent forum software permits. :)
Eventually you come back to questions of who decides what art is and just what does it mean to be "better". Better in what way?
What I observe is that art is an itch that just needs to be scratched. I've watched my grandkids sit next to each other on a sofa and play the same online game with each other. They will send texts rather than talk to someone that is next to them. But one of them just loves to sketch and color with markers. Her favorite gift has been a sketch set and pad. Another also loves to create sketches and use watercolors.. Her high school had a mini art show (not a large school). They were allowed to choose their own medium and subject. There was quite a variety of both. They were finding way to scratch that itch.
I went back several times to look at some of them that appealed to me. At one I was looking at (for maybe the fifth time) I noticed a girl and her mom standing behind me. So I asked, "is that yours? It's really quite nice." Her smile showed the real satisfaction she got from doing her project. And having it appreciated by someone else. I wonder if AI stuff will ever give that same sense of accompishment.
Case in point - I took a math course in chaos theory (iterative solutions to systems of equations, strange attractors that "pull" the soltutions into it, Butterfly effect etc. Plotting up the solutions generates fractals. It's fascinating to watch the patterns being produced and most are quite appealing. But I never felt like an artist while I was doing it. If I had pursued it further would I frame the graphics and sell them to people that wanted them? Hells ya. But hey, that's their defintion of art and not mine.
Don't throw away the markers, pads, pencils, paints etc just yet. Some of the kids (and adults) will put up quite a fight. I worked with one woman who "needed" to produce wall-filling pictures. Her day job was an engineering tech but at retirement she was moving to an artists' colony (maybe Sedona?}.
So I think AI will break off and form it's own version .... of something. A something we probably don't have a name for yet. Art as most of us define it may be limited to "colonies" - virtual or otherwise. But I think it will still be around.
As far as the future, I suppose AI will be like a lot of other things and degenerate to the lowest common denominator. An interesting parallel is the work of Gustave LeBon. He was interested in why large groups of people behave the way they do. What caused them to do things as part of a group that they would never do if by themselves. An idea (aptly called a contagion} spread from person to person. And if that's not depressing enough, read further into how others figured out that this idea of a contagion and mob behaviour could be used to manipulate people for marketing, politics etc. Yep ... that's how I see AI going.
But being an engineer as my job for 40 years, I think we're getting a bad rap. Better to look at the program management. The area of ethics in science and engineering does need a lot of work though. Do you condemn out of hand the scientists and engineers who produced the first atomic weapons? If so you probably didn't have relatives that fought in WWII or who were caught up in it.
In the mean time, I'm going to continue to look at pictures. understand the direction and quality of the light, and appreciate how to elements of the picture lead to the subject.
And at some point I expect Headwax to jump in here and tell me I'm full of crap.....
You explained my point better than me :) Creating is something that is integral to some people's existence - no amount of AI art is going to stop them from creating their own art, because its not being done for others or money - but because its who they are.
AI might become its own art movement - the images are interesting to look at and quite inspiring at times. The artists I talk to that are playing around with it are all impressed by the ability to quickly iterate concepts - find that bit of inspiration that speaks to you - but then you take it into your own direction and make your own art. AI can spark avenues of art exploration that might not have occured otherwise. For me its opened up several different directions that I can take concepts in for a musical experience. Just like reading a good book, or seeing a beautiful scene, or watching a good movies does.
"Imagine if the same AI could compose music as beautiful as Bach and paint as well as Rembrandt. The question of sentience might fade into the background as we debate which oracle we, as sentient beings, should be paying attention to." - Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion columnist, professor of economics at George Mason University
Entire article here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-13/google-ai-engineer-s-claims-about-sentience-aren-t-so-outlandish
The question would be, from whose perspective is one looking/listening?
The creators, consumers or the one who's trying to make money with it?
pretty sure it can compose today's music
And write most books, scripts, and screenplays. Consider the '7 Basic Plots,' and the 'Save the Cat Story Beats.'
My personal perspective is to view "AI" at different levels. At the highest level, the program is doing unexpected things that are in some way "better" than humans. I think I mentioned the chess program AlphaZero, which is self taught (no chess history involved, just the rules of the game) and comes up with wildly original moves/tactics/strategies. And is ranked far above the current human chess champion.
But at a less lofty level, it can be a "Marvelous Toy" (song link below) that is great fun to play with. I mentioned "Band-In-A-Box" by PG Music that creates full songs given a genre, some chords, and maybe a few more parameters. It is great fun, but its limited to fairly standard genres - rock, folk, blues, classsical, jazz, etc. A more off the wall example is the long defunct "Sound Globs": "Move beyond the world of sequencers and melody to the world of interactive textures... freeform exploration... " It was an MS-DOS based program described in detail in the link below, and came with a bunch of prepared "songs" to demo the possibilities. Truly different, but to me great stuff for some movie scores. And no, I've lost all of it, and cannot find any examples online. I once asked the creator if he was planning a Windows version. He replied that he put several years into it and sold very few, but put a few weeks into some drum patterns for sequencers and sold a bundle. And asked me to guess his answer. (Spoiler: No Windows version ever came out)
http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/twelve-tone-systems-sound-globs/415
Tom Paxton's "Marvelous Toy" performed by Peter, Paul & Mary
getting off topic but that song reminded me of this awesome musical composition I loved as a child
but the adults all said it was too naughty to sing in the playground
Did photography replace painting? Clearly not. Today I attended a lecture on the history of American photography by a professor of art history. She was very fair and quite impressed by the artistic accomplishments of photography. She used many well known images from the last couple of centuries: Matthew Brady Civil War photos, Ansel Adams nature photos, etc. Afterwards we talked about an area she left out, photojournalism. She was receptive, mentioning the famous photo of a young girl burned by napalm in Vietnam. She was not familiar with WeeGee, famous for his crime photos in the 1930's and 40's in New York City. "He worked at night and competed with the police to be first at the scene of a crime, selling his photographs to tabloids and photographic agencies". Rmeinds me of the good movie "Nightcrawlers". But his famous quote about cameras, technical settings, etc. is what endures for photojournalists: "F8 and be there."
https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini
An Elf Cat Casting a Spell
some horrifying stuff
my Wombo results
A modern day "Garden of Earthly Delights"? Bosch might be pleased.
Fantasy musical instruments with Midjourney :)
lutes seem to be the instrument of choice in fantasy land
Okay, lutes, but my first thought on the very cool Midjourney instruments was mandolin, like the intro to "Maggie May":
Mada's are more mandolin
Except I don't see frets ... and speaking of lutes, one of my alltime favorite works is the short "Bouree" from J.S. Bach's "Lute Suite". Here's a couple of versions:
I really like the colour schemes Midjourney creates, and I often prefer the smaller thumbs. Got really interesting results in Midjourney last night - would be great to recreate in 3D with some fairies hidden away :)
This all shook a few of my neurons loose and I rememberd "Groboto", now apparently defunct.
"GroBoto has succeeded in building systems that combine Real Time, True Geometry Boolean Editing with the capability of generating High Fidelity, Beautifully Structured Meshes — Automatically. These systems are both Robust & Sophisticated — Able to Automatically Mesh any Arbitrary, Complex arrangement of Primitives & Booleans and further, to Smooth & Stylize those Meshes creating sublime forms."
A later version even allowed animation, which I fiddled with for many hours. A search Groboto/Images gives a lot of examples.
I wish I had bought Groboto when it was available
This has been a very eye-opening thread. On the positive side, AI can give us new tools to creste art - I especially like rose #1 above, It could well become its own style or category of art. And can certainly be used for compositing. I think drone photogarphy has already become its own genre. I haven't seen it called that yet (any forums that have a separate section dedicated to drones?} - probably because its so accessable that tthe library of existing drone footage is extensive and it's already become very difficult to produce something that stands out from the rest. But new art forms are evolving.
The dark side looks bad and really bad as far as AI influencing and directing social behavior. A couple of experiments demonstrate how easy it is. The one that disturbs me is the one where there is a waiting room where a buzzer sounds and someone stands up. It's not long before everyone is doing it. More people come in and they do it too .... without any good reason except social pressure or need to conform. Psychologists can't agree on exactly what is happening so I don't feel any need to try and explain it. Of course I wonder what I would have done. Why should someone care what a group of strangers thinks? And in the various verseions of this I've seen I'm not aware of even one person who asks, "What happens if I don't stand up when the buzzer goes off?".
And the Stanford experiment (1971) with the guard and prisoner roles for a random group of students devolved so quickly a planned 14 day experiment had to be stopped after just 6 days. And it took an outside observor - a girl who had just been awarded her PhD - to see the big picture and call a halt to the experiment.
There are serious ethical issues with the experiment. But I accept the original findings at face value. You can't use another decade's standards to analyze what happened in 1971, The Miranda ruling was a 1966 thing (USA) and in 1971 not many people had internalized wihat Miranda rights were, warrantless searches, etc. Being "arrested" by even a fake policeman in 1971 would have had much more impact then than it does now. And of course AI wouldn't even concern itself with ethics.
So in the future maybe the only people creating their own original art free from AI will be people living off grid, without a smart phone, and wearing tin foil hats or sitting in Faraday cages?
I'm going to take a break and think some positive thoughts .....
https://images.nightcafe.studio//jobs/40VxPha5bX7eVpWARS7R/40VxPha5bX7eVpWARS7R--LJ9FU.mp4
another I played with