alt Hacker NewsIt saddens me. Innovations in AI 'art' generation (music, audio, photo) have been a net negative to society and are already actively harming the Internet and our media sphere.
Like I said in another comment, LLMs are cool and useful, but who in the hell asked for AI art? It's good enough to fool people and break the fragile trust relationship we had with online content, but is also extremely shit and carries no meaning or depth whatsoever.
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There was a recent discussion in another HN thread that I think summed it up well. Good art rewards a careful viewer; the more you look at and think about good art, the more you get out of it. AI art does the opposite and punishes thoughtful consumers. There's no logical underpinning to the various details, it's just stuff mashed together in a superficially nice looking way.
I think AI "art" can be as useful as the text generators, i.e. only within certain limits of dull and stupid stuff that needs to exist but has little to no value.
For example, you need to generate a landing page for your boring company: text, images, videos and the overall design (as well as code!) can be and should be generated because... who cares about your boring company's landing page, right?
> Like I said in another comment, LLMs are cool and useful, but who in the hell asked for AI art?
I did. I started messing around with computer graphics on DOS with QBASIC and consider AI art to be just an extension of that.
On the other hand I don't care all that much for LLMs most of the time. They're sometimes useful, but while I find AI art I enjoy very regularly, using a LLM for something is more a once every couple weeks event for me.
I agree with the first part. For me, AI art is the chance to have a somewhat creative outlet that I wouldn’t have otherwise, because I’m much worse at painting that I can stand. Drawing by prompts helps me be creative and work through some stuff - for that it’s also nice and interesting to see that the result differs from my mental image. I will tweak the prompt to some extent and to some extent go with some unintentioned elements of the drawing. I keep the drawing on my phone in the notes app with a title and the prompt.
To get back to the beginning: I really do agree that the societal impact on the whole appears to be negative. But there are some positives and I wanted to share my example of that.
That describes most art. At least ai art can be pretty and doesn’t have the same political message.
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Much of the time I don't want "meaning or depth", I just want a pretty picture of whatever it was. AI art is great, it's just that the people it most benefits are the people you don't see or hear much from (and, rude as this is to say, people who write less convincingly).
>who in the hell asked for AI art?
everyone who has ever used stock photography, custom illustrators, and image editing. as AI improves, it will come after all of those industries.
that said, it is not OpenAI's goal to beat shutterstock, nor is it the goal of anthropic or google or meta. their goal is to make god: https://ia.samaltman.com/ . visual perception (and generation) is the near-term step on that path. every discussion of AI that doesn't acknowlege this goal, what all of these billions of dollars are aiming for, is myopic and naive.