This is extremely impressive. It’s the first GAN I have seen which lets you tweak the result in a meaningful way rather than being just random.
I think the speed that GANs have come in to the world has really shaken people up and it’s hard to process what this all means and what it will result in. Especially the ones which generate based on real people.
But the feeling this gives me, is what happens for the future of art. Sure, this example is no where even close to replacing real artists, but it’s already generating images better than I can draw after a year of practice. It does give me a feeling of “what is the point”. Which might be an irrational feeling, but I’m sure others feel the same.
Haha, this is something that constantly ponder, while I am developing this product.
Though, the conclusion I've come to is that that hand-drawn art will always meaningful for humans, because it is born of the human experience.
An interesting example is the invention of photography, which at its time, was very good at doing the thing artists were doing back then (capturing likenesses)
But photography didn't replace art: instead, artists now use photographs to be more expressive, convincing, and make better art. In tandem, the widespread adoption of photography meant that more average folks could get their likenesses taken!
Personally, my skills as an artist has improved by quite a bit, after launching this product, purely because observing it offers some fascinating insights into how anime is created!
I hope that as an industry, we'll find better ways to create, and what we know to be the "best" art today will be even better in the future!
One thing to consider is the number of artists employed by businesses. I dont have actual numbers but i know video game companies employs many. Businesses have different values than an individual human, and won't care if the art is made by a computer if its cheaper and passable. Theres also huge market for NSFW art. Whos going to know who or what made the image?
Comparing photography to hand drawn art is silly. They are two different mediums.
Your company could be the first to capture the market. I guess if you can sleep with the consequences of your work,who cares? Im not judging because if its not you, it will be someone else.
Personally i think we as a society need to step back and press pause and really consider the consequences of this technology, and even existing technologies.
If you become rich, could you set up a charity for all the future starving artists, if that future comes to pass? I dont want to live in a world where theres no room for human creativity.
It's no longer art if it's for commercial purposes.
Those who have the courage necessary to become artists, and renounce the vulgarity of the world, will continue to do so.
Those who delude themselves into thinking they're creating anything while being employed in commerce, will be managed out.
The deep crevice where the two meet and manage to find compromise, will continue to be filled by wealthy, independent patrons.
Asking others to think and do as we wish is silly.
Ironically, if it's that important to you, why don't you start giving monetary support directly to artists? Changing one's own actions is more impactful than trying to change those of the many (and the prior is more likely to lead to the latter, than if one were to focus solely on the latter).
I think your definition of art is just a partial one. As an example, the characters drawn for an RPG are works of art. They are receiving monetary value in return for that art. So its commercial/entertainment art, and a place where many artists aspire to be.
Your definition is what I would call "culture defining art", which is art that some part of the culture identifies with (or more specifically, a person's way of communicating that they can identify with). The currency here is tribalism, i.e. it creates a way for two or more people to bond together through what they feel and think.
>Those who have the courage necessary to become artists, and renounce the vulgarity of the world, will continue to do so.
Courage is trumped by needs. If they need pay rent, buy food, support a family, pay for a car, etc, then no matter what they are sacrificing some part of their time in order to obtain those things. Thus any artist who can make money off their work would have more time for their work, and possibly grow faster.
>Those who delude themselves into thinking they're creating anything while being employed in commerce, will be managed out.
Seems like you're too attached to the idea of what an artist is and isnt?
>Ironically, if it's that important to you, why don't you start giving monetary support directly to artists?
Because Im not building something that is taking away from their dreams (e.g. living off their work/passion).
<side thoughts>
I wonder if people are aware of the consequences of automating creativity? IMO humans need human input in order to stay human. The less and less we come into contact with humanity, the less human we'll become.. and at the very end of that long path is a bag of chemical reactions that's forgotten the meaning of "how are you?" [1]
Which made me think, perhaps its the inefficiencies of life that is what makes us human
[1] This is because some company/companies will realize/have realized that tuning the machine to become most efficient at creating what the masses want will be the most profitable path.
That's not my definition of art. That's your take; and you're projecting your (mid-brow) sensibilities onto me.
I don't define art. It's a sense, not a logical box you can put things in.
Receiving money for your art is one thing; going out of your way to use it as a means of living is another. The work immediately becomes tainted, and is no longer art.
It could be an amazing piece, but if your line of work is receiving money for what you create, you're an artisan, not an artist.
A character drawn for an RPG is not art. It is not a work of art. It is a graphic designed for utility. That is all it will ever be.
The sublime nature of art is there because it transcends everyday vulgarity. One transcends mere personage and becomes an artist by being in the world, but not of it.
The more money an artisan makes, the more his craft suffers. He almost always improves his technical ability through this process (otherwise, he would not make money), but loses his soul, and will never be an artist. He does not have the fiber in his heart that allows one to suffer through all manner of anguish, and material poverty, to dedicate oneself towards something above oneself; so he settles for being an artisan.
I can understand not being educated on these matters. But the amount of misplaced confidence you carry, writing on things you know nothing about is detestable.
If your inquiries into the nature of humanity and what it means to be are genuine (and not mis-attributed self-importance), my recommendation is to read and listen more, and talk less.
Matthew B. Crawford's works are a decent bridge into all that, for the modern middle crust who feels something stirring in his soul, and needs a direction.
If you feel like your assessment of your own abilities is honest, then I would completely skip anything modern, and begin with Burke's A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. I will even buy you an unabridged copy and have it shipped to you, if you're a starving artist that cannot afford it (and my respect for you would increase, all the same).
If interested in an other project that offers good tweaking, artbreeder (artbreeder.com) has been around for a while too. You have different models to play with (faces, anime, general, buildings, paintings etc...). Not all of them have the same level of quality and customization, but for example if you go for the face one, you get a really high level of customization: "cross-breeding" of 1 to 8 faces and then tweaking of many attributes (gender, color theme, age, ethnicity, realism, and other various details).
These generated pieces look extremely similar to real human art so they look very expressive to me. And you can even add your own input by hitting refresh until you get something similar to what you wanted.
I hear what you're saying, but at the same time, there's a ton of mass-produced, low-creativity art out there, where the objective is not to express oneself but to churn out products with the intent to make money. This is not just in artwork, but in other design based things like e.g. website designs as well.
There is definitely a difference between art and mass-produced art. In the beginning, we only had art as an expression of human creativity, and it's not until later that we got mass-produced art, whose only goal is to provide profits for the author(s). It'd be useful to distinguish the two in conversations like this.
It doesn't seem far fetched that in the near future an "artist" doesn't need to be able to draw at all. If GANs or the like become sufficiently tunable, I can express myself by telling the GAN what I would like to have drawn.
That's certainly a possibility, but is that intelligent or are paintbrushes already intelligent? :) In other words, in that case, it would simply be a tool directed by an intelligent being. We have that in many senses with generative and other computer-based art.
Well, digital art already allows you to copy/paste a layer and stuff that traditional art never allowed for. Imagine copy pasting a statue.
This is sort of the same thing on steroids. You can copy/remix previous art by feeding them into a ML model in training mode, and it will be massively utilized the same way ctrl-c ctrl-v is used, but it's a part of the toolset of art creation, not replacing it.
> You can copy/remix previous art by feeding them into a ML model in training mode, and it will be massively utilized the same way ctrl-c ctrl-v is used,
Then you need attributions for said previous arts, all of it, at least going by texts of laws.
Ctrl-C Ctrl-V is a career killer for human artists. Why it's not for ML?
e: the argument for human artists is human inspirations are generalized and artists’ own interpretations are always added to it, and for ML it’s that their network weights are highly generalized and likewise not a copy; but IMO a more solid line has to be drawn and distinction has to be made between C-c C-v and generalization at some point forward.
> Ctrl-C Ctrl-V is a career killer for human artists. Why it's not for ML?
Human artists use copy/paste as a tool all the time, and it doesn't kill their careers. The element you're missing here is that jychang wasn't talking about copying pieces verbatim from others' work without permission & attribution, but rather using it as a tool to manipulate your own art ("to copy/paste a layer"). Imagine being able to do the same but with an AI model working behind the scenes to adjust the object to fit the scene it's being pasted into.
> But the feeling this gives me, is what happens for the future of art. Sure, this example is no where even close to replacing real artists, but it’s already generating images better than I can draw after a year of practice. It does give me a feeling of “what is the point”. Which might be an irrational feeling, but I’m sure others feel the same.
There's a similar situation ongoing with fiction writing, by way of NovelAI. (And some competitors, but NovelAI is head and shoulders ahead of the pack. Thankfully; they seem to be the nicest of the lot.)
I'm a fairly prolific (fan-)fiction writer, and also AI enthusiast, so of course I jumped on that bandwagon as soon as I could. What I've found is...
- AI cannot write stories on its own. It just can't, full stop. Some people try, including me, but the results are nonsensical without significant tweaking. I expect that to change eventually, but not without a conceptual breakthrough or two.
- AI is immensely useful as a prosthetic imagination.
What I use it for isn't to write the story for me. It's to, in case I ever get stuck at some point, offer me suggestions for how the story can continue -- suggestions that I can accept or deny. Even if I deny it, it's useful as a way of illuminating my own ideas for the story. There's got to be a reason I don't like that continuation, and that is often enough to think of something I do like.
In other words, it's mostly eliminated writer's block.
It's also handy for expanding my vocabulary. English is my third language, and while I like to think I'm good enough for daily life -- I've lived in Ireland for over a decade, after all -- there's a big difference between 'good enough for daily life' and 'good enough to write good fiction'. Prior to using NovelAI, my writing was... dry. Conceptually heavy SF doesn't necessarily require high-end wordcrafting, but it helps.
The AI, especially when told to emulate Sheridan Le Fanu or any of the other great authors, is better than me at this. And since I can ask it to jump in at any point, it's become the most attentive, capable cowriter I've ever had. Perhaps noticing this, NovelAI now calls their default AI tuning 'Co-Writer'.
It's still likely to write something I can't immediately use, but that just means I need to absorb its ideas and make them my own. Repeat a hundred times per day, and I end up learning much, much faster than I ever did when I was writing on my own.
To summarize, I don't use AI to write my stories for me. I use it to get better at writing.
I think it should be possible to do the same for other forms of art.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, incomplete thoughts ahead...
Yes, people still play, but they no longer create.
With the exception of Adversarial attacks on particular algorithms, no human is creating new Chess theory, discovering new openings, for example.
As a game, challenge, competition, social activity, chess is alive and well.
As a creative endeavour, or vehicle for discovery, Chess is solved. It is no longer an art of its own.
We're part way through this transition now with Go as well. New opening theory, new joseki, new strategies are being played by robots, and at the highest professional levels we are playing catch-up to understand.
But isn’t that inevitably the final form of any highly complex tactics game (in lieu of a better word) humans create? I guess we reached the ceiling of what we can fathom on our own, so the logical next step is to hand over to robots that can grasp a wider range of possibilities, and learn from them.
I once heard someone say people will never be able to understand God’s plan, just as a dog will never be able to really understand why their owners do things the way they do them.
I feel like this is a similar threshold; a humans mind is incredible, but not perfectly suited for thinking in advance, or calculating probabilities.
So I guess my point is, while this certainly feels a little scary, I think it’s just a consequence of the game, and probably okay.
> With the exception of Adversarial attacks on particular algorithms, no human is creating new Chess theory, discovering new openings, for example.
That's not true though? Human chessplayers are constantly exploring new lines, and engines are a useful tool but by no means the bottom line - indeed lines that were neglected because engines gave them low evaluations have been a fruitful source of ideas lately, because humans play differently from engines and may not be able to find the refutation.
Yeah I totally get this is the same thing that has happened so many times before. But at least for chess, it was never a practical thing and was a competition. Like how the existence of aimbots does not ruin a game as long as you are playing against other humans.
For art it feels a bit different since it’s not competitive and more a practicality thing. Perhaps art will shift from placing individual strokes on an image and move to making creative directions for AI to resolve in to an image or enable more people to create labor intensive works like animation.
I think the speed that GANs have come in to the world has really shaken people up and it’s hard to process what this all means and what it will result in. Especially the ones which generate based on real people.
But the feeling this gives me, is what happens for the future of art. Sure, this example is no where even close to replacing real artists, but it’s already generating images better than I can draw after a year of practice. It does give me a feeling of “what is the point”. Which might be an irrational feeling, but I’m sure others feel the same.