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I've been pretty obsessively playing around with AI image generation the last 3 or so weeks, and after learning what I have in that time, it's struck me how the culture war arguments seem to miss the contours of the actual phenomenon (i.e. like every other culture war issue). The impression that I got from just observing the culture war was that the primary use of these tools was "prompt engineering," i.e. experimenting with and coming up with the right sets of prompts and settings and seeds in order to get an image one wants. This is, of course, how many/most of the most famous examples are generated, because that's how you demonstrate the actual ability of the AI tool.
So I installed Stable Diffusion on my PC and started generating some paintings of big booba Victorian women. Ran into predictable issues with weird composition, deformities, and inaccuracies, but I figured that I could fix these by getting better at "prompt engineering." So I looked at some resources online to see how people actually got better at this. On top of that, I didn't want to just stick to making generic pictures of beautiful Victorian women, or of any sort of beautiful women; I wanted to try making fanart of specific
waifuscharacters doing specific things (as surprising as it may be, this is not a euphemism - more because of a lack of ambition than lack of desire) in specific settings shot in specific angles and specific styles.And from digging into the resources, I discovered a couple of important methods to accomplish something like this. First was training the model further for specific characters or things, which I decided not to touch for the moment. Second was in-painting, which is just the very basic concept of doing IMG2IMG on a specific subset of pixels on the image. (There's also out-painting which is just canvas expansion + noise + in-painting). "Prompt engineering" was involved to some extent, but the info I read on this was very basic and sparse; at this point, whatever techniques that are there seem pretty minor, not much more sophisticated than the famous "append 'trending on Artstation' to the prompt" tip.
So I started going ahead using initial prompts to generate some crude image, then using IMG2IMG with in-painting to get to the final specific fanart I wanted to make. And the more I worked on this, the more I realized that this is where the bulk of the actual "work" takes place when it comes to making AI images. If you want to frame a shot a certain way and feature specific characters doing specific things in specific places, you need to follow an iterative process of SD-generation, Photoshop edit, in-painting-SD-generation, Photoshop edit, and so on until the final desired image is produced.
I'm largely agnostic and ambivalent on the question of whether AI generated images are Art, or if one is being creative by creating AI generated images. I don't think it really matters; what matters to me is if I can create images that I want to create. But in the culture war, I think the point of comparison has to be between someone drawing from scratch (even if using digital tools like tablets and Photoshop) and someone using AI to iteratively select parts of an image to edit in order to get to what they want. Not someone using AI to punch in the right settings (which can also be argued to be an Art).
The closest analogue I could think of was making a collage by cutting out magazines or picture books and gluing them together in some way that meaningfully reflects the creator's vision. Except instead of rearranging pre-existing works of art, I'm rearranging images generated based on the training done by StabilityAI (or perhaps, the opposite; I'm generating images and then rearranging them). Is collage-making Art? Again, I don't know and I don't care, but the question about AI "art" is a very similar question.
My own personal drawing/illustration skills are quite low; I imagine a typical grade schooler can draw about as well as I can. At many steps along the process of the above iteration, I found myself thinking, "If only I had some meaningful illustration skills; fixing this would be so much easier" as I ran into various issues trying to make a part of an image look just right. I realized that if I actually were a trained illustrator, my ability to exploit this AI tool to generate high quality images would be improved several times over.
And this raises more blurry lines about AI-generated images being Art. At my own skill level, running my drawing through IMG2IMG to get something good is essentially like asking the AI to use my drawing as a loose guide. To say that the image is Artwork that 07mk created would be begging the question, and I would hesitate to take credit as the author of the image. But at the skill level of a professional illustrator, his AI-generated image might look virtually identical to something he created without AI, except it has a few extra details that the artist himself needed the AI to fill in. If I'm willing to say that his non-AI generated images are art, I would find it hard to justify calling the AI-generated one not art.
Based on my experience the past few weeks, my prediction would be that there will be broadly 3 groups in the future in this realm: the pure no-AI Artists, the cyborgs who are skilled Artists using AI to aid them along the process, and people like me, the AI-software operators who aren't skilled artists in any non-AI sense. Furthermore, I think that 2nd group is likely to be the most successful. I think the 1st group will fall into its own niche of pure non-AI art, and it will probably remain the most prestigious and also remain quite populous, but still lose a lot of people to the 2nd group as the leverage afforded to an actually skilled Artist by these tools is significant.
Random thoughts:
I didn't really touch on customizing the models to be able to consistently represent specific characters, things, styles, etc. which is a whole other thing unto itself. This seems to be a whole vibrant community unto itself, and I know very little of it first hand. But this raises another aspect of AI-generated images being Art or not - is it Art the technique of finding the right balance when merging different models or of picking the right training images and training settings to create a model that is capable of generating the types of pictures you want? I would actually lean towards Yes in this, but that may be just because there's still a bit of a mystical haze around it to me from lack of experience. Either way, the question of AI-generated images being Art or not should be that question, not whether or not picking the right prompts and settings and seed is.
I've read artists mention training models on their characters in order to aid them in generating images more quickly for comic books they're working on. Given that speed matters for things like this, this is one "cyborg" method a skilled Artist could use to increase the quantity or quality of their output (either by reducing the time required for each image or increasing the time the Artist can use to finalize the image compared to doing it from scratch).
For generating waifus, NovelAI really is far and away the best model, IMHO. I played around a lot with Waifu Diffusion (both 1.2 & 1.3), but getting good looking art out of it - anime or not - was a struggle and inconsistent, while NovelAI did it effortlessly. However, NovelAI is overfitted, making most of their girls have a same-y look. There's also the issue that NovelAI doesn't offer in-painting in their official website, and the only way to use it for in-painting involves pirating their leaked model which I'd prefer not to rely on.
I first learned that I could install Stable Diffusion on my PC by stumbling on https://rentry.org/voldy whose guide is quite good. I learned later on that the site is maintained by someone from 4chan, and further that 4chan seems to be where a lot of the innovation and development by the hobbyists is taking place. As someone who hasn't used 4chan much in well over a decade, this was a blast from the past. In retrospect this is obvious, given the combination of nihilism and degeneracy you see in 4chan (I say this only out of love; I maintain to this day that there's no online community that I found more loving and welcoming than 4chan).
For random "prompt engineering" tips that I figured out over time - use "iris, contacts" to get nicer eyes. "Shampoo, conditioner" seems to make nice hair with a healthy sheen.
I am not a historian, but I can see parallels between your art-cyborgs and computer programmers through the history of programming. I am told, through peers, media, professors, and culture, that in the beginning days all programs were made by hand; every operation scrutinized and thought out. But as computer-time because cheaper and programmer-time becoming more expensive, other programming languages were created as abstractions over the previous languages. C simplifies the construction of loops (which seem horrible in assembly). Python removes pointers (which are a pain-point for many programmers). Github co-lab and GPT-3 can remove a lot of boilerplate code with good prompts (though I've never used them, so they may not be that wonderful). Matlab, SPARK, lisp, and others can probably fit into the progression, but I am unfamiliar with them.
It seems that, inevitability, programming will be further and further abstracted away from the origins of programming and what the computer is actually doing. People of course still do some work in assembly (but it is usually niche from my understanding). People still use C (sometimes the problem really is a nail). And programming in general hasn't been overrun with computer generated functions that can generate complex elements from plain english.
I expect though, that the next wave of programmers are going to be like the art-cyborgs. They are going to be adept at automating 80% of the work with AI and then the rest is going to be manual work to fix errors or edge cases and combining multiple functions to form a complete program. This AI automation is just another layer of abstraction for the programmer from what the computer is actually doing. If programming used to be the translation of English to machine instructions, and now it's the translation of English to code, eventually we will have the machines translate for us and programming will be the art of typing the right words into the computer machine.
i.e. The next programming language is English and programmers are just the ones skilled at putting the right words and symbols into the computer to get the right answers out.
But to not wander too far away, I feel the same thing about art or whatever previously unfathomably inherently human skill is done in the realm of AI (perhaps music?). AI generated images are a tool that future artists might use to enhance or speed up the translation of idea to canvas. Not too dissimilar from the transition of physical to digital art (but as I said, I'm neither an artist nor a historian). Even if the art is purely collage-style, I don't think that makes them have any less art. Making a collage still requires skill, and given a magazine with scissors it is hard to stumble into a good creation by pure chance. Even still, can a sufficient description not be art by its own merit? Books have the ability to paint wondrous pictures leveraging your imagination (unless you suffer from aphantasia). Maybe it's not fair to compare writers to painters and illustrators, but that is a different argument than saying it's not art.
To summarize because I need a conclusion and am not a writer: AI art is a tool that will be used by artists to quickly iterate on ideas. This parallels computer programming which used more abstract languages to help programmers quickly iterate on ideas.
The programming parallel makes sense to me, and there are plenty of similar parallels throughout history. Humans using technology in order to make arduous processes easier, leading to each human having much more leverage leading to that level of leverage being the norm, with additional technologies built on top of that to make those processes easier, and so on and so forth. In the past, it might have been the wheel or a cart or a bow or a plow or a car, right now AI is one of them.
And at each step in the process, it seems like there have been people who were accustomed to the old norm decrying the new one as some abomination that lacked the "soul" or "essence" of the thing. A digital artist today is standing on the shoulders of giants, relying on the hardware and software development of engineers to contribute to their art, including the specific choice of brush strokes that the software developers programmed in. They would balk at traditional artists who insist that you must actually put paint on canvas using a brush that you control physically, in order to capture the subtle nuances of the muscle movements that result from the unique set of training that the artist went through. And those artists would balk at even more traditional artists who insist that you must actually construct your own brushes by gluing together hair that you gather manually and mix your own paint, in order to capture the subtle nuances of the choices you made when constructing the tools that show up in the final result due to the tools being used. And those artists would balk at even more traditional artists who insist that you must actually raise the animal from which the brush hair came from and tended to the tree from which the wood in the brush or painting surface came from, in order to capture the subtle nuances of the choices you made when prepping the raw material for the tools.
And each of these people would have a point. A very good point worth making. But the point would largely be lost on the person listening, who doesn't particularly see those as worth the trade-off of losing the immense amount of efficiency and creative freedom. After all, with the additional efficiency, now they can create far greater, broader, and deeper works of art than with the previous methods. But to someone who's used to the old norms, these efficiency gains just look like shortcuts that only have a cargo cult understanding of the process.
AI generated imagery is different, in just how much of a leap in abstraction it is compared to the other ones. A digital artist still has skills that would transfer very well to painting on canvas. An AI tool user's skill doesn't need to go far beyond basic Photoshop skills and a basic artistic compositional skills. It's still so early right now that I don't think it's possible to tell, but based on how I've seen actual artists use AI generated images the last few weeks, I suspect that it will be more similar to the other ones than different; that in time, we'll see it as just another tool to increase an artist's leverage in expressing themselves.
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Just to nitpick this sentence and say nothing about the rest of your essay, Python hardly removes pointers. It just removes the ability to do pointer arithmetic, just like Javascript, go, c# and many other newer languages do. The essence of pointer, having a cheap way to refer to a load of data elsewhere, is still there. If anything Python removes the ability to refer to data in any other way. You pass a class instance by value and you can't inline a struct inside another like you can in C.
And Python even gives you a new way to subtly shoot yourself in the foot over pointers, which is the
isoperator.5 is 5andTrue is Truebut5**55 is not 5**55(on my system). In fairness the only real use case for this is to check forthing is not Nonewhen dealing with optional arguments, or perhaps more nichea is bchecks when you're absolutely sureaandbcome from the same finite pool of objects, as a way to optimize away a more expensive deepa == bcheck.More options
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This is practically already the case for a lot of programming. The issue isn't actually writing the code, it's understanding what the problem even is.
People are both bad at and unused to thinking at a higher level of specificity and logic. This is apparent when you read what people write if they write something longer and more complex than a 1-2 paragraph comment. People's texts are rife with dangling modifiers making even their central points unclear, and this is rarely by mistake either, they don't even realize they are there or why it matters.
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This isn't hugely relevant to your point, but loops really aren't that bad in assembly. Basic for loop from 0-100 in assembly will be something like:
That really isn't particularly bad, though certainly not quite as nice as C or another higher-level language.
^ Is doing all the heavy lifting of "isn't particularly bad".
Nah, not really. Sure, whatever you put in the loop body will certainly be more verbose and harder to write than if you wrote it in C. But that isn't relevant to the notion that loops are hard to write in and of themselves in assembly. That's why I didn't include anything inside the loop, to show that the loop itself isn't hard to write.
Now, if we're saying assembly in general is harder to write? I will totally agree. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's super horrible or anything, but it is harder for sure. There is a reason we invented higher level languages. My point here was simply that loops are not particularly bad.
Maybe loops were a bad example. To be fair, I never wrote anything more than the bare minimum in assembly. I don't have deep knowledge of it and went for the first thing I could think of. The main point was C provides a bunch of niceties on top of assembly. And Python provides a lot of niceties over C. My mathematician peers would probably love to write their for loops in the style of
for i,j,k ∈ +Z^3; i,j,k <= 10 { }which is a lot more abstract than loops in previous languages. Eventually it might becomeFor all positive integer 3-tuples each value less than 10 { }. Heck maybe evenFor all the points in a cube with side length 10 { }. We lose some specificity, choosing which direction to iterate over first, but we are rewarded with reduced conceptual load.More options
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Maybe what you mean is "assembly is bad at scopes" (in that the "whatever you want to do in your loop" has to remember which registers you've already used for other purposes outside of the loop; the same problem arises for procedure calls)?
Seems fair, but I agree with @SubstantialFrivolity that it's weird to characterize that as assembly being bad at loops. It's bad at naming. And getting the name of your complaint right is half the battle -- the other half is cache invalidation and the other half is off by one errors.
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hey now
Our power (and income) relies on the kids trained on Java and Python viewing assembly as some sort of dark magic, I can't let you just hand out eldritch knowledge willy-nilly ;-)
The new programming literacy test: Write Fizzbuzz. In assembler. 6502 assembler. And it has to accept values up to 100,000. You may output a character by calling a subroutine at 0xFDED with the character in the accumulator, after which all register contents are lost.
(it will surprise nobody familiar with the subject that Fizzbuzz in 6502 can be found on the net)
6502 is one of the instruction sets that were actually kind of nice to write by hand, though. I guess you'd do something that amounts to keeping your loop counter mod 15 in the low 4 bits of X and then use the remaining 13 bits in X and Y plus some flag you don't touch to get to 100k? I'd rather do this exercise than MIPS or some nasty SIMD and/or RISC special-purpose core...
Yes, all the 8-bit processors were pretty easy to write for by hand; the trick is they don't have multiplication, division, or 24-bit numbers. (Most can do limited 16-bit arithmetic). Getting that right isn't hard but it probably requires you've done low-level work before.
MIPS isn't hard either, provided you just throw a no-op in the delay slot.
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I'd rather use 68k which had a bit more to work with (and I still have a physical reference manual) and it had more consistent behavior rather than the fun quirks of 6502.
Yeah, the 68000 series was probably the peak of hand-writable assembly language. But it's a 32-bit processor with multiplication and division, way too easy.
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While you're at it, mine your own silicon for the CPU.
PrimitiveTechnology has entered the chat.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to let guild secrets out into the open like that.
Honestly I find it kind of depressing just how many of our new hires now seem to view even C and basic command line functions as eldritch knowledge. Like come on, what do you guys even do in school these days?
Given that I just spent two days dealing with Linux kernel driver conflicts even though that is obstensibly not my job I think you're right ;-)
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