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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.
The best video concerning this issue is still on the metaphor of Lace.
Or as Kasparov said: let us become centaurs! Let the computer handle tactics, and I'll oversee the broad strokes of the Strategy! He has always been arrogant.
But this metaphor is lacking, isn't it. Because there's only so much you can do to make lace fancy. It's always been a pure show of skill. Art is deeper.
What you're discovering with Stable Diffusion is that it's a low-level skill prosthesis: very good at rendering, silly at composition, near completely unable to work with concepts. This is the rough pattern of automation in a given field: the technology begins with eating the routine technique. Abstractions follow. Technique on the level that is aesthetically pleasing is so hard for humans to master, it's the subject of such envy and crab mentality, that the development of style (in gwern's definition, «some principled, real, systematic visual system of esthetics») is, among serious artists, from what I can tell, roughly synonymous with the mastering of techniques, and artists have come to scorn «idea guys». For the most part I believe they're stupid doomed crabs who struggle to trace coomer "art" over photos of their onlyfans colleagues of the opposite gender, Stable Diffusion is the great equalizer, and ideas matter a lot more than technique; but with passage of time, the role of centaurs and chimeras and man-machine collaboration will shrivel up, as stronger models master radically more abstract and large-scale skills – from rendering technique to composition to coloring to «taste» to... As in chess and go, so in art: at some point, one machine makes the Move 37 and that's it.
So in writing. I've read this today, a work of greentext prose by GPT-3, prompted by Connor Leahy (h/t gwern). It's perfect «metamodernism», oscillating from clownery to sincerity, scarily compelling, at times haunting. At times painfully lame – but I've seen flesh-and-blood writers fail harder, especially in sci-fi. I recommend you check it out.
...it's crucial, though, that real ideas aren't «options». They aren't even «choices». They are, to put it naively, transcendent events, grasping entire insights from beyond the distribution. Artists have a point. There is a difference between pro-consuming, deigning to snap together a minimal viable element of novelty, a medium-tiddy anime PLUS impressionism DOG! girl with BURGERS in some harder pose, like most anons on 4chan are content to do, – and a creative act, even if expressed in largely the same behaviors. Perhaps creative acts can be mastered starting with this play. Perhaps artists are right and you need the pain of the grind to earn the key to creativity. Perhaps it's only given to some, but is given irrevocably. This almost feels Gnostic. As an Idea Guy, I'd like to believe the latter. But even if I arrive at a visual idea – how do I prompt it? How does one summon into existence this, before it is drawn by Syd Mead? Is spoken language humans can realistically use even expressive enough?
Most «artists» are illustrators, and most illustrators can be replaced by a guy who's mastered Stable Diffusion (realistically, SD+ that's been pumped to Midjourney V4 level) plus a couple of inpainting/img2img/prompt2prompt techniques, like me and you, because most illustrations are trash. But that's not very interesting. There does exist original art, it's qualitatively different from this, and it remains to be seen if AI tools will reveal any Idea Guys as real artists who have been merely technique-deficient. As far as patterns go... The prior art is not encouraging.
(Both «Idea guy» and «creative choice» are terms @FCfromSSC has used a couple of weeks ago. I've written half a post, been procrastinating to respond to him and now it's probably too stale.)
I know that feel. You should finish it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
A big advantage of the grind is that it works from both ends of the chasm. Working problems gives you a clearer, more systemic understanding of their solutions, and also a language with which to communicate those solutions, while also increasing your ability to actually implement solutions yourself. Ideally, you end up in an area where you can both show and tell, and both the showing and the telling cover for each others' deficiencies. Frequently, there's a problem that I'm having trouble putting into words, so I make a quick sketch. Or the opposite, there's a sketch I can't get right, but I can describe what I'm going for. The grind gives me a deeper understanding of the structure of art, a whole multitude of hooks to hang different concepts on so I can think about them in an organized fashion.
I think that Syd Mead picture is in fact expressible in words. But it would take a whole lot of words, where some form of meta-collage would be vastly easier and clearer. The video you linked of the guy doing step-by-step infilling and editing, we both recognize that's baby steps. Something more mature would be a 3d-volume with a camera, where you can position elements, each of which have their own prompt-identity, and then apply an overall prompt to the scene as a whole. fine control over elements and composition, blending to overall control of the style, lighting and so on.
I enjoyed this quite a bit, but I enjoyed your plantae story below quite a bit more. I think you sell yourself a bit short, sir.
I think you need the pain of a grind. I'm not sure it matters much what you're grinding. You need to learn that there's good ideas and bad ideas, and to gain the ability to discern between them. And to do that, you need an understanding of the underlying mechanics of your chosen medium, so that you can think and talk meaningfully about it. I have zero doubt that AI tools can provide this grind, because the core questions remain the same: "is this good? Why or why not? how do I make it better?" If you're asking that, you're an artist already.
I'll leave aside img2img and inpainting and other gimmicks, because ultimately they do not allow fine control of pixel values of the finished product, and using a normal editor to get there is just the stone soup route.
To the first approximation, promptgrinding and drawgrinding are similar in that one internalizes reproducible patterns of affecting the medium, and with any luck, gets closer to transferring imagination onto the canvas. But under scrutiny this charitable analogy breaks down, which is why /ic/ crabs feel in their gut (but can't explain without appealing to SOVL and bashing pajeets etc.) that «this is not art» as normally conceived, not even digital illustration art.
The thing is simply that drawing is the realm of continuous effects, iterating over a smooth isomorphic fitness landscape towards perfection; one can make a gotcha with pixel art, but usually digital environments emulate the truly continuous traditional medium. This is how we learn, this is how we perceive getting better, minimizing the deviation. Prompting, like text generation, are discrete procedures. It's not an accident that «AI art» tends towards gacha rolls: there's the ease of getting good-enough stuff, there's the low bandwidth of prompting, but the fundamental issue is that combinatorics of token interpretation are inherently jumpy, so the feedback is discontinuous, and such a surface is qualitatively much harder to master on a level that's deeper than memorizing cheap rules of thumb – for our natural learning algorithm, at least. And perhaps for any learning algorithm, seeing as image diffusion generation (continuous process) runs circles around autoregressive next token prediction in terms of wow effect per FLOP.
We're making progress in diffusion for text, though – perhaps making text gen more human-like (at least I sort of feel the diffusion of meanings when I write). And we're making progress on interpreting the black box gacha mechanic and controlling its attention maps. With a few more tricks, such as bringing back latent space exploration (that was developed for GANs), I hope to see a qualitative breakthrough in interfaces that will finally fit like a glove and improve on traditional continuous-effect GUI editors, rather than on CLI programs with output to a GUI plugin.
But it's a serious ergonomic design challenge, maybe on par with creating GUIs as a concept, so for now it's fair to say that prompting is not a human-worthy way to learn to do art, even if it's a great shortcut to illustrating concepts.
Then again, I take issue with drawing too. Prompting is unnatural bullshit in a whole another dimension.
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I'm not really sure what you're suggesting here. Are you envisioning a future where you just tell the AGI "make me something" and it handles everything from conceptualization to planning the story beats to the final rendering?
There is some limit, somewhere, to how much visual information you're able to encode in text. Otherwise, it seems plausible to imagine that a written description of an image would be an acceptable substitute for the image itself. But, it's not. You have to actually look at the thing to know what it looks like.
The appropriate thought experiment here is to imagine that you have a true AGI, and it can draw better than any human artist. Your own personal artist-slave at your beck and call, 24/7. Could you truly communicate to it everything that's in your head using only words, no images? Not even crude MS Paint sketches to indicate the sort of composition or mood you want? I suppose that's partially dependent on what's in your head and how much specificity you desire, but I think plenty of people would still find reason to communicate with the AGI in images and sketches, and not just purely in words.
Many years before AI art existed, I would see game programmers say things like "I just want to be able to draw well enough to get my ideas across to an artist, so he can finish them". It seems they also had the intuition that they wouldn't be able to fully communicate their visual ideas in words alone.
Seems like as good a time to ask as any.
I know you've talked in the past about how you're excited about the possibility of SD to level the playing field of visual expression, and enable people to express political and philosophical messages that they weren't able to before. Do you have any projects in mind that you want to accomplish with SD? Have you been playing around with it?
This will be done at some point, assuming no political hurdles. Taken literally, this will amount to a gacha roll, hardly any different from current prompt combinatorics. «Make me something with the quality of Netflix slop, but a better fit for my data-mined profile» plus a few tags to taste – I'd say it's more commendable than consuming Netflix propaganda, but it's not an artistic act on your part, indeed any more than ordering a dish and asking for it to be extra spicy makes one a chef.
Technically there isn't; after all, images are 0s and 1s as well. But my point is more that natural languages do not lend themselves naturally to describing very specific visuals. Imagine Syd had his hands crushed in a road accident, but was otherwise intact. Would he be able to create an equal piece of art using an «art slave» as you put it, or simply a very responsive AI, talking about tones and shapes and reflections and such, especially not referencing prior work? I get that text is the universal interface, but eh... sounds bothersome. And leaving aside subtleties lost in translation – how much of the original image even was in Syd's head, imagined ex nihilo, versus discovered serendipitously through actual work of drawing the piece, stroke by stroke, both «at inference time» and over the decades of «training the network»? Also, how well could that iterative process be substituted in collaboration with a command-interpreting «slave»? Great painters offloaded much of their work to assistants, but they could do the job of any given assistant even better… Then again, high-level imagination can be lost in the work, or perhaps exposed as a half-baked incoherent dream…
Those are not obvious questions to me. I do not wish to look down on manual technique, no matter how much /ic/ type artists beclown themselves with shitty arguments. It's a travesty that humans have to do art in such an inefficient manner (animation is the worst sort of bullshit – 1D acts to construct a 4D object!), but in practice it appears to be either very important or fully necessary to build one's creative ability.
It isn't sufficient, though, so some crabs clearly have no legs to stand on while they bash prompters.
I have, but playing around is the right way to put it.
My excitement was vicarious, on behalf of young people who haven't had the time or the insanity to acquire technique, yet believe they have something to show. It'll be more than a bit ridiculous to ape being a Creative now. This was a self-deprecating use of the term; I used to be an Idea Guy, but my Ideas are shriveled up and dead, visual or otherwise, just a dust-collecting folder with drafts. I'm not good at technique either. Sometimes I test it. For example, two months ago when I was dining out and saw this writingprompts thread «When humanity went extinct... Earth is now dominated by sentient trees» obviously baiting environmentalist nuts, and quickly wrote this , in the dry style of gwern prose.
It'd be relatively easy to expand my sketch into a larger-scale story, and illustrate with SD or Midjourney; I can envision most separate pieces. It'd communicate some of my politics and philosophy too. What would be the point, though? Even for better concepts of my own invention – who would need it? This tech is wasted on me, I admit it freely.
But there are other people.
What's the point of writing posts here? Communication and creation are their own rewards. Making something that you and others can enjoy is a delightful thing.
I find myself in much the same position. My head was once full of fascinating ideas, mostly abandoned now that I have an actual job. But it still has some of them, and I still grind a bit now and again trying to express them, and derive enjoyment thereby. Maybe I'll get around to pushing them out someday. The future is not closed until we are dead and gone.
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