No, it didn't but people who took only one semester of art classes may remain under the delusion that art is about making pretty pictures.
People who need illustration or graphics with no particular style can meet their needs with this tool but that is far from art. This replaces commercial illustration, not artists.
Exactly, this replaces general illustrative commercial art. This is great for illustrations at the head intro of fiction stories. However, fine artists that produce art where the object created is merely the totem for their actual art: intellectual conceptualization of an idea, often concerning the finality of life and the immature behaviors we playout within; that type of Fine Art is completely out of reach of modern AIs. I'm sure there are attempts by AI developers to mimic such art, but that mimicking will be gibberish. It requires a sentient being to create Fine Art, because Fine Art is an 360 degree expression of existence, not some pretty picture.
I can see this replacing the clip and misappropriated art in slide presentations that no one is paying for currently with a $20/month service that lets you do "line art angry man in toga at computer" to put into your talk on Kuberentes.
It might replace the "nice pic, do you have it at {size} so I can use it as a desktop image" comments on various social media sites.
I don't see it replacing an actual photograph as a wall hanging (or a painting) because they are subtly wrong in some ways. The reflection in the lake doesn't match the landscape... that one cloud has its lighting at slightly different angle than the rest.
Possibly... but I'm skeptical. For the type of photography that I do, these are things that come from an understanding of the world and its implications. You aren't going to see certain types of clouds in certain landscapes - they just don't form there. For example, having a cloud that indicates fast moving wind in a mountain environment in a plains landscape with a glassy smooth pond.
It's not that you can't paint that picture... but you'll never be able to capture that scene in camera. If someone was presenting that as a photograph, it would feel wrong to me because of an understanding of the meteorological criteria for the scene.
Yet, I am doubtful that I'll have a generated image at 11x17 that holds up to the same scrutiny that I apply to my own photographs.
I am absolutely certain that it will be able to generate images that are completely appropriate for images that you don't look at for more than a minute at a time or are used as complimentary material for other content.
All that said, I am not concerned that I will get more or less sales of my photographs with AI generated art competing. The people who are going to pay for a photograph are going to pay for a photograph. Those who aren't - weren't going to in the first place.
Of course not, it just gained a new "advanced stable diffusion usage" track. Photography didn't displace painting from art school, and even outside art there are plenty of examples to be found. CNC machines are awesome, but every machining class in existence still teaches manual lathing and milling.
Not yet, but I can definitely imagine a future where these tools get more capable and refined, to the point where all the shortcomings listed above will be overcome. Knowledge about cameras and scene composition are already encoded in the networks to some degree, it just needs to become more accessible. There's probably also a better way to seed new images than by starting with random noise, so we could get similar variations easier. We have already made the big step towards creativity and real world understanding of objects and their lighting, the remaining issues are more technical and unless we are incredibly unlucky and run into a true show-stopper, we'll probably all have access to a high quality digital artist that can reduce production times dramatically.
You need to give some information about the scene to the network.
Camera settings is just a short hand to describe the field of view and depth of focus (at the very least). If you make that implicit you'd still need to give the network the steradians, focal length, circle of confusion, etc. etc. etc. that you want your image to use.
You'd need to understand everything in Hecht's Optics to tweak all the parameters of an AI generated image.
That's an implementation problem, not a technical or conceptual one. Diffusion models have shown that they can learn practically all of these things if you make them sufficiently big.
i dont think it would be a massive stretch of the imagination to be able to train a robotic arm to hold a brush and reproduce something that is on screen and do it really well.
Machines like that already exist but specifically with oil painting there is a lot of important information in how was the paint applied. So it is really really hard. Too many decisions in tools used, angles of the strokes, pressure, thickness of the color etc.
You might make painting that looks identical from far away but when you come close it will be completely different.
Nobody gets paid to be a telephone operator or a cobbler or a steeplejack anymore either. If new tools come along that automates and further commoditizes the production of art, I don't see the issue. Automatic driving for trucking, public transport, taxis would economically impact vastly more people, and everyone here seems to be cheering for that.
There's nothing special about art. People will still do it as a hobby, like they do with a lot of other dead trades and professions. In many ways I think the personal aspect of the creation and sharing with people you know is the special thing, rather than the creation or performance of a commercial success (not that I've had any experience with the latter, mind you). And I'm not against the mass consumption of art, just that it needn't be produced by people if it has the same entertainment value then that's great.
I grew up in a car dependent area and moved to a walkable big city in my teenage years, and only then became aware that cobblers were still a thing -- in fact, in NYC, they're not an obscure thing, but as common as bank branches.
I think that's why there's a lot of people online who think cobblers aren't a thing anymore. They're from car dependent areas. If you drive everywhere, shoe soles don't wear out much faster than shoe uppers anyway, so it doesn't make sense to care. But if you move to a walkable city, you'll suddenly find it quite economical, since the soles wear out far faster, and the cost of a sole replacement is less than a new pair of shoes, so you might replace the sole a couple times before discarding the shoe.
Well you got me. I guess chimney sweeps and black smiths and loom weavers and carriage drivers still exist too, not sure about steeplejacks since the passing of Fred Dibnah. But you get what I'm trying to say, hopefully.
You included “cobbler” only because it sounds old-timey to you, and I was pointing out that it’s not.
Repairing expensive shoes is not an automated process. It’s more like fixing a roof leak, landscaping, or changing a flat tire. Jobs for those things still exist and aren’t going anywhere.
You're nitpicking one of the given examples without engaging the user on the point they were trying to make.
To be nuanced, maybe they might have said, "cobblers are less in demand now that many people have moved from owning fewer pairs of shoes they make last through repair to owning more pairs of shoes that they tend to get rid of when they are worn out due to changes in construction materials used in production," but if people have to write like that to make points, nobody will ever make a point.
It's a nitpick, but a little bigger than that. It's as bad as including "bus driver" in the list. Cobblers just shouldn't be included in the category at all.
Cobblers are in just as much demand in most of the world as they always have been. They only fell out of demand in car-dependent areas, which is a small minority of the world population (but a vast majority of the HN commenting population since most of the USA outside of a few cities is car dependent)
I don't know if it has anything to do with construction but doubt it. If you actually walk everywhere shoes don't last very long these days, especially shoes under $100.
There are a lot of other urban services that exist in almost the entire populated world, but that most Americans think quaint because they are not relevant to a car dependent highway world.
All that said, this really is a nitpick and the original point stands very well. Some of us just don't like it when car-dependent people forget that they are a small minority worldwide and instead treat urban walkable people as the insignificant minority! Or rather, HN being a forum for all things interesting, we find it interesting to make it a teachable moment. What could be more interesting than finding out that something that has always seemed obvious to you is actually backwards?
> I don't know if it has anything to do with construction but doubt it. If you actually walk everywhere shoes don't last very long these days, especially shoes under $100.
By construction, I mean the material and design of shoes people tend to wear. I can't say I've ever met someone who takes sneakers or running shoes to a cobbler and these shoes are more common nowadays.
Those kinds of shoes you mention tend not to last very long at all and are not resoleable. If you walk a lot, you find yourself throwing away the $80 shoe after just 6 months.
These kinds of shoes are most of the market because most people don't walk much in the USA. If you walk a lot, you might still not change anything and keep buying the disposable sneakers, throwing away $160 a year.
But if you walk a lot AND are disposed to think critically about the situation, you find that if you pay a bit more for shoes you can make them last many years as long as you resole them periodically. And as I recall, a good $50 sole on a good $150 shoe costs half as much and lasts three times as long as a disposable $80 sneaker.
Not only do you save money (not really a ton) but it actually is more convenient, since even counting resolings, you get more miles between having to go repair or replace your shoe. And you don't have to wear in your leather uppers again. It is truly a luxurious feeling when you come back from the cobbler and have shoes that are worn in and fit your foot just perfectly like a glove... yet the soles are brand new and strong and comfortable and ready for another thousand miles.
Why do you think there's a stereotype of leather boots being popular in NYC? I'm sure the resoleability and longevity in the face of large amounts of daily walking have a lot to do with it.
No I included it because it used to be a common profession and now it is an extremely niche one. I could have also put chimney sweep in there knowing that it's still a thing.
Someone is still going to pay for a person to perform or create art for them. Some professional driving jobs will continue to exist long after most are automated. When I said "nobody", that's what's known as hyperbole.
