Although we talk a lot about disruption, only very few technologies are truly disruptive. You can tell by the panic and awe in the air whether you're dealing with real disruption or incremental change.

Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant.

Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking people from A to B. First you had to call the cab company now you use an app. It's an improvement, but not truly disruptive. Not like level 5 self-driving cars would be.

Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't.

Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before. This pushes cost down and quality expectations way up. Some artists will adapt and thrive in this new environment, but the majority won't. It won't be long until making a living with photoshop will become as hard as making a living playing guitar. This is good for society but bad for many individual artists.

There will be a backlash. People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. Because SD isn't going anywhere. This is what disruption looks like, and it isn't pretty.

>It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me.

Why is SD going to destroy the livelihoods of artists when machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet?

I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

Some art, technical and scientific illustration in particular, requires a great deal of precision, and ability to interpret information. That work isn't going away any time soon, and is similar to what is required of professional translation. A lot of art does not require that.

Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration?

Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.

I'm concerned that the discussions about AI art on forums like HN get distorted because you have people sharing their views on art here, even though they don't actually have a serious and nuanced appreciation of art and they don't have a good understanding of all the types of work that artists do. Maybe you'd be fine with reading a comic book where everyone has seven melting fingers, but people who take comic books seriously as an artistic medium would not.

> I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

Technology is making something that used to take a lot of practice and skill be accesible to those without any of it. A monkey can now draw two ovals, label it an owl, and run an image-to-image conversion with Stable Diffusion to get a pretty good sketch of an owl [1].

Is it better than what a good artist could do? Irrelevant.

Is it better than what a cheap illustrator I find on Fiverr could do? Irrelevant.

The only important point is that I no longer need an illustrator to get myself an owl. I draw some lines, I pick some words, and presto I have an illustration.

The question of whether it's "art" is entirely irrelevant.

> Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.

I think this is severely underplaying the speed at which things are changing and basing an argument about things that the AI currently can't do. DALL-E was anounce in Jan 2021 and it's still locked behind API access. Stable Diffusion came out Aug 2022 and I can run it on <$2,000 laptop. That's not 2 years. Do you think hands are going to be a long term roadblock?

As for complex scenes, you can currently string that together with a Stable Diffusion plugin for photoshop/gimp.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wwv7zk/sta...

But if I want a good picture of an owl, I Google "owl" and get many more options than I could possibly ever have time to pick from. Stable Diffusion is essentially doing the same thing as Google, except presenting a kind of average result instead of showing me all the results in its DB.

Now, this may actually be helpful in that it gets around copyright claims - but that's the only real difference.

Go ahead and get me a photo off Google images of an alpaca in a suit playing chess in vibrant digital painting style.

Without meaning to sounding rude about it... I'll wait.

I'd be curious to see if you could get that from the AI as well.

I tried generating that exact prompt a few times at theartbutton.ai and all the results were nonsensical.

For example: https://theartbutton.ai/image/OW1HZLfhjg6DFvJtk4vQZzUYqI7pGG...

Not a very wide range of what I could do with the idea in terms of composition, but just some variations of finishing touches/intermediate steps. I achieved this with some human-in-the-loop iteration and inpainting, but it was no more than 15-30 minutes toying around with it, and I'm no artist.

If you have a semi-decent graphics card and would like to experiment with a bunch of extra settings and tools than are readily available online, this is a good repo for that: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui