I am a guy who does those kinds of Fiverr commissions. Not the $10 ones, but plenty of $50-100 dollars ones. I have a lot of thoughts and concerns about the impact of Dalle-2 on visual arts as a whole, but I see no threat at all to my Fiverr business.
90% of my clients couldn't do anything without a human in chat that walks them through all the steps. There's no possible interface simple enough for them to do everything without my help. They can't figure out which files they want and what to do with them once they got it. If there's any possible customisation option - they will use it to make the pre-made template uglier, and then will ask me if I could do something to make it look good again. That's what they are paying me for.
I'm working at a small food startup and we needed a logo. One the one hand I was ordering a commission from UpWork and on the other side I was trying to create a logo on my own using DallE2. Dalle2 took a lot of tries and I ended up eventually with 2 good candidates. Unfortunately neither were perfect and I don't have time to try and edit it despite having some graphic design experience. The commission, on the other hand, allowed me much more control over the situation as I could ask for incremental changes and then see how I feel about them. Dalle2 is really lacking. If you wanna do things DIY you may find it useful but it'll still take some extra work. If you just want a good product that is ready for market, you need an artist
When I've worked with graphical artists if the idea is tough to explain I usually include some rather awful mocks. I postulate in that regard Dalle could be used as an intermediary step to create visually appealing mocks for graphical designers to realise and expand upon.
This is what I thought as soon as I saw the blog post, but in reverse: as a tool for graphic artists.
My wife ended to turning her artistic abilities into a greetings cards / wedding stationery because her social anxiety and low self esteem make it extremely difficult for her to work through the process of figuring out what the customer actually wants and how much she should charge for a commission. The way she describes it, many customers think that they can give you a one-sentence request and get back exactly what's inside their head, except that there is nothing inside their head at all, just a very loose idea. Essentially, they want to flip through an infinite set of mock-ups (that they don't pay for) until they finally stab one with their finger and say "THIS!", but they have no idea in advance what "this" is. When they finally come to payment, they only want to pay for the time it took you to produce the final result, which is "just a simple design!"
In fact, the red-flag customers sound like this: "Hello. I'm looking for the simplest thing in the world and it probably won't take an amazing artist like you 15 minutes to make. It'll be used as a logo at our business so it would be great publicity for you!"
Person doesn't value your skill and will try to low-ball you. Ask them to clarify their one-sentence request and they say "Oh, you know, just a simple logo with something nautical on it". Tell them you'll charge for every set of mock-ups as you slowly figure out what they want, and they disappear.
I think that tools like these could be the first step in your journey with a customer. They have to explain to AI what they want, and refine their statement to the point where it produces "mock-ups" something in the right ballpark. Then you can take their top 3 results and talk through them.
Hah. That could be a great way to use those models. "Talk to the AI until you know what you want, then I'll make it for you".
I'm totally with your wife, btw, the attitude of her customers sounds horrible. On the other hand, my experience is that one artist took my $25 and has still not produced what he agreed three months later, and yet asked me if I had more work for him. Another guy offered to do it for free and did it for free in a few days and then refused to accept my money when I explained that I was already paying another guy for the same task so it was only fair that I paid him, too. This was some cover art for a vanity project of mine and I was asking for free contributions but also paid the first artist because he was evidently trying to become a professional. Fat chance of that. Bottom line, if you want good art you have to find the people who are passionate about it.
Oh and image models can't create the art I want, because it's text-based art. Even if they could generate the images I want, they couldn't output them in ASCII or ANSI. In fact I tried and they give me kind of pixelated results, but not recognisably text-character based.
In general, I think that in cases where intentionality around specific details is required humans are going to outperform AIs for quite some time, in any creative domain. Conversely, when I don't really know what I want beyond vague direction, Stable Diffusion's results have been good.
I guess I'd say, the less specified your prompt, the more it seems the AI is able to "read your mind." An interesting little tidbit in the world of human/machine interaction. It's like the results make you say, "Yes, that IS what I was thinking of!" But as soon as you have a really specific idea in mind it kind of stumbles a bit for me.
Right now dalle is lacking. I feel very strongly that we will see the tech improve exponentially in a short time. Img2img strategies, for example, might allow you to ask for modifications to a previous output. Machine learning tech is already there, it just needs to be put in the right package. Add in future advancemens in AI, and we are likely to see high quality products built on this within a couple years.
Could a webform be used to ask the questions that you ask (based on a very large decision tree, of course), and then either (1) format the results in a way that AI can generate an appropriate image, or (2) have a human look at the results and in 4 minutes use AI to generate an appropriate image?
Do you think that people in your line of work, or adjacent lines of work, will use AI to offload brainstorming or to get inspiration?
My guess (as a complete outsider) is that the skill of drawing will remain important, but that there will emerge a new skill: an AI translator, who serves as a midwife for the creation of AI art.
Many services like that already exist - at this moment they are using stock images. Once AI generated images become as good and predictable as stock images - I have no doubt that the services will switch to them.
But, stock images have existed for many years. They are considerably cheaper than custom work, are as professional looking and are available immediately. Sounds like an absolute game changer, but in reality the market for custom design work didn't die.
I am not sure that I understand all of the reasons why people pay extra for custom design work in a world where automated stock services exist. Some of my guesses are
- People don't trust their visual taste and want a trusted human to make those decisions for them
- Discovery problem. People are simply unaware of such services and their benefits
- People are willing to pay
premium for the knowledge that their design has a human author.
- Last mile problem. Even if the image looks 99% like what you want, you might still need a guy to save it / fix it / crop it / format it because you don't know how to do it yourself.
I am sure that there are more factors. And even if AI images will bridge the quality gap to human-made stock images, all of this will still apply to them.
Many services and technologies have been trying to solve those problems for many years. AI will add to that process, but I don't see a reason for a dramatic change in the near future.
> - Last mile problem. Even if the image looks 99% like what you want, you might still need a guy to save it / fix it / crop it / format it because you don't know how to do it yourself.
That's the next step for AI generation. The AI image will be almost what you want but you will hire someone to fix it
I could imagine a service that creates logos/designs via an interactive process that lets the user/customer resize various elements, change colors/shapes along the way. This would be sort of similar to the way you can use AI tools to infill different parts of images.
Bingo. Artists have a new creative tool with new constraints, tricks, and prerequisite skills. I think the idea it'll destroy other forms of art (and art-derived commerce) is an unlikely one since it can be used to fuel many of the creative arts that currently exist, but I suppose we'll find out soon enough.
Forgive the dumb question but what kind of output do you make?
Do people ask for graphs on fiverr like the article? (I can only imagine sort of "must have a powerpoint ready for 9am in Tokyo sort of thing. I know that's a real industry even if that industry always seemed to me like everyone gathering round a fake painting with everyone knowing it's a fake)
I sell logos and vector illustrations.
I have tons of pre-made ones in my portfolio. If someone likes one of my logos for their business - they can just buy it outright. They don't even have to contact me and can just buy the file package generated by the website.
If the client likes the logo, but can't figure out the interface, or want me to apply some changes - he contacts me. I talk to him, do everything that he requests and at the end I sell him the logo + premium for my time and additional custom work.
Usually people ask me for things similar to what they saw in my portfolio. Rarely do I get unusual requests like this graph. If I get a request that I can't do - I will say no or refer them to the graph guy. But if I am feeling creative - I tell them an unreasonably high price. Sometimes they agree and it turns out that I was a graph guy all along
AI is moving so fast that we might be a couple of years prior to having a program capable of conversing with a dumb and indecisive person like this and outputting what they want
Dec 2016 - "These 20 companies are racing to build self-driving cars in the next 5 years." [0]
Oct 2022 - "Even after $100 billion, self-driving cars are going nowhere." [1]
People have been historically notoriously bad at predicting how good AI/technology will be in 5-10 years time. If the predictions from 2015 were right, the roads would have been filled with level 4 and 5 autonomous vehicles for years now.
I remember watching a panel discussion with some CEOs and some industry engineering veterans, I think hosted by NVIDIA, in 2016. The CEOs were saying we'd have self driving cars all over the roads by 2019, and the engineering veterans were saying we'd maybe have partial deployments by 2023. It's interesting that the veterans seem to have made accurate predictions.
I think what we see are CEOs looking to raise funds, and news organizations looking to sell an interesting story that will say "revolutionary tech is just around the corner", but this is motivated reasoning. You're right that this is the same with AI technology, where some people say AGI is just around the corner, whereas some veterans say it may well be decades still, and the truth is we don't know.
So anyway I guess I agree with what you are saying, which is that AI development is difficult to predict and many people make bad predictions. I just wanted to point out that it tends to be people with a motivation to predict rapid growth that tend to produce a lot of these errors. These errors get propagated widely because technology press is one of those groups with this bias. However not everyone makes such bad predictions.
Don't get me wrong, Stable Diffusion & co are incredibly impressive. I'm using NovelAI image generation for a project I'm working on, so it's already useful to me as more than just a toy, even. It is absolutely a massive technological step change.
But NovelAI and Stable Diffusion both have limitations. It's nearly impossible to generate two different specified characters, much less specify two characters interacting in a certain way. For NovelAI, common/popular art styles are available, but you can't use the style of an artist with ~200 pictures. (Understandable, given how the AI works technically, but still a shortcoming from a user's perspective.) Both are awful at anything that requires precision, like a website design or charts (as shown in the article). And, as most people know by now, human hands and feet are more miss than hit.
People are extrapolating the initial, enormous step change as a consistent rate of change of improvement, just like what was done with self-driving cars. People are handwaving SD's current limitations away; "it just needs more training data" or "it just needs different training data." That's what people said about autonomous vehicles; it just needed more training data, and then it would be able to drive in snow and rain, or be able to navigate construction zones. Except $100 billion of training data later, these issues still haven't been resolved.
It'd be awesome if I were wrong and these issues were resolved. Maybe a version of SD or similar that lets me describe multiple characters in a scene performing different actions is right around the corner. But until I actually see it, I'm not assuming that its capabilities are going to move by leaps and bounds.
My partner works in design and her design teams have jumped all in on using Stable Diffusion in their workflows, something that is effectively in "version 1." For concept art especially it is incredibly useful. They can easily generate hundreds to thousands of images per hour and yes, while SD is not great at hands and faces, if you generate hundreds or thousands of images, you get MANY which have perfect hands and faces. Additionally it's possible to chain together Stable Diffusion with other models like GFPGAN and ERSGAN, for up-ressing, fixing faces, etc.
Self driving cars are completely different, no one was using "version 1" of self driving cars within weeks of the software existing. Stable Diffusion and similar models are commercially viable right now and are only getting better in combination with other models and improved training sets.
I think you're shifting the goalposts to what success is here to be quite frank. "The model needs me to be able to specify multiple characters in a scene all performing different actions."
The truth is, if I had to ask art professionals on Fiverr for "beautiful art photography of multiple characters doing different actions", it would be difficult and expensive for them too! And worse, you would get one set of pictures for your money and if you weren't satisfied, you're shit out of luck! On my PC, Stable Diffusion can crank out > 1000 unique pictures per hour until I'm satisfied.
> My partner works in design and her design teams have jumped all in on using Stable Diffusion in their workflows, something that is effectively in "version 1." For concept art especially it is incredibly useful.
I do agree if you are coming from the angle of "I need concept art of a surreal alien techbase for a sci-fi movie[0]" then SD&co are super useful. I'm not saying they don't have their uses. But those uses are a lot more limited than people seem to appreciate.
> I think you're shifting the goalposts to what success is here to be quite frank. "The model needs me to be able to specify multiple characters in a scene all performing different actions."
Having multiple, different characters in a picture/scene interacting in some way is not an uncommon, unrealistic requirement.
[0] high res, 4k, 8k frostbite engine, by greg rutkowski, by artgerm, incredibly detailed, masterpiece.
As far as I can tell, it is possible to draw such a scene by adding in the pieces and using the tools to paper over the boundaries and integrate those elements. It takes much more work than just generation but maybe one fiftieth to one hundredth of the work necessary for classic illustration.
I have also been floored with their output, but it's because of that that the comparison to self-driving vehicles is so relevant. Even if we saw impressive growth over 5 years, it doesn't mean that growth will continue for another 5.
It's possible that Stable Diffusion, or minor improvements of, is our peak for the next few decades.
I think the future will involve “layering” different AIs for art. One for backgrounds, one for human poses, one for facial expressions, one that can combine them. That sort of thing.
The self driving car analogy isn't applicable here as the contexts are way different: operating conditions aside (roads not built for self driving cars, random unexpected situations, etc.) a single accident can result in one or more fatalities, which calls for extreme caution before wider adoption.
Perhaps unpopular opinion but I think the tech is more than good enough that I think most cars should be autonomous already. However the reason I think there isn't is because public perception, regulation, changing tradition is hard, and peoples acceptable safety.
It seems like most would rather wait until autonomous cars are way better than human drivers while not truly acknowledging most human drivers are awful. Sure I dont want people hurt or killed but I think it could have made more progress in prod so to speak.
> However the reason I think there isn't is because public perception, regulation, changing tradition is hard, and peoples acceptable safety.
No, the reason is that for city driving there is no system that is even close to navigating typical driving problems that humans encounter multiple times on a daily basis. There are plenty of videos of self driving cars flummoxed by basic road obstacles.
What people like you call “edge cases” are actually common occurrences.
If you think any non geofenced system is close to average human level competence you are simply deluded.
I don’t agree with the gp, but humans, in my tiny village, drive into shit everysingleday. We just don’t accept that from self driving cars, but we do from humans because it’s normal.
Human drivers drive into other people all the time, whether due to intoxication, tiredness, or just outright not paying attention. I know two people that have gotten rear-ended at a stoplight by another driver going >40mph. One of them was drunk. The other claimed to not be paying attention and otherwise seemed sober.
Likewise, plenty of people just stop paying attention and read their phones ... idling at intersections much much longer than necessary. Or drive stoned and drive around at ridiculously slow speeds.
Your assumptions are just wrong.
Currently, self driving cars are much worse than humans. Invest some time and do the research. It's appalling how misleading sources like Tesla PR are.
> People have been historically notoriously bad at predicting how good AI/technology will be in 5-10 years time.
Taking the people who are most incentivized to overhype things to get clicks and/or funding as the consensus view is maybe not the best take here.
If you looked at people in general or engineers in general and looked at the median predicted timeframe, it would've probably been much more conservative.
90% of my clients couldn't do anything without a human in chat that walks them through all the steps. There's no possible interface simple enough for them to do everything without my help. They can't figure out which files they want and what to do with them once they got it. If there's any possible customisation option - they will use it to make the pre-made template uglier, and then will ask me if I could do something to make it look good again. That's what they are paying me for.