The same eggheads who said the internet would end censorship, Bitcoin would end state coercion, and Google thermostats would end global warming have also been telling us the A.I. revolution is 10 years away for 50 years now.
But the advent of A.I. drawing algorithms like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion has professional illustrators sweating.
See this video for a demo of what an indie author can do with this technology in a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon:
And David’s just showing you the basics there. I’ve seen the kind of output these programs are capable of when you start playing with more advanced settings. Training the algo how you want it takes time. But after that, you can turn out professional-grade book cover art in less time than it would take to communicate the specs to an artist.
Let’s get back down to Earth for a minute. “A.I.” is just a marketing catchphrase here. These programs aren’t self-aware. What they are is sophisticated decision trees pruned and shaped by users.
But are they good enough to replace professional illustrators?
The lazy, unimaginative, and overpriced ones, yes.
“Not so fast!” you may hear artists online say. “Authors shouldn’t get too smug. Because A.I. writing programs are coming for you. They’re even winning poetry contests!”
Until recently at least, they were also shitting out word salad like this:
“That was years ago,” the common objection goes. “Writing A.I. is way smarter now.”
Is it?
Top ghostwriter Joshua Lisec took to Twitter in an effort to shed light on writing A.I.
Using -ly adverbs is to writing what blinking and sweating are to testifying in court.
This is the silver bullet right here. Because everyone in the know I’ve talked to – including at least one author who contacted the US Copyright Office – says you can copyright A.I.-generated art. You just have to do something transformative to it to get it out of the public domain. Which pretty much means running it through Photoshop. But that’s way easier and quicker than editing an A.I.-generated manuscript for mood, tone, and persuasive power.
Back to Joshua for the final word …
Affiliate offer: Not only is Joshua an industry-leading ghostwriter, he’s one of my best clients. And he coaches authors in his million-dollar writing techniques. Let him show you his next-level secrets for producing quality, persuasive writing fast so you can maximize your book sales. Get his career-changing course now!
when it comes to AI art, the only reason it is seen as a threat is because the industry and illustrators within it willingly lowered quality and chided audiences until they also began accepting said dumbing down of art.
I even received some blowback for calling out an animator on the hacky Invincible for showing how his “high quality” could never be replicated by an AI. Except it could be. Very easily. And it’s the industry’s own fault it can be.
Flat angles, sitcom poses, lack or grit or detail, Whedon delivery and scripting, ’00s nihilism, and red juice plastered on top of undetailed scabs, are all things an AI can do, or will eventually do. They deliberately bent and broke their own art into a pile of clichés and same old tropes that the audience has been trained to want above craft or any sort of meaning. It’s also based on a preexisting script and comic art. There is no originality needed to make it.
Could an AI make Rocky & Bullwinkle? King of the Hill? Felix the Cat? Exosquad? Rocko’s Modern Life? Jackie Chan Adventures? Mighty Max? Gargoyles? Heavy Metal? Secret of NIMH? No, because those all required artistic input and direction, ambition, and originality. An AI can never replicate that, but it can replicate specific formulas, plot ideas, character motivations, and “surprise” twists of the sort the old industry thrives on. An AI script can easily produce this stuff and have shell crew polish it up for the production line. This is the industry they built.
These things only affect hacks who willingly killed their ambitions and ideas for an industry that only wants product. It has no bearing on those able to aim higher and produce creations only they can make. This is why I don’t think AI will be a problem in the long run, and it isn’t one now. If you are negatively affected by an AI program pumping out generic product then you aren’t good enough anyway and deserve being replaced by a machine.
I don’t see a problem here.
Your last point sums up the whole situation. Death Cult hated of beauty has combined with corporate oligarchy and Millennial “Before me, the deluge!” chronological snobbery to leave whole industries outflanked by algorithms.
You’re also right that these algos aren’t as sophisticated as the hype suggests. Even software engineers working on this stuff admit that it’s not yet capable of true autonomous functionality without any human supervision – and it may never be.
From what I’ve seen (I’m not paying for this stuff) even within that style NovelAI can’t make a character with specific obscure traits without varying from a known design. Ex. if you’re want a character with a shark tail you’re going to get Gawr Gura or you’re going to get an abomination, since Gura is by far the most prominent character for fanart that has a shark tail.
I imagine how this will go is that people using AI will say “we just don’t draw certain tropes that the AI can’t do” and people commissioning art will lean hard into designs that AI sucks at. (Of course if this is done enough a new AI algorithm could be trained to do well at those areas, while sucking in new places.)
Trying to make a cartoon out of this is just going to be a more sophisticated version of using something like that Spiderman cartoon maker from the 90’s.
Believe me, the easiest way to rid yourself of awe for computers is to have even a rudimentary understanding of what’s actually going on under the hood. There’s nothing an electronic computer can do that is fundamentally different from what a mechanical or hydraulic computer can do, it’s just much more efficient at it. Almost nobody would be crazy enough to think that a sufficiently large and complex assembly of gears or pipes could become sentient. People just don’t understand electricity nearly as well as gears or pipes, so that ignorance covers the idea of true AI with a veil of plausibility. If there ever were a true AI, it would be a special creation of God.
I’m with you. However, I think you’re leaving bugmen out of your calculus. Mention “strong A.I.” to any one of them, and he’ll start waxing poetic about sapience because “geometric increases in processing power” and the Singularity™.
My father worked in the AI and robotics field for a major mic corp in the USA. He always shook his head at those bugmen statements, and could not understand if they had drunk their own marketing pitches to idiot government contacts, or they were frauds pretending to know how the algos worked.
His take was a complex of if-then statements can handle basic tasks and probably get to mid-advanced tasks, but anything requiring talent/artistry, creativity, or non-material concerns such as faith, emotion, etc. would never happen.
That’s the dichotomy I’ve seen, as well. It’s the tech fetishists who do busywork all day that are sure the machine god’s arrival is imminent. The engineers in charge of developing the tech sound a lot more like theologians on the subject.
As a software engineer I second this. The people who believe in Strong AI in the STEM / IT space are likely either more on the theoretical side (e.g. Comp. Sci. professors) or in business or management side of things.
On the other hand, there are those for whom it’s more appropriate to say they don’t believe in strong intelligence to begin with, and believe computers can do anything humans can because they essentially don’t believe in the soul, or human will, or conscience, etc. So dumb AI is good enough.
“Ron was going to be spiders.” Lol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvpPxjCKTqc