I'm sure the novelty wears off. But I'm already coming up with several applications for it.
On the personal side, I've been getting into game development, but the biggest roadblock is creating concept art. I'm an artist but it takes a huge amount of time to get the ideas on paper. Using DALLE will be a massive benefit and will let me expedite that process.
It's important to note that this is not replacing my entire creative process. But it solves the issue I have, where I'm lying in bed imagining a scene in my mind, but don't have the time or energy to sketch it out myself.
>I'm an artist but it takes a huge amount of time to get the ideas on paper.
this is what I really like about DALLE-mini, it's ability to create pretty good basic outlines for a scene. it's low resolution enough that there's room for your own creativity while giving you a good template to spring off from. things like poses, composition of multiple people, etc.
I've used AI to try out different composition/layout possibilities. Sometimes it comes up with an arrangement of objects I hadn't considered. Sometimes it uses colors in really interesting ways. Great jumping-off point for drafting.
I'm in exactly the same boat. I got tired of waiting around for openai to take me off their waitlist and used DALLE-mini (now craiyon) to generate large batches of concept art for a project I was working on. I picked the ones that, despite being low-res blobs, conveyed the right mood or had an interesting composition of elements. I then layered my favorite elements of those and painted over, adding details wherever I wanted, and came out with something much better than I would've been able to make alone.
I've been having a blast using it in my dungeons and dragons games. If you type in, say, "dnd village battlemap" it's really pretty usable. Not to mention the wild magic weapons and monsters it can come up with.
I’ve been using generative models as an art form in and of themselves since the mid/late 2010s. I like generating mundane things that bump right up along the edge of the uncanny valley and finding categories of images that challenge the model (e.g. for CLIP, phrases that have a clear meaning but are infrequently annotated).
Generating itself can be art. I’m not going to win a Pulitzer here, it’s for the personal joy of it, but I will certainly never get tired of it.
I don't know how to say this without sounding like a jerk, even if I bend over backwards to preface that this isn't my intent: this statement says more about your creativity and curiosity than a ceiling on how entertaining DALL-E can be to someone who could keep multiple instances busy, like grandma playing nine bingo cards at once.
Knowing that it will only get better - animation cannot be far behind - makes me feel genuinely excited to be alive.
Dall-e has novelty, but no intent, meaning, originality. Yes the author can be creative at generating prompts, but visually I haven’t seen it generate anything that feels artistically interesting. If you want pre-existing concepts in novel combinations then yes it works.
It’s good at “in the style of” but there’s no “in a new style”.
It has a house style too that tends to feel Reddit-like.
Isn't every "new style" just a novel combination of pre-existing concepts? Nothing new under the sun and all that.
Either way, I feel like your view is an exhaustingly pessimistic take on AI-generated art. I mean, sure, most of what DALL-E generates is pretty mundane, but other times I have been surprised at how bizarre and unique certain images are.
You seem to imply that because an AI is not human, its art is not imbued with meaning or originality -- but I find that an AI's non-human nature is precisely what _makes_ the art so original and meaningful.
> Isn't every "new style" just a novel combination of pre-existing concepts?
At the extreme limit, maybe. But within art or even digital art, then new styles are actually not that rare, humans are pretty good at generating them. Maybe they grab inspiration from nature, visual phenomena, etc, so in that sense it's not "new" but it is "new to the medium". In art you new styles all the time. DALL-E will never do that by it's very nature, and so it's easy to see how it's boring.
And that's just the stylistic level, but it's happening at almost all levels. It's almost definitional that it doesn't innovate, only remix.
It's strange framing this as pessimistic, it's not really optimistic nor pessimistic, it just is. It's also not AI, and that's important to realize: it's a statistical model that generates purely based on pre-existing training. It's very nature is without-meaning and without-originality. That doesn't detract from it being cool or interesting or helpful or enjoyable. I find it cool and useful.
But it's not innovative or creative or meaningful by itself.
> It's very nature is without-meaning and without-originality.
That's a pretty bold claim. What are humans but statistical models that generate based on pre-existing training -- and yet, are humans not with-meaning and with-originality?
Of course, human brains are some large order of magnitude more complex than the neural nets that underlie most AIs, but we can already see areas where these "simplistic" AIs outperform humans on specific tasks. So what prevents the arts from being one of those areas? If not now, in some not-too-distant future?
One thing humans seem to have that is beyond statistics is creativity. In that stats explain what is, and creativity takes what is and makes a dot outside that other people appreciate. No model has demonstrated even attempting the dot, let alone having a good chance of success. What DALL-E does is draw a dot between a few existing points, but never outside.
Humans incidentally have three more things that make for interestingness: emotions derived from feelings, long term memory, and roughly storytelling (~ an ability to turn long term memory into long form recall with a specific reaction intended to a specific audience). I don’t think ML has any of those, but it likely (eventually) gets the latter two.
Meaningness/interestingness require at least a few of those, and it’s what puts most art in a different category than games or math.
I would say it helps to first think what you want to get out of it.
If your task is "show me something that breaks through our hyperspeed media", then I guess some obscure museum is a better place than an ML model.
If your task is "find the best variation on theme X" or "quick draft visualization", they are often very useful. I am sure there will be many further tasks to which current and future models will be well suited. They are not magic picture machines. At least not yet.
I've got thousands of queries, and a LOT of them have generated things I genuinely see as having artistic value, I've probably got 200~ images that I would 100% hang/display in my home ('woodcarving' and 'stone carving' queries rarely disappointed me)
is it some unique form of art, no, but can it produce works I want to see in a medium or style that already exists to a level that it is believable as authentic human art, absolutely.
People like me, with zero artistic ability, are able to take part in creating visually pleasing works. I imagine artists would also find great value in it, being able to feed a few queries in with what they are thinking of creating to draw inspiration, or even putting their own work in and generating variations that may lead to inspiration for new works.
Same. I generated several thousand images and found it a chore, outside of the daily theme on the discord server, to try and even think of anything to query. It was also discouraging when sometimes you'd hit pure gold for 4-5 of the 6 images, then you'd be lucky to get 1 out of the 6 that was worth saving for several more queries. Now it's down to 4 images and... yeah...
I'm not going to try and profit from the images, I don't need them for any business uses or anything, so to me it was a fun for a while and now just something I'll largely put out of mind.
I was actually forcing myself to go through the whole 50/day because I knew it wouldn't be free forever, and I wanted to get better at it. I'm glad I did, but I wish I did more.
