Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one.
In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, and I don’t think it ever will be, no matter how good the graphics get. That’s assuming they even solve the motion sickness problem, which doesn’t seem solvable to me at this point.
The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings. You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both. So the controls have to become really stiff and avoid requiring wide movement, at which point you might as well just push buttons on a gamepad.
But AR is a completely different thing. No motion sickness, no risk in any movement, you can move around without silly threadmills, and no exclusion from the world. It’s truly amazing. The AR boxing, pickleball, ping pong and golf are so much closer to real thing then to a videogame adaptation, even the shitty Quest graphics don't ruin the magic. Those AR experiences don't work on videogame rules and really deserve their own name and category - they're as different from gaming as books are from movies. If VR headsets don’t die out, AR is going to be the thing that brings them to the mainstream. I just wish it had more attention, more apps, and more non-Meta mainstream platforms. Not this time, sadly.
Valve is focused on making a device that works well with their existing game catalog. It's a Steam device first, and it needs to be inexpensive to compete with Quest (which is subsidized by Meta), so they need to prioritize which features get included. I wouldn't be surprised to see a first party AR camera attachment a while after launch. The expansion port seems specifically designed for this, with the inclusion of MIPI CSI lanes for two cameras.
The Steam Deck was wildly popular for a non-Nintendo device. It's got Linux up to 3% of total Steam playtime. If this has a similar draw (play every game on Steam without having to buy a TV), maybe the install base of VR will grow to a point where it's more feasible to make games that support it.
It also makes SteamVR relevant again in a world where Oculus has been eating a lot of the mindshare by releasing affordable headsets and buying the most successful game studios.
It will be more expensive than Quest 3s and so is unlikely to grow the VR market significantly beyond what Meta has achieved so far IMO. I'd love to be wrong.
I don't think the greyscale camera is mainly a cost concern. I imagine the greyscale camera has better low light and noise performance, which is quite important for tracking.
The big difference seems to be that this headset doesn't have AR cameras at all, but reuse the mapping camera for some light passthrough duty.
The headsets that have AR cameras don't use them for tracking AFAIK. They all have monochrome cameras for that. The AR cameras are an additional cost that is only used for AR.
I get that there needed to be tradeoffs, I just disagree with this particular one. I could suggest many other ways to save ten bucks in hardware costs.
Any other cost saving measure would still allow to play the same games, just with worse performance. But this choice cuts the stock device off from an entire class of apps - in my opinion the best of them all.
I'm sure they did their market research. For me it's the exact opposite. Performance is absolutely key to me, and AR is just a fad in my eyes. All it does for me is give a glimpse into the real world if I'm about to bump into something. AR games are scarce and have never truly impressed me.
AR is a gimmick. VR has real games people spend many hours in. People don't want to see their boring surroundings unless it's to find the couch or a bag of chips.
The real reason the Frame is monochrome AR is because the cameras are also used for IR tracking which is better in monochrome. You can use the Frame in the dark or a dimly lit room - Quest 3 you can't. For real VR users the trade off is worth it.
> You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both.
You clear the area within the boundaries, leave a little buffer space to the walls, and respect the boundary warnings in game. No problems. You do need a few square meters without any furniture to do this.
Boxing and ping pong feel just as great in VR as they do in AR. It's more a matter of the level of immersion: AR works well for table tennis, but fantasy games are severely limited in what they can do. The most impressive experiences are always in VR - "flying in space" doesn't work while looking at your living room walls.
> It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world.
That's a feature for a good number of games, if not most. For example, Resident Evil 4/8 in VR are by far the best horror experiences I've had, and part of it is that you stop seeing your living room while playing.
> The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings.
There is zero chance that aiming with a controller is more intuitive than point-and-shoot. What I get from your comment is that the movement can be awkward which is absolutely true, but plenty of games have neat ways around that. And then there are games that require no actual movement, like racing games with a sim setup.
Exactly. Performance is welcome for everyone. AR is, right now, a gimmick that would eat into performance if you kept the price point the same. Good choice by Valve imo.
Apparently Valve was able to use a true cell phone chip and get more raw performance out of it by using lower res monochrome cameras, whereas qualcomm's AR-capable chips use up a lot of the wafer for processing color AR video and DSP. Given it's built to a budget, and I don't ever use AR, monochrome AR seems like an acceptable tradeoff.
What pass-through apps are you using for all this? I tried pass-through pingpong but it didn't fit in my room so it clipped through the wall uncomfortably. There is AR golf?
Home Sports is a collection of five sports that includes amazing AR pickleball and badminton, and a pretty good AR mini-golf. So I would recommend starting with it. But it does need quite a bit of space—about 2 × 1.5 m. I had to rearrange my room to make it fit.
I am currently adding passthrough mode to my game (DodgeALL) to spawn portals on your walls letting you dodge things coming out of the walls. Planned release within the next month (in time to enter in the Meta VR competition). A friend of mine made a game (Loop One: Done) that is Factorio-lite which lets you build infinite factories in your flat, which is loads of fun.
Glad that you used this exact example! This guy doesn’t have a photorealistic memory. At least it’s far from as good as it’s claimed to be. He’s an artist proficient in a particular style - better than most, but not superhuman.
When he’s not drawing from a direct reference, he’s simply making up details based on assumptions, not on photorealistic memory. Here’s a good example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyPqQIHkasI
He looks at a city and then draws a picture of it. It’s very detailed, so we assume he remembered all of it and recreated it accurately.
But if you compare any part of it it to the actual photo of the city he saw, you’ll see that he only recreated it roughly — some landmarks, the general shape of the coastline. He probably got the number of bridges right.
But you couldn’t use this as a map. If you were trying to find a particular building that isn’t among the top 15 most memorable ones, it’s probably not in his drawing, with a completely random building taking its place instead. Every part of that drawing is filled with mistakes and assumptions that would never be made by someone who could actually see the landscape in their mind like a photo.
And it’s the same with every other claim of photorealistic memory - it’s always some kind of trick where people have a decent but realistic level of memory. And then they fill the gaps with tons of generated detail that we either can’t check, or wouldn't bother to check.
This is called building your 'catalogue' in art, especially concept art. In order to draw something (well) from imagination, you should draw it from reference many times. Then when you draw from imagination, your brain will pull from what it knows. And since you studied the subjects, the textures, the shapes, etc, so well, you will have that stored away and will be able to do so.
Yeah, it resembles what you'd get when using gpt 4o for image editing. Of the parts that should have been unaltered, the broad lines are correct, but the exact details are made up. A modern white chair is replaced by some other white chair. A book is replaced by some other book. Etc, etc.
Both brains and gpt appear to be doing lossy compression based on preexisting world knowledge.
Speaking of the Apple test, as many other commenters here I truly believe that people who describe themselves as being at 1 are actually much closer to 4, they just aren’t aware of it or don’t understand the concept well.
https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...
I’m an artist - I draw professionally and studied drawing in a group setting. It seems like a profession that would require the highest level of visual imagination. And I wish I could see clear pictures in my head, but I don’t. I need to have a reference in front of me, constantly compare it with my sketch, and refine it using knowledge and techniques that took years to learn.
When discussing this concept with my artist peers, many say they’re at 1. But they clearly aren’t - I can see that in their work process. There’s an immediate difference in art quality depending on whether the artist is drawing from reference or not. If someone could truly see the picture in their head and draw from it, they could skip years of art training and become good almost immediately. Such a genius would be clearly obvious to their peers. But I haven’t met a single person like that - it seems like everyone works with roughly the same hardware as I do and has to develop the same workarounds to become good.
I believe that Kim Jung Gi was a 1. I’m sure there were other historic geniuses with such a superhuman ability. But I’m also sure that 99% of people just aren’t there - whether they admit it or not.
Maybe that are two different thing? Some may experience what is in their head the same or very similar way to how they would experience it if they would actually see it, but I think that doesn't mean that what is in their head must be static or photo-realistic. I suspect these are important factors, too, in a reference image you use for drawing.
I mean - it's either similar or it's not. Things I see with my eyes are definetely photo-realistic. So mental visualisations similar to that would also be photo-realistic. If they're not - they can have interesting qualities, but they're not similar.
Not the GP, but I find it hard to even respond to your question. The whole framing seems unrelatable, but I can try to read between the lines to understand your intention. Normally, my mental experience does not include anything that feels like questions nor answers, nor other words really. Being verbal is almost like climbing into my verbal mecha-suit and piloting it for a while, which I am doing right now to type this post.
In summary, there is no sense for me in posing a question and casting an answer. I either know or don't know. I can't communicate with myself to expose things. To do so feels like trying to act out (while rolling my eyes) some classroom exercise on the Socratic method, which feels as artificial as one of those team-building corporate retreat games.
When I am actually trying to choose something, there is just the fleeting feeling of doing a little "path search" or simulation into my future. This is not likely to involve any awareness of words, unless I take an extra effort to meta-think and verbalize. If I wanted to explain to my wife what I am thinking about, I could deliberately force myself to articulate it. I could stop short of speaking that, and have a sense of the intended words without a sense of speaking, hearing, nor communicating.
Me naturally trying to "ask myself" what to do is more like directly simulating a future and which way I will go at the fork. I don't think words "left or right". Instead, I can feel the branch and whether I am going to innately go one way or the other. I could even feel myself hesitate there with indecision or ambivalence. I mean this metaphorically.
If I literally think about travel, it is less like a first-person simulation and more like flipping through a set of routes or destinations. It's not a visual map nor a first-person vista, but an innate understanding of place and/or manner of movement. For a walk or day hike, I don't see options, but I feel a sense of topology, topography, relative effort, and even accompanying qualia. Whether it is an out-and-back or loop, whether it feels like closed-in canyons or open hillside or steep cliffs...
For driving, I would similarly feel the shape of the route and the important bits like congestion, bridges or tunnels, mountain passes, or a tricky freeway interchange.
For airplane travel, I might have a fleeting sense of the geographic distance, but mostly I would think about logistical elements like ground transport, airport terminals, and duration of the air phase. Or I might think more on the people and social contexts.
For something abstract, like how I should set my retirement investment allocation, I'm not going to think words like "SP500 vs REIT vs i-bonds". I feel the different buckets and also feel a sort of weighted distribution like a branching river. Or more likely, a hazy maelstrom of risks and uncertainties in this case.
For something very concrete and near-term, like am I getting a snack from the cupboard or bypassing it and getting tea, it almost feels pre-motor. Which way am I moving through the kitchen as premonition. Similarly, if I'm pondering how to dress for an errand, I am almost feeling the particular pants, shoes, or jacket in the expected environment. Or I'm stuck in front of the closet, not knowing what to grab...
You pretty well describe my experience as well. So much of recall for me is "just knowing" and already having the mental "thing" at hand in the moment (rather than starting with any perceptible intention) and I do wonder if our kind of thinker might end up more devastatingly affected by age/illness-related memory issues because we simply take for granted /just knowing/.
No idea. I'm still in the middle of shepherding parents through dementia, and I can only hope that it can be delayed and then come all at once if it must come at all.
I think I'd be ok with shifting into a catatonia of non-knowing and non-intention, the basic metastability and paralysis I have always known at times.
I think it would beat the paranoia, confusion, and recriminations I saw in one parent. Or the apparently chaotic internal dialogue/chorus of the other who seems to fluidly conflate imagination with conversation and visitation.
I don't want to ever feel like facts are being beamed into my head, that people I remember are "behind me" and doing my actions for me, or inverting cause and effect and thinking that my fears are putting my loved ones in danger.
There's a guy who is a genius at creating Reface DX patches, and he uploads them all for free on SoundMondo.
I recommend everyone checking this video to see how wonderful Reface DX can sound. After discovering those patches I've sold my Reface CP because I've liked the DX simulated Rhodes just as much.
I was really pro open internet. I remember the old internet and feel nostalgia about it that probably won't ever completely fade.
I am Ukrainian, and when some years ago my government banned the most popular social network at our country - Russian-made VK, I felt strange about it. I kind of understood some of the security concerns, but didn't feel like they were enough to turn off my open internet fantasies and free-speech absolutism.
Now I totally get it and am happy that it happened sooner that later. Turns out that the security concern was as real as it gets. Russia gets info from VK to jail hundreds of people, and at least they one less weapon to use against Ukrainians.
And I have to admit that I've used VK and probably wouldn't stop doing it if my government didn't ban it. Now I am kind of hoping that they will do the same with TikTok. With all of this experience I still have no strength to quit it by myself.
I mean, your govt is banning enough of the shit with some real questionable reasons(while keeping some actual questionable things/traditions alive) that being skeptical is probably still the best bet.
and let's not pretend that the UA govt has had a history of transparency lol. Being better than Russia has been a low bar in the eastern bloc. -30 is better than -70 but it's still far below 0.
> I mean, your govt is banning enough of the shit with some real questionable reasons(while keeping some actual questionable things/traditions alive) that being skeptical is probably still the best bet.
Such as?
> and let's not pretend that the UA govt has had a history of transparency lol. Being better than Russia has been a low bar in the eastern bloc. -30 is better than -70 but it's still far below 0.
Why bring up Russia here, and disparage by faint praise Ukraine?
This is not related to anything in the original reply.
I used to be on Twitter more (Masto now) and this type of reasoning is seen from the Russian Twitter farm accounts, and I note the account making this reply is new.
1. I did not write what I mean, to say the account is new : I mean to say, it has sprung into life, for this thread. Farm accounts can be brand new, and many are, but you also find accounts which have been around for a long time, and then start being used. I suspect Farms constantly make accounts, bank them, and then consume them however many months or years later.
2. Having read the comments from this account, I does not feel like a Farm account. However, I could be wrong. Farm accounts in my experience use different approaches - some are combative, some are mild, some use the usual twisted Russian or Chinese logic ("we had to invade Ukraine because of NATO!", etc).
> I mean, your govt is banning enough of the shit with some real questionable reasons
I love advocates of democracy and freedom of speech always taking up the time, in the middle of a brutal war no less, to show us the righteous path.
Well guess what: war is the absolute worst enemy of democracy, there can be no polite debate and pluralism while the enemy is blowing your children up. A country defending from a aggression is a fascist state where everybody has an assigned post and maintaining the chain of command is an existential duty. Democratic armies do not exist.
It's no coincidence that all authoritarians and fascist tend to start wars or invent enemies, they long for this state of total control where the whole nation is forced to rally behind them. For Ukraine, that enemy is very much real and the resulting fascism is the only way forward as an independent nation. There is nothing "questionable" about it.
As for advocating for freedom of speech, yes, there is place for that after the Russian aggression ends. Or one could try to setup a booth in the Kremlin square and promote those ideas into a country that, allegedly, is not at war with anybody.
This attitude leads to generals sabotaging the Christmas Truce and way more deaths than necessary. Very very few wars are against invaders who want to kill everybody.
That's an insanely naive form of pacifism justifying acceptable genocide. If killing 0.99% of the population for geopolitical goals is acceptable, then 0.99% of the population of all states will get will get killed, currently roughly 80 million people. Because any country has at least one enemy with some geopolitical goal.
I cannot put into words how revolting this idea of yours is, and it's exactly people like you that need to be silenced in times of war for any chance of durable peace.
War is always and everywhere a result of insufficient deterrence - the enemy will only be dissuaded if they are guaranteed a response that far outweighs any potential wins.
Your speculation is baseless. Basically no countries and states want to kill under a percent of another country. I can't think of a single example.
World War 1 killed a lot more than 1% of the involved population.
Honestly, just giving up and "losing" WW1 would have been way less bad for the commoners than actually fighting was.
The problem with wanting to fight wars is that deterrence doesn't work (e.g. see the past 10 wars). The incentives leaders are subject to often makes starting a war the best option for them personally, even if its bad for the population.
Btw: its exactly warmongers like you who need to be silenced to have any chance of a durable peace that doesn't kill a million Iraqis ;)
The fact that you lump together invasions and wars of choice, like the Iraq war, with wars of necessity like the Ukrainian resistance against such an invasion, and prescribe that same cure against "warmongers" - when I was clearly talking in context only about the second case - should probably be a cue I need to stop entertaining this conversation.
I know you are well intentioned and believe in the things you say, but you should probably think this stance more thoroughly.
I see UA before Zelensky and after as two completely different countries politically. Most of the things UA gov was criticized for seems to be mostly an effect of Russia's influence.
Out of curiosity, what has Zelensky done to improve Ukraine before the war, other than not being a Kremlin puppet?
As I understood it, before the war he was sliding down in the polls, becoming unpopular because there haven't been the massive crackdowns on corruptions he was campaigning for (like in his TV show), with him also being uncovered in the Pandora papers as having various hidden assets [1] and only his resistance to the Russian making him the most popular leader ever.
There's a ton of white washing of Ukraine since the invasion. Just as with everything else, it's not enough to just think that one side is more correct, they must be completely exemplar.
> Out of curiosity, what has Zelensky done to improve Ukraine before the war, other than not being a Kremlin puppet?
Incremental progress. Getting rid of Kremlin influence and corruption is enough for one presidential term.
This is also why I hope for Zelenskyj to step down after the last Russian has been driven off Ukrainian territory. There is no greater feat a President can achieve than saving the country from such an aggression - if he steps down, he'll be remembered for the rest of his life in the glory he and the defenders of Ukraine deserve. If he stays in office, his legacy will be tarnished by the everyday muck throwing of politics - no matter if legitimate or not.
Ukraine under Zelensky is almost completely an authoritarian state, all opposition is banned and either jailed or left the country. All mass media are under government control or left the country. Courts are under total government control, well known murderers are freed from prisons as they were murdering people that were against current government. Business under total control and either does what’s told or gets taken away. You don’t like something and dare to voice your concerns? Welcome to the frontlines or a nearby forest with a 2m digged hole! You think there’s no more corruption? Have you noticed that more and more governments are concerned with all the weapon systems smuggled to their countries from Ukraine? Yes, they steal provided weapons and sell it for profit. You sent water and food aid to Ukraine? Local authorities are selling it to locals. Ukraine is a dystopian society. And no, it’s not just a result of war, all the processes started years ago and were just rushed as soon as the war started.
It's interesting in and of itself that ByteDance allows this.
Perhaps PLA believes that bleeding Russia dry via America expending all of her reserve weaponry means that that American combat power can't be used in the Pacific. If you squint hard enough, it might actually be in CCP's interest for Russia to extend itself in Ukraine because it means that the Americans spend infinity dollars and burn through stocks of key weapons. It's Machiavellian but it makes sense.
I may be wrong, but to my eye, China has a direct interest in Russia being successful in its invasion of Ukraine : the invasion of Taiwan.
China is and has been - as Russia did, prior to its invasion - massively expanding its armed forces.
To my eye, there is absolutely no defensive need for this - India is not about in invade, for example. There is only one use for all this weaponry; Taiwan.
I swim a lot, and I meet people in the pool.
Two weeks ago or so I met a South Korean diplomat - in the pool :-) - and we discussed the situation. South Korea very much is looking to see that Russia is defeated, to discourage China from invading Taiwan.
China also has a direct interest in seeing Russia defeated. In the event of a full on Russian defeat, Moscovite power over the vast territories of Russia will weaken greatly, which can allow China to expand its influence in the Russian Far East. Russia has a lot of resources that China needs, such as natural gas, oil, and fresh water. Already, we are seeing Russia selling resources to China at below market rates. This is why I believe the US will take actions to prevent a full collapse of the Russian state.
The west will never allow a break up of Russia, it serves as a useful bulwark against China. So they won't allow the Chinese to expand their influence to the Russian far east either.
Don't see how Russia succeeding in a winning settlement of an artillery war on its land borders would greatly change China's chances of success using their much bigger army to wholly capture an island which the US might honour its commitment to directly intervene to defend. Russia having a horrible time of it is a reminder to China that military annexation of Taiwan wouldn't be easy, but the basic problems with trying (even a victory would involve absolutely levelling what they consider to be their own territory and kissing goodbye to most of their overseas trade, and the US might actively intervene to defend Taiwan) remain the same regardless of Russia's success or failure, as will their confidence their own army doesn't have Russia's weaknesses.
I suspect the Chinese are more bothered about the delicate balance of other consequences (strength and unity of West, central Asian nations prioritising China over Russia for alliances, Security Council implications, trade implications) and aren't necessarily sure which outcome will be best overall for them.
Russia's success in taking Ukraine, and eventually big parts of the EU, was somewhat hinged on the idea that nato, and to a lesser extent the EU as a whole, could be broken up by doing things like threatening Germany with a cutoff of natural gas.
This sort of breaking up of NATO cohesion would allow China and Russia to act more freely in the world without a unified opposition.
What China and Russia were betting on was that the EU would be weak in the face of tension, and realistically that was a pretty good bet because the EU looked pretty.
They attacked, that didn't turn out to be true, and all their best laid plans are going to shit before their eyes as the EU unifies in the United States pros like 10% of our military capacity at Ukraine and manages to make a tiny country of like 25 million people compete effectively with the country of 150 million that is like three times the size.
China still wants Russia to be a strong unified country, because they want a Russia opposed to the west so that the west is now divided between two fronts.
But aside from that, every single one of their plans has gone about as long as it possibly could have.
Russia was not able to take Ukraine but in a few days
The west did not fall apart
United States has gotten stronger economically.
Economic sanctions have been incredibly effective, without firing a single shot.
It has become clear that given a choice between security and economic progress, countries choose security. China was betting on the ability for their large experts and import market to prevent countries from standing against them.
People were claiming this was going to be the decade of authoritarians against waning democracies, but all of a sudden it looks like this is going to be the decade of strong democracies against waning authoritarians.
It's about the international reaction, not (only) about the outcome of the fighting itself.
China can see the price the intensional community levies upon a war now, and, in case Russia accidentally wins, they can also see the price of occupying an otherwise independent nation.
Mind you: Taiwan isn't recognised as an independent nation by nearly as many nations as Ukraine is.
> Perhaps PLA believes that bleeding Russia dry via America expending all of her reserve weaponry means that that American combat power can't be used in the Pacific.
They are seriously mistaken. Unlike Europe whose capacity in manufacturing anything from ammo to tanks and jets has gone downhill over the last thirty years and who haven't seen an actual fight since the Balkan wars and the early years of Afghanistan, the US has logistics nailed down and is in well-trained condition from the adventures of the last twenty years. Should China ever decide to enter war against the US, it won't end up pretty for them.
I would be very hesitant to suggest that the engagement of limited artillery, ammunition, and side equipment in UA is remotely on the order of magnitude the United States is capable of mustering from its reserves alone. It doesn't make sense because manpower is more expensive to train and maintain than equipment, and the US isn't deploying manpower.
> Perhaps PLA believes that bleeding Russia dry via America expending all of her reserve weaponry means that that American combat power can't be used in the Pacific.
If this is their plan then this is a very poor plan. Russia is a land war, and most of the equipment we're giving to you crane is not the sort of equipment that we would ever use in a war anymore.
There's also just the fact that soldiers are often a bit crap at opsec it just doesn't always get them killed. I have doubts anyways that China would be feeding Russia strike targets based on tiktok usage anyways so they'd be stuck to using the videos to guide strikes based on the nation-state equivalent of GeoGuesser. That can be fantastically accurate but it's much slower generally.
relative to Russia, yeah? China isn't like, literally invading them. China could get ByteDance to pass location data to Russia, but it doesn't seem like China really wants to get in the middle of the war.
It's very rare to read such honesty on the internet.
While the internet has been in existence for a while, it is actually still quite young in the sense of affordable democratization of access to the internet. This does raise a lot of questions regarding long term effects of the internet.
While the current threat actors were relatively predictable, I wonder how in the long run nations can protect themselves from threat actors which are currently still seen as allies? On long timescales allies can become threats and threat actors can become new allies. Does this mean the concept of international companies and services will fragment? Currently Europe is trying to organize more domestic manufacture of semiconductors. Will the future see a race of nation states to be as self-reliant as possible? On the level of individual humans the prepper who wants to make his own shoes / computer / ... is ridiculed, while blocks / nation states / ... are taking steps in such directions...
Again, I thank you for your honesty, most people would just be embarassed for their past activity on foreign platforms, and not highlight it to others.
Actually half of Russian internets went south. Do you, Ukrainian, want to google something on your mother language? Use Tor or wait tens of years while Ukrainian-speaking folks use to speak enough for you to be able to google anything on cyrillic languages. Seems like you, English speaker, do not help your not-English speaking nation a lot.
TBH, that applies to anyone. In any field, especially technology, googling in English gives you much better results than in native language. (except country-specific knowledge).
Good luck searching anything about 1c database (maybe the best accounting software I have ever used). And this is only the top of my head, Russian culture used to be huge. A lot of country-specific knowledge get blocked and I very disappreciate that people who use to think that there is anything better than a free access to any information.
In the US I’m not really afraid of China. There are some people who should be, but I’m not. I’m annoyed at American companies who bow to their wishes, but I’m also annoyed at American companies who censor to advertisers so nobody says “fuck” on YouTube and my level of annoyance is about the same.
Some other places would do good to ban tiktok and people concerned about national secrets and the like sure should, but I’m just some dude leaking plenty of information plenty of places and china is among the least of my concerns.
TikTok is a massive platform that can be used to subtly influence popular opinion through its algorithmic feed. That should make you afraid, even if you don't believe you'll ever be targeted as an individual by China.
What’s the worst case? That China subtly influences the American youth to be less supportive of Washington’s wars? Because TikTok has tons of ‘ex’ CIA and FBI manning the Trust and Safety Dept just like the other socials
That’s the kind of fight I’d like to have though. A good thing to stand up for.
I could also probably be fired for things i say on the internet with my real name, but i think it’s worth standing against that kind of thing and not being afraid of it even though it’s entirely possible. (I do on occasion say things which are very much not well thought out, rude, just to trigger good discussion, or because I’ve had too much wine or am feeling ornery… in other words I’m not ashamed to be human)
Little guys don't have their mansions paid for with the money coming from China. So it makes perfect sense they would be less afraid than LeBron. They have less to lose here, and a way less likely chance to actually lose anything at all due to this.
All those rich celebrities are not afraid of China per se, or any other rich totalitarian regime (the World Cup in Qatar comes to mind), they are just too corrupt to care about anything else then their huge pay checks. The same for companies so.
Makes sense, if you think about it. because it is just peak capitalism, unchecked by anything else then the need for money (the best approximation for power the west has).
I am afraid of China. China has developed missiles that can evade our ability to detect them until it's too late. Meanwhile our military is busy with initiatives like... declaring "Sir" and "Ma'am" as gendered language that should be eliminated.
The fact that American boys are increasingly preferring video games to sports should also worry you. There is a shortage of fit young American men for special-ops programs like the SEALs, etc.
The military is perfectly capable of solving more than one problem at a time. This issue is being dealt with in addition to the other items you read about in the news.
The USA, technologically and manpower wise is doing fine at the moment in addressing these external threats.
> The fact that American boys are increasingly preferring video games to sports should also worry you.
You should not worry about the fighting ability of the average Chinese man vs the average American man. U.S. has the most violence-ready population of young men on Earth, and it's not close.
Maybe Latin America or parts of Africa and the Middle East beat us in terms of willingness to commit violence, but we have much more resources, training, and equipment. China has none of this.
In fact, you should be worried about our young men choosing to exercise this violence against you here before you worry about some kind of military defeat at the hands of the Chinese.
"addiction" and "just ___" are kind of mutually opposing forces. It can be difficult to understand addiction from the outside, as the solution seems obvious, but the internal world is not straight forward to navigate.
If the only way the poster is going to cure their social media addiction is through government intervention, I would suggest finding alternative means of addressing the issue.
I think even those who came into contact with addiction and substance abuse may fail to realize that social media dependence is a very similar thing.
We can get technical - drugs and booze are psychoactive, while social media is behavioral addiction. Even so, the habit-building loop and the compulsion that stems from it is effectively the same.
So, I don't think it's condescending to say "just quit it". I suspend my Twitter account from time to time when I realize I built a habit loop again, and the "urge" just goes away.
If you delete your facebook and twitter accounts you lose access to the only customer support channel in many places. If you delete faceboom you lose access to local second hand markets, you lose access to information about community events, you cannot participate in group chats, you get harangued at every social event if you try to share another contact channel.
I haven’t found ostracism for using channels outside of Facebook. I have plenty of friends and acquaintances that I keep in touch with via Snapchat, email, and text.
I certainly feel ostracized for not having a Facebook account. Chambers of Commerce, Community Groups, and it feels like most queer people expect you to be on Facebook, and if you aren't your on the outside.
Its very similar to not being a blue bubble in some regards, but Facebook has a much broader scope than just being a messenger platform.
Excited for the EU to fix the closed messenger issue, then I can have 3rd party clients to bridge all my communications securely into one unified view, just gotta make sure that these large companies don't try and open up these platforms by hiding your end to end encryption keys on their servers :D
I'm very much okay with being ostracized by people who don't care enough about me to stay in touch outside of social media. I actually prefer to be ostracized by anyone who'd judge me for bubble color.
I deleted my facebook during Lent in 2017 as part of a social media "time out" and never brought it back.
Interestingly enough, friends started calling again. Quitting social media cold turkey is great because you get to find out who is actually important in your life, and you find it out really fast.
My first one was in graphic design. I've studied it in college and done it professionally for many years. At first it was fascinating and artistically fulfilling. Each new logo was a small new adventure. I've worked on them for weeks, I fought with clients to keep my ideas, It took tons of effort from me and from them to achieve something.
Through the years I became so much better at logo making. It took me a week to produce a logo that I was kind of happy with. Now I can do 5 better ones just in a couple of hours. I went through the same process that the author of the article went and became an art-producing machine.
But at the same time I burned out and lost the love for my artworks. They lost their story and meaning. They were not special anymore. I remember the projects I've worked on in the first months of my career, but it's hard to remember what I've worked on last month. My hands are having fun doing what they know, but the artistic soul feels empty and unfulfilled.
At some point of burning out on graphic design I've picked up music. Started singing, learning instruments from scratch, writing simple stuff. Five years later, I have about 10-15 songs that I am really happy with. I don't have children, but those songs are the most similar that I've experienced to fatherhood. I am so proud of them. They don't feel like mine, or even like a part of me, but I love them and am happy that I did what was needed for them to exist.
My musical life is an absolute struggle. It was so hard starting learning music in my 20s from scratch. It was hard picking up each instrument, hard to perform before people. Each song takes me months of stressful rewriting. I still haven't recorded most of my stuff and am sticking to live performance for now. Of course I spend most of my practice time thinking of how I can improve this process, get better, more efficient. I love my songs and I want to be able to create much more of them and much faster.
do I? great question…
I was listening to npr today and there was this guy talking about a book he has written on the artistic similarities of Prince and Charles Dickens. Apparently they had similar patterns of production, both extremely prolific, working on multiple major works/albums simultaneously and generally accepting a non-perfect result (subjective idea I know), and just publishing constantly etc. To beat the perfectionism creeping in I have tried to simply finish the song in one sitting. If I have to go back it’s always weird and difficult and of course my patches are not all the same and totally un-recallable with analog gear. Some of the best stuff comes by forcing a lossy non-revertable approach. Instead of polishing, just go at it again. Your best song is the one you have yet write and all that…
I am a graphic artist. In the recent months I've read dozens of articles and threads like this. I still can't see what the big deal is.
Graphic artists don't have trade secrets or unique impossible techniques. If someone can see your picture, he can copy its style. It becomes publicly available as soon as you publish it. For the vast majority of graphic styles, if one author can do it, then hundreds of his colleagues can do it too, often just as well. If one author becomes popular and expensive - then his less popular colleagues can copy his style for cheaper. The market for this is enormous and this was the case for probably hundreds of years.
I personally am a non-brand artist like that. More often then not clients come to me with a reference not from my portfolio and ask me to produce something similar. I will do it, probably five times cheaper than the artist or studio who did the original. It may not be exactly as good, but it won't be five times worse.
Some clients are happy to pay extra for the name brand, and will pay. Some want to spend less, and will settle for a non-brand copy.
The clients that are willing to pay for the name brand will still be there for the same reason they are now, and the existence of Stable Diffusion changes nothing to them. And the ones that just want the cheap copy would never contact the big name artist in the first place. The copy market will shift, but the big name artist doesn't even have to be aware of it.
The main thing people are worried about is the fact that food costs money and you need to eat in order to live. People are afraid that their illustration jobs are at risk because of AI illustrations being _good enough_.
This is a hundredth time in history when technology progressed and artists had to learn new ways to make money. I've learned art in art school - none of the jobs that my art teachers had in their youth are relevant right now. The tools, the pricing, the workflow, the clients requests and expectations are all different. You can keep some of the skill, but you still need to learn and adapt to the new reality. Sometimes it takes 5, sometimes 15 years, but the job of the artist is always transforming.
The illustrator from the article is probably drawing in Procreate with an Ipad. Probably doing her promotion on social media and doing business with her clients remotely. All of those are recent technological advancements that appeared in her lifetime and completely outperformed the previous way to do commercial illustration. Illustrators that worked before that had to learn those new ways, or lose their jobs. This happened dozens of time in history. Now is the turn for current illustrators to adapt.
But none of that addresses fundamental changes to the market structure. How can a beginner artist possibly get traction in a marketplace where people only pay for premium names or pay dirt for beautiful art that's 90% of what they want. You said yourself most clients are willing to settle if the price is right, and you can't really beat free.
When we get to $0 for any possible artwork of any quality - yeah, it's game over for everyone, the end of the industry. Right now we are far from it, thankfully. AI still can't produce usable commercial quality files. Most of them are simply not good enough, and even those that look kind of good have to be fine-tuned and reformatted by a human artist. Which takes real skill and effort and costs money.
And until someone does any job for some amount of money, a beginner can start his career by doing the same job for less money. This will still be the case no matter what technology comes next.
They don't. They will either need to find a way to stand out in an increasingly competitive market, or get pushed out of it. That's how all labor markets work, but creative fields are especially cutthroat and very few people get to do art as their full time job.
Same problem for wheelwrights and loom weavers and chimney sweeps. Occupations go obsolete, people have to adapt. There is nothing special about artists in that regard, if technology supersedes them then they'll go away and people will have to do other things.
This doesn’t directly answer your question, but when I was in university about 20 years ago, I was in a digital arts program, but I focused on algorithmic art and using programming to generate images. I came to the realization that "style" doesn’t matter, and the body of work I produced really looked quite different from one project to the next. I could generate countless numbers of images in a particular style but then moved on.
The art in my case was thinking of style as parameters and certain constraints.
> But none of that addresses fundamental changes to the market structure.
There is no fundamental change. Only an incremental one.
Even if AI-generated imagery takes over the market for “drawings in the style of someone else”, these AIs will still need to be trained and operated by human beings. It will not bring the cost to zero, it will just lower it — which already happens continuously in all markets due to human ingenuity.
Your profile states your a logo designer. With regards to your above post "Now is the turn for current illustrators to adapt."
Are you happy for me to feed that in to an AI generated feed and and generate logo's based off your illustrations, post them online to be sold? How would you feel? How would you adapt from that?
I am not happy or unhappy about it. I just don't have a moral problem with it.
I did the same thing to get into the logo industry. In the process of learning I've analysed hundreds of logos made by other artists. I've tried hard to understand how they work, copy the best practices and styles and do the my best effort so my logos could be as good. I've trained on this dataset and got to be successful enough to become a part of it.
I don't have a moral problem with AI doing the same. It will probably be hard to compete with it, but for now I manage. If I won't be able to compete anymore - I will adapt and apply my skills elsewhere.
If that is the main issue, why are artists hiding behind the pique that "when I create art, it is full of soul, experience, blood and sweat" Just say that you need a way to make money and these models are replacing us.
I dislike the drift this "need to work for food" phrase that I'm hearing so often. Job automation never reduced our ability to produce food. The harvest is not in any danger, not even if we suddenly produce twice the art with the same amount of work.
Hi. I'm a professional artist. I have a lot of friends who are also professional artists.
Most of us live in cities, and go to the store to buy food. We have specialized in being good at making images, which we trade for money, which we can trade for other goods and services such as "food" or "entertainment" or "rent". Some of us are doing well enough to have room for a garden, and the time to tend it. This is by no means the majority.
How many of your peers would know one end of a modern combine harvester from the other? Probably very few, if you live in the city.
It's not about food production, it's about capitalism.
If artists could simply ask for food and be given it from the overflowing cornucopia, then yes, this wouldn't matter and in fact would be a net benefit.
Unfortunately though, artists must sell their art to get money, then exchange that money for food. Now, if a robot produces free art that's almost as good, most of those buyers won't pay those artists anymore, and the artists will starve (or stop being artists).
I do believe that job automation will quickly eliminate scarcity for basic life necessities, while also displacing more and more jobs in our economy, and that therefore UBI or some equivalent will be imminently necessary - but that's a much larger topic
I see a pretty clear analogy to the various industries that felt threatened by home video and audio recording improving to the point of being able to make copies quickly and without significant degradation--particularly when disc ripping at 20x+ became a thing and time wasn't even a barrier.
A person who can clone a style and crank out illustrations at human speed is a very different thing than an automated process that can do it immediately on request, in minutes or seconds. If nothing else, the latter is a huge efficiency gain for being able to self-serve, as it would allow an editor to trial different illustrative approaches without all the back and forth contracting out to a human would require.
Personally, I think what this will do most is convince artists not to put galleries of their work suitable for training online.
The Redditor identified in the article posted a new comic art model based on James Daly III (this is mentioned at the end of an article with a link). The Redditor's comment in that post implies Daly was chosen specifically because they had a gallery of easily consumable training images all in one place.
I have no idea what the minimum effort would be to make the images less useful for training, but I foresee a lot of obnoxious watermarks in our future as people try to do so.
The big deal is that now I can copy someone's style in less than 30 minutes and it doesn't require the intermediance of any professional artist. That was a major source of friction that was just uplifted. Not even mentioning that I can generate tons of samples in a matter of minutes. There are so many differences here that I can't imagine how you can be asking this question.
It might not be a _big_ deal. But isn't it at least a small deal that on top of having her style lifted, her personal name is the trigger in the prompt to apply it back ?
Her style isn't original and unique to her from the art world perspective. There are dozens of people who draw exactly like this, and hundreds who can draw like it and just choose not to. This is not a criticism against her personally - it's practically impossible to have a truly unique style in this world with millions of other artists.
The fact that pictures in that style can be meaningfully described by her brand is only a result of the success of her personal branding effort. She kept a consistent style, she promoted her work, established a website, personal portfolio, publicised her career. She didn't invent this style, but made an effort to claim it as hers. This is a regular path for an artist. It didn't just happen to her like a robbery against her will - it took years of effort for her to establish her name like that in the public consciousness, culture and search engines. Stable Diffusion just builds out of those things.
If this artist didn't exist, the style would still exist in works of other artists. It just wouldn't have this useful tag of her name. We would have to put something like Modern-colorful-flat-vector-cute-disney-textured-cartoon-illustration to get the same results. But since she claimed this style as hers, we can just use her name to effectively describe it. I don't see it as a tragedy, I see it as a success story.
Thanks for the very nuanced take. I think part of the reaction is on the tension between these years of efforts to embrace and establish this style as hers, have it associated with her name; versus a project emerging from nowhere to take that name and art style and run away with it.
On a factual/legal level these are nothing burger events, and we'll probably forget about it if two months from now she has a big boost to her career. But I'm kinda skeptical much good will come out of this for her. In our worlds it would close to raising an open source project for a decade, have it succeed and shine in the world with some support money coming in, to then get it cloned by AWS and you're left wondering what you'll do next. This is part of the game, but it sure sucks.
Autocomplete in Gmail has been getting more and more robust. At first it only suggested grammatical correction in words. Later it started giving advice on better sentence structure and then it just started suggesting whole sentences. Each of those steps I loved. More often then not it just says what I wanted to say, with less button pushes, and without all of the mistakes that I make as a non-native english speaker. I sound smarter in gmail and I like it.
If I didn't have this experience, then giving the machine any input on what I write would seem crazy to me. I would think that language is too personal, too contextual, that I need control over every word and every letter.
But now I love writing with the help of the machine. It still feels like me speaking, the machine doesn't add any extra context that I don't approve of. It really feels like the messages are still mine, and the autocomplete just helps me extract my thoughts from my head in a better and more effective way.
1. (of body tissue or an organ) waste away, especially as a result of the degeneration of cells, or become vestigial during evolution.
"without exercise, the muscles will atrophy"
These tools will only become more pervasive, so why does it matter if that part of the brain "atrophies"? I'm sure people had the same worries about mental math during the rise of the calculator
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.
In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, and I don’t think it ever will be, no matter how good the graphics get. That’s assuming they even solve the motion sickness problem, which doesn’t seem solvable to me at this point.
The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings. You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both. So the controls have to become really stiff and avoid requiring wide movement, at which point you might as well just push buttons on a gamepad.
But AR is a completely different thing. No motion sickness, no risk in any movement, you can move around without silly threadmills, and no exclusion from the world. It’s truly amazing. The AR boxing, pickleball, ping pong and golf are so much closer to real thing then to a videogame adaptation, even the shitty Quest graphics don't ruin the magic. Those AR experiences don't work on videogame rules and really deserve their own name and category - they're as different from gaming as books are from movies. If VR headsets don’t die out, AR is going to be the thing that brings them to the mainstream. I just wish it had more attention, more apps, and more non-Meta mainstream platforms. Not this time, sadly.