Some random predictions about what AI image generation tools will do/are doing to art:
1. The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. The most successful artists are ones that craft a story around their life and art, and don't just create stuff and stop. This will become even more important.
2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
3. Those that bother to learn the actual art skills, and not merely prompting, will increasingly be miles ahead of everyone else. People are lazy, and bothering to put in the time to actually learn stuff will stand out more and more. (Ditto for writing essays and other writing people are doing with AI.)
4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
5. Art with physical materials will become increasingly popular. That is, stuff that can't be digitized very well: sculpture, installation art, etc. Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form. This uncoolness will push people away from the screen and towards things that are more material.
> 1... The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.
When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
> 2... Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist.
It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
> 4... It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Just like AI now is way more capable than it was 20 years ago, and able to write interesting texts and make interesting pictures - something which at the time wasn't considered a technical problem - with time what we perceive as "taste" may likely improve.
> 5... Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form.
AI critics are for a long time mistaking the level with trend. Or, giving a comparison with SpaceX achievements, "you're currently here" - when there was a list of "first, get to the orbit, then we'll talk", "first, start regular payload deliveries to orbit, then we'll talk", "first, land the stage... send crewed capsule... do that in numbers..." and then, currently "first, send the Starship to orbit". "You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.
You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.
> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :)
I can't tell if you're being facetious. But being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets. We'd do well to remember.
Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine. Do you think it's an impossible task or just one we need more time to figure out?
Physicalists say consciousness emerges from matter.
The other camp says matter comes from consciousness.
Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor, says consciousness cannot emerge from matter because matter is inert and not self-conscious, so it cannot produce consciousness.
Who’s right and who’s wrong? Time will tell. But it is also wrong to claim that consciousness emerges from matter until it is proven (aka the “hard problem of consciousness.”)
Being alive is divine. It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It's a beautiful thing to have a consciousness in this world, and to have the ability to create, to love. It takes a huge intellectual effort to try to trick yourself out of believing something so intuitive as that.
There are many examples when scientists strongly believed something to be obviously impossible and yet being wrong - Poisson spot or heavier-than-air flight machines coming to mind. So what you believe might be intuitive - that doesn't preclude it from potentially being wrong, unless you proved the impossibility.
I guess there is people that are willing to die over the hill that there is nothing sacred or divine about being alive. I'm not very interested in playing that game.
Given that this is the one problem that neither scientists nor philosophers have made any progress on in 3000 years, we don't have the tools to begin tackling it and nobody is making serious attempts, it may very well be impossible.
We can't know if consciousness emerges but does it actually matter ?
These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society.
I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact.
Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ?
We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
Even if LLM will one day be autonomously updated, they started from us, from our knowledge.
The human brain « is smart », it’s wired up to be in any kind of culture or knowledge. We fill up to be smarter from experience but LLM can’t do that, I can’t teach Claude something that it will use with you the next day, it needs to be retrained with knowledge stopping at some point.
Even if technology catches up and the machine becomes more autonomous, what will say this machine would ever want to integrate to our society or share anything with us ?
They have eternity, given there is electricity. Why would they want anything to do with humans if you go that way ?
If it’s really conscious, should we consider it a slave then ? Why couldn’t « it » have fundamental rights and freedom to do whatever it wants ?
>>These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
See, I don't believe that for even one second. They are just very clever calculators, that's all. But they are also dumb like a brick most of the time. It's a pretend intelligence at best.
>>when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence."
A computer playing GO is intelligent now? Is this the kind of conversation we're having?
>>I sure wish I had.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
>>The next best time to start paying attention is now.
I am paying attention, I use these tools every day - the whole idea that they are intelligent and if only you gave them a robot body they would be just normal members of society is absurd. Despite the initial appearance of genius they are just dumb beyond belief, it's like talking to a savant 5 year old, except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
"Dumb beyond belief" doesn't perform at the gold-medal level at IMO.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
I'd have dropped everything else I was doing and started learning about neural nets -- a technology that, for the previous couple of decades, I'd understood to be a pointless dead end.
As for Go, the defeat of Lee Sedol caught my attention in part because a friend and colleague, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, had spent a lot of time working on Go-playing AI as a hobby. He was strongly convinced that a computer program would never reach the top levels of play, at least not during our careers/lifetimes. The fact that he'd turned out to be wrong about that was unnerving, and it should have done more than "catch my attention," but it didn't.
Today, my graphics card can outdo me at any number of aspects of my profession, and that's more interesting (to me) than anything I've actually done.
...except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
Like I said: it's a good time to start paying attention. Start taking notes, so to speak, like the models are doing now.
It's kind of like the difference between something being enjoyable for you, and something being widely popular?
In a hypothetical world of "AI can produce a lot of extremely high quality art", you can easily find (or commission) AI art you would absolutely love. But it probably wouldn't be something that anyone else would find a lot of value in?
There will be no AI-generated Titanic. There will be many AI-generated movies that are as good as Titanic, but none will become as popular as Titanic did.
Because when AI has won art on quality and quantity both, and the quality of the work itself is no longer a differentiator against the sea of other high quality works? The "narrative/life of the artist" is a fallback path to popularity. You will need something that's not just "it's damn good art" - an external factor - to make it impactful, make it stick in the culture field.
Already a thing in many areas where the supply of art outpaces demand. Pop music, for example, is often as much about making sound as it is about manufacturing narratives around the artists. K-pop being an extreme version of the latter lean.
Are you a woman? If not you can't really judge it since it was intended for women, not being the target audience doesn't mean it was bad, women absolutely loved the movie.
as someone who had a DiCaprio lookalike in his middle school when it came out, who attracted ALL the girls' attention, and also as someone whose first date ever was to see Titanic
I begrudgingly have to admit it is a very good movie
I agree with everything you said, except that #1 is clearly wrong. I can prove it with one word: autotune.
At least in popular, mainstream culture, the viewer is heavily invested in the identity of the artist. The quality of the "art" is secondary. That's how we get music engineered by committee. And it's how we get paparazzi, People Magazine, and so forth.
On the other hand, this isn't anything new at all. We've had this kind of thing for decades. Real art still manages to survive at the margins.
All this being said, I think comparing the art market and popular music markets is foolish. 12yo boys aren't buying emerging mixed-media artists. But they are picking Spotify songs.
When I buy art, I have often spoken with the artist in the past couple days, or I am aware of their history and story and how they developed their art as a response to some other movement or artist collective.
It's rare for people to buy art just bc oil paints go brrrrrm
> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life.
And here we come back to the aged old "can you seperate an artist from their art" because I'd argue when you watch a movie you are watching a product of their life
1. I meant artists writ large, not specifically movies. My point being that community management, PR, having a brand, etc. are becoming a key element of an individual artist’s career. Examples of this abound – see the recent Markiplier film as a case in point. That movie did well because Mark’s audience wanted to help him, not because it’s such an original genius concept for a movie.
But even then – people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor. People want to watch people, not imitations of them.
The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.
A technical company like Space X really has nothing to do with this conversation, and I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.
At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.
Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.
Just look at the images in the link: this is the best they can do? A kangaroo at a cafe in Paris? Could anything be more devoid of good taste?
In response to having a community and building a brand. This is not necessarily human anymore. Most famous people are not someone you will actually meet. Plenty of people do meet them, but nowhere near the amount that composes their fans.
And we have AI generated influencers now, ex. https://www.instagram.com/imma.gram, so why wouldn't people care about an AI the same way they do about people they never meet?
> Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.
I suspect here we have underlying disagreement regarding assumption that AI - in general, not necessarily today's models - isn't qualitatively different than human mind. The part "Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it" isn't an accepted truth, and even today AIs do interact, in a limited sense, with the world - so "None, of course" is questionable. And even if so, concluding "Hence... slop..." seems like a jump in reasoning. For example, why don't you think this slop is more like child's early paintings? Just because today's AIs have limited means to learn in the process?
> I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.
What it is about culture at large? SpaceX analogy was brought to illustrate how much arguments about AI incapabilities are applicable today, but not necessarily tomorrow - just like arguments about SpaceX inability to reach a particular goal quite a few times turned out to be a matter of - not so long - time.
I agree that many AI results today can be uncool. But how do you know it's not passing the uncanny valley period? How can you know they can't be cool eventually?
> people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor.
Let me stretch a little to illustrate here. Imagine "personal" experiences of AI - making AIs unique. One of those AIs consistently produces good movies, which, if you're honestly don't judge by the authorship - are actually good. Yes, people may not care about non-existent AI actors, but they may still care about existent AI author :) . Do you think it's impossible?
> People want to watch people, not imitations of them.
How can you tell the difference? You're watching a movie with actors who are not familiar to you. Would you refuse to watch just for this reason? You just came to somebody's party, and here's a movie going on, and you watched it to the end, because it looked interesting, and you don't know anything about producers, actors etc. - you still can talk about the movie, will you be predominantly worried that it's "AI slop" even if it looks great? Suspiciously great maybe?
> The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.
It's hard to define taste, to be honest. People can definitely have different tastes, almost by definition. But more importantly - why do you think AI products may not have tastes?
> At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.
Yes. But doesn't it look like a prejudice? Of course we can point to how many times we looked at it and didn't get some perceived value out of the work, and got annoyed that we spent time and efforts, but didn't get some results - but what if we'll mostly get results from AI works? Do you think that's impossible?
> why do you think AI products may not have tastes?
Because it can't feel. Get used to it. It can't feel, and what ever it comes up with, would be an imitation of someone real who can feel. So it can generate stuff that can cater to a taste, but the thing itself can't have tasts.
It is fundamental. Arguing about it all day wont change it.
Well, there are definitely people who care about the vision and style of movies from certain directors. It's not so much "story" like plot, but story in the sense of a "brand story" where there's recognizable elements in all the work, repeated themes, changes and decisions and evolution to how they approach things.
> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
Every human being is unique, both biologically and experientially. Until an AI can feel and have a lived experience, it can not create art.
Demonstrably wrong. The most highly regarded AI artist today is Refik Adanol. His work was recently described by Jerry Saltz as a "glorified lava lamp".
The art establishment clearly does. Refik has a show at MoMA at the moment. Saltz won a Pulitzer for his art criticism, so I guess the Pulitzer committee cares.
Art is a reaction to life. AI is thereby incapable of producing anything with any degree of authenticity unless it conveys the experience of being an agent to the world.
With how much data goes into the frontier systems, and how much of it gets captured by them, an AI might have, in many ways, a richer grasp of human experience than the humans themselves do.
You were only ever one human. An LLM has skimmed from millions. You have seen a tree, and the AI has seen the forest it stands in.
First, "AI is thereby incapable" is a hypothesis, not a fact - how would you prove that you have to "live" to produce art? You might feel this way, you may suggest some correlations here - but can you really prove that?
Second, I don't see impossibility for AI to be - to various degrees - an agent to the world. I think that's already happening actually - they are interacting with world even today, in some limited sense, through our computers and networks, and - today - not many of them actually "learn" from those interactions. But we're in the early days of this - I suspect.
>It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
Humans do that a lot but it's not all we do. Go to a museum that has modern(ish) art. It's pretty incredibly how diverse the styles and ideas are. Of course it's not representative of anything. These works were collected and curated exactly because they are not average. But it's still something that humans made.
I think what people can do is have conceptual ideas and then follow the "logic" of those ideas to places they themselves have never seen or expected. Artists can observe patterns, ask how they work and why they have the effect they do and then deliberately break them.
I'm not sure current genAI models do these sorts of things.
> I'm not sure current genAI models do these sorts of things.
You might be right here. Two points though - first, we don't know if current AI is actually incapable of something in particular; we didn't find this, didn't prove it. Second, we might have a different AI approach, which would actually be capable of these things you mention. To me, it's way too early to dismiss AIs - at least in principle - regarding all of this.
> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
The target audiences for art and film are not the same. The latter is far more pop culture. You can't apply them the same way, and the narrative of the artist has been extremely important for decades. People will watch slop movies. They don't pay $30K for slop art. They're paying that for historical importance or, if contemporary, artist narrative.
I'm in fandom spaces, and the prejudice against AI art is overwhelming. I also run in art collecting circles, being somewhat wealthy but not a billionaire. They also care about authenticity.
That is to say, the people who pay for original art, and participate in art spaces, are generally educated who actively hate AI. Filmgoers are probably a standard deviation lower in education, and are far more willing to part with the cost of one unit of consumption (a $10 ticket) than art buyers.
AI is a threat to graphic designers and those in their orbit.
The only way I see AI being a threat to professional artists is AI copies of their work. And AI isn't anything new there. I have a friend who gets commissioned by hotels to do one-off pieces for display all over the world. People have been making knockoff pieces of her style and selling them for at least a decade. And that's her lower margin, small pieces made for a couple thousand dollars to hang at your house, not her $100K+ pieces for hotels where they fly her out to supervise reassembly and mounting.
> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important
We are 50 years into post-modernism. Can't imagine it can get any more important.
I predict emergent design will be the next big thing. Czinger[1] is a great example of what it may look like. Rick Ruben-esque world, where the creator is more a guide.
> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.
Less the narrative of the art's production and more the message that it's conveying.
I don't mean (necessarily) a political message or a message that can be put in to words. But the abstract sense of connecting with the human who created it some way.
This isn't just art though. An example: soon, Sora will be able to generate very convincing footage of a football match. Would any football fan watch this? No. A big part of why we watch football is that in some sense we care about the people who are playing.
Same with visual art. AI art can be cool but in the end, I just don't really give a shit. Coz enjoying art is usually about the abstract sense that a human person decided to make the thing you are looking at, and now you are looking at it... And now what?
This is why every time someone says "AI art sucks" and someone replies "oh yeah? But look at THIS AI art" I always wonder... What do you think art is _for_?
The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity?
We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.
The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.
We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.
I think we fall into the trap of seeing art from a consumption point of view. “Of what use is a human vs AI piece of art to Me?” Art is residing in the productive space too, the artist is considering not his/her utility but his/her presence in the world. Maybe what you describe is the way forward for art monetisation but not for art, and we know experientially how the production of real art is not always in tandem with its appreciation.
My prediction: KNOWLEDGE of whether something is made by AI or a human will be alpha and omega, and will eventually be regulated used in commercial contexts. You will always be able to generate something, but if you somehow get exposed presenting it as human made, the sanctions will hurt you.
We'll get to the point, if we're not already there, where you won't be able to tell if the artist actually did the work or just could have done it, and to which extent. Everything in the process can be essentially faked. If you put a massive emphasis on proving human work, you're essentially conceding you cannot tell without some sort of notary certification. We're in the lab diamond stage and clutching at some artificial authenticity.
I don’t know that this has to be the way. One thing that is really going to confound this very common idea that taste and quality and personal characteristics will win the day, is that you can use AI to represent all of these to other people.
It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money.
I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.
This is a great and worthwhile discussion. People are loosing sight of what art is. The art is the idea, not the medium. And just because something is easy, doesn't mean it will be good.
I've seen some fantastic original pictures that actual artists have generated through AI. I can't wait to see what current and future artists can do with the new tools at their disposal.
> 4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
I agree on current AI art taste, but disagree that it can't be improved. I think art AI companies can hire skilled "taste makers" and use their feedback loop as RL for AI art models. I think this area will always be in flux, and will vary by subpopulation so it will be a job role always in demand.
Do you think taste is something that cannot be taught/learned? Are certain individuals just born with good taste; it's an immutable property?
Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.
Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
> Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
This is...not true? Or at least I can find no basis for your claims.
UK Copyright for books and sculpture predated the invention of photography and existed in a completely recognizable form ("a copyright term of 14 years, with a provision for renewal for a similar term, during which only the author and the printers to whom they chose to license their works could publish the author's creations.[4] Following this, the work's copyright would expire, with the material falling into the public domain"[1]).
Paintings and photographs gained copyright protection at the same time, in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, seemingly because it seemed natural to extend the haphazardly covered fine arts more completely.
Digital Photography and digital painting. Both were considered deeply offensive to a lot of artists. I have witnessed both first hand and the criticisms were verbatim the same as AI.
They said you couldn't become a good photographer if you didn't learn it with the limitation of film that forced you to make each shot count. Photoshopping a picture made it "not a real photo" and was banned from online communities and irl events, drawing in photoshop was not considered art. I find it very ironic that digital artists are repeating the exact same argument as the one used against their art
> Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.
I think the most important is number 2. People are now looking for things that are made by humans. Most detest AI slop. And if they find out that you are peddling slop, you lost trust.
It seems to me that we will go through the same phases that chess went through when chess on computers became a thing. First, people thought that this will kill chess, then people start using it as a tool to play better chess. Now, chess is thriving, despite AI being used in chess. I can see a similar path with art. Using AI to generate ideas, still create art by humans.
I am also glad the
commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe.
Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.
>2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
How can you say this? These models can trivially create things that have never existed, and you can easily test this yourself.
Re: But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
Is it possible for a character in a novel to have novel experiences? Or for you to experience a novel dream? I would argue yes. You can know the rules of the environment and the starting conditions, but with a bit of randomness (or not) you can generate from that novel experiences which were unexpected - so too from the data & distribution that AIs are already trained on they can experience new experiences.
Another source of novelty is from good verifiers/recognition of a class of object which is hard to construct but easy to verify - here the AI can search and from that obtain novel solutions which were unthought of before.
N.B novelty itself is basically trivial - just generate random strings. But both of the above are mechanisms to generate novel samples inside some constraint of "meaningfulness"
I'm building my personal home right now. The AI image models have been a game-changer in designing the look of the house. My architect did an OK job, but the details that Nano Banana added really bring the house up a notch. I just do hundreds of renders from the basic 3D models and I find looks that I like and iterate from there. We are implementing the renders from Nano Banana over our Interior Designers designs. We would not have hired the Interior Designers again after using Nano Banana to do our interiors.
I think part of the issue with architects and designers today is that they use CAD too much. It's easy to design boxes and basic roof lines in CAD. It's harder to put in curves and more craftsman features. Nano Banana's renders have more organic design features IMO.
Our house is looking great and we're very happy how it's going so far with a lot of the thanks to Nano Banana.
Part of the job of interior design is delivering the promised images in … yknow, physical reality? How are you going from nano banana images to actual plans, materials, finishes, products, paint codes, … ?
Interesting. I model interior architecture as "here's $xxxK, make it nice" and they do a bunch of work to figure out what you mean by nice, and a bunch more work to codify your definition of nice into, like, SKUs of sconces and so on. Seems like NB helped you figure out your definition of nice, and your subcontractor had a good designer on staff to execute on that.
A sufficiently detailed render won't require a designer to figure out the materials. Any (reasonably competent) contractor can take a sufficiently detailed render with him to the store and find matching products. At least assuming the thing in the render actually exists.
He can also send back a picture of the real product for approval. I think the primary difference here is the level of involvement. A quick consult and then the professional "makes it all work" versus hands on design with the client figuring out all the details for himself.
A designer knows things from experience and would be aware of small details that if not designed correctly, become very apparent when built in reality.
The interior designer doesn't really do squat. They can do plan drawings and have some off the shelf cupboards and furniture. They don't implement anything
not the op, but this is what i did too and bypassed the designer. I iterated with nano banana and gave the result to the company that builds the kitchen. the middleman is gone now.
NB Pro can do some seriously impressive edits around interior decorating - see the prompt that replaces the window with a mirror which correctly reflects the room. It's not perfect, but it's still damn impressive.
I'm deeply impressed, especially with the "replace window by mirror". It did not only do the window thing right, it also changed the illumination of the whole room while keeping all the other details unchanged.
Right? That part kind of blew my mind too - the multimodal model actually altered the overall lighting in the room by eliminating all the reflections and specular highlights when the natural light was taken away WITHOUT being asked in the prompt.
Same! I redid my backyard entirely and needed ideas. Gemini took a pile of dirt and gave me countless ideas, improved my plans, recommended materials, etc. a designer gave me two out of the box ideas that Gemini didn’t come up with, but it did everything else perfectly. (Designer said, put a patio out in the yard and put your table there, and take your ugly shed and make it the center of attention, since you’ll never succeeed trying to hide it)
Same thing here. I took a picture of some gravel/grass and asked it to show me what it'd look like with tiles. I showed it another part of the property, and asked it to show me what it would look like with a raised lawn. Super impressive to be able to see a cloudy idea in the physical realm like that.
Is any of this intrinsically a strength of Nano Banana, while not of other models/generative tools? Have you tried doing the same with say Klein, ZIT, etc.?
I actually built an app to accomplish this exact thing as I was finishing building my home and was clueless when it came to interior design. I'm genuinely astonished by the capabilities of these models with regards to this, and it feels vastly underutilized by the general populace. Being able to try out multiple paint colors in seconds, or add real furniture or wall decor from Ikea, or move objects around instantly - it still blows my mind.
Can you write a bit more about your workflow? I've been thinking about doing the same, but since I'm very non-interior-design minded have struggled to ask the right things.
Like...
What are your inputs to the model? Empty renders of the space, or more fully decorated views/ photos?
Do you have a light harness around this to help you discover the style you like and then stay consistent with it?
Do you find that giving a lot of context around the space you're designing helps (it hasn't in my attempts)?
I started with sketchup to make basic floor plans and house shapes. I had a rough idea of the style of the home. I picked "Transitional English Estate" since the build site is out on a farm that sorta looks like the Cotswolds. I used AI in this process to get rough renders and feedback on the floorplan. I then took that basic floorplan and house dimensions to a Draftsman who did a lot of tweaking to get it up to code and fix issues. I got his plans and took it to a Sketchup Pro on Fivver . They made a detailed sketchup model. I then took that model and took screenshots from different perspectives and tweaked the prompt to get renders I liked. These changes were reencorprated into the blueprints. I did the same thing with the interior. Took screenshots from sketchup and put them into AI and tweaked the prompt. https://imgur.com/a/lSIYTYr
Mine was far more lightweight, but u just uploaded pics of my yard and prompted manually a bunch of times. Sometimes id find reference images to give as context, draw on the image to call out specific areas, etc.
It wouldn’t show me the exact things I wanted, but got close enough that I could test ideas and iterate quickly.
Out of curiosity: what is your input to the model? A CAD file or a drawing?
I find it does a good job at isometric views from floor plans. However, I needed Gemini 3.1 Pro to be able to have a chance at rendering 3D human point of view images from floor plans.
Any chance you'd be willing to share an album? I've considered doing this for my own home and I'd be psyched to study practical examples. Honestly this would make one helluva blog post (imo).
These image gen models are getting so advanced and life like that increasingly the general public are being duped into believing AI images are actually real (ex Facebook food images or fake OF models). Don't get me wrong I will enjoy the benefits of using this model for expressing myself better than ever before, but can't help feeling there's something also very insidious about these models too.
It's more likely than not that every single person who uses the internet has viewed an AI image and taken it as real by now.
The obvious ones stand out, but there are so many that are indiscernible without spending lots of time digging through it. Even then there are ones that you can at best guess it's maybe AI gen.
People will continue to retreat into walled, trusted networks where they can have more confidence in the content they see. I can’t even be sure I’m responding to a real person right now.
At the point now where basically any photo that isn't shared by someone I trust or a reputable news organisation is essentially unverifiable as being real or not
The positive aspect of this advance is that I've basically stopped using social media because of the creeping sense that everything is slop
Maybe not an actual argument for anything, but even before these image models everyone that used the internet had seen a doctored image they believed to be real. There was a reason that 'i can tell by the pixels' was a meme.
people only notice when they are prompted to look for AI or scrutinize AI
a lot of these accounts mix old clips with new AI clips
or tag onto something emotional like a fake Epstein file image with your favorite politician, and pointing out its AI has people thinking you’re deflecting because you support the politician
Meanwhile the engagement farmer is completely exempt from scrutiny
Its fascinating how fast and unexpected the direction goes
I actually think this was a good thing. Manipulating images incredibly convincingly was already possible but the cost was high (many hours of highly skilled work). So many people assumed that most images they were seeing were "authentic" without much consideration. By making these fake images ubiquitous we are forcing people to quickly learn that they can't believe what they see on the internet and tracking down sources and deciding who you trust is critically important. People have always said that you can't believe what you see on the internet, but unfortunately many people have managed without major issue ignoring this advice. This wave will force them to take that advice to heart by default.
> By making these fake images ubiquitous we are forcing people to quickly learn
That's quite the high opinion on the self-improvement ability of your Average Joe. This kind of behavior only comes with an awareness, previously learned, and an alertness of mind. You need the population at large to be able to do this. How if not, say, teaching this at schools and waiting for the next generation to reach adulthood, would you expect this to happen?
I agree that improvement for the Average Joe will be very hard. I also think that taking more attention to teach the younger generation is vitally important. But mostly I don't see an alternative. I don't think we can protect people from fake information without giving up our freedom, and that isn't a viable alternative in my mind. So what is left but trying our hardest to teach people to think critically?
I remember telling my parents at a young age that I couldn't be sure Ronald Reagan was real, because I'd only ever seen him on TV and never in real life, and I knew things on TV could be fake.
That was the beginning of my journey into understanding what proper verification/vetting of a source is. It's been going on for a long time and there are always new things to learn. This should be taught to every child, starting early on.
I used to also have this optimistic take, but over time I think the reality is that most people will instead just distrust unknown online sources and fall into the mental shortcuts of confirmation bias and social proof. Net effect will be even more polarization and groupthink.
> By making these fake images ubiquitous we are forcing people to quickly learn that they can't believe what they see on the internet and tracking down sources and deciding who you trust is critically important.
Has this thought process ever worked in real life? I know plenty of seniors who still believe everything that comes out of Facebook, be AI or not, and before that it was the TV, radio, newspapers, etc.
Most people choose to believe, which is why they have a hard time confronting facts.
And not just seniors. I see people of all ages who are perfectly happy to accept artificially generated images and video so long as it plays to their existing biases. My impression is that the majority of humanity is not very skeptical by default, and unwilling to learn.
When it comes to graphic content on the internet I usually consume it's for entertainment purposes. I didn't care where it came from before and don't care today either. Low quality content exists in both categories, a bit easier to spot in AI generated, so it's actually a bonus.
In reality: millions of boomers are scrolling FB this very minute reacting to the most obviously fake rage/surprise/love bait AI slop you've ever seen.
I feel like there is one or two generations of people who are tech savy and not 100% gullible when it comes to online things. Older and younger generations are both completely lost imho, in a blind test you wouldn't discern a monkey from a human scrolling tiktok &co
Boomers used to tell us to never trust anything online and now they send their life savings to "Brad Pitt"
New generations gets unlimited brain rot delivered through infinite scroll, don't know what a folder is, think everything is "an app" and keep falling for the "technology will free us from work and cure cancer"
There was a sweet spot during which you could grow alongside the internet at a pace that was still manageable and when companies and scammers weren't trying so hard to robbyou from your time money and attention
People already have access to every form of niche pornography they could dare to imagine (for absolutely free!), I really doubt that 'personal taste' is the part that makes OF models their money. They'll be fine.
I think you're under-estimating how much personal taste applies in that industry. Yes, there's a lot of free content but it's often low quality and/or difficult to find for a particular niche. The OF pages, and other paid sites, are curated collections of high quality stuff that can satisfy particular cravings repeatedly with minimal effort.
A big part of it also the feeling of "connection" with the creator via messages and what not, but that too can be replicated (arguably better) by AI. In fact, a lot of those messages are already being generated haha.
I was mostly hinting towards the 'connection' part of it, yes - I think that's really where the money is made more than anything else. That's the part that'll start killing the industry once some company tunes it in.
This is the dystopia of that pacified moon from "Mold of Yancy" by PKD but taken to the next level.
What's astonishing abut the present is that even PKD did not foresee the possibility of an artificial being not only being constructed from whole cloth but actually tailored to each individual.
Even ignoring the model censorship making high quality sexual imagery/videos not possible, this is a crazy take. You think OF models are making money because it's the only way to see a nude man/woman with particular characteristics on the internet?
You're completely misunderstanding what the product being sold is.
Their point is that the point of OF is that there is (supposed to be) a real human. It's a (para)social relationship that no image generator model is going to give you.
If you can make X money running one client at a time you can make ( X × N ) money if you work with N clients at a time. You have to give just enough human to keep'em hooked.
Sex work shouldn't be shunned, but it's not a normal profession either. Mental health, addiction and abuse is just as much of a problem online and in countries where prostitution is legal and normalized.
You can’t really because these powerful models are censored.
You can create lewd pictures with open models but they aren’t nearly as good or easy to use.
I’ve seen some very high quality NSFW AI video in the last few months. Those models are not far behind and the search and training space for porn is smaller than being able to generate anything
> I’ve seen some very high quality NSFW AI video in the last few months. Those models are not far behind and the search and training space for porn is smaller than being able to generate anything.
Agreed. In my opinion, the primary limitation of the porn models is actually poor labeling of the training set. The company that manages to produce a well-labeled, porn-tuned AI image model is going to absolutely clean up.
The extractive dark patterns that will emerge from a parasocial chat "AI relationship" that can generate porn images relevant to the chat on the fly will be staggering. Once that proceeds to being able to generate relevant video, all holy hell is going to break loose.
> The company that manages to produce a well-labeled, porn-tuned AI image model is going to absolutely clean up.
For anime/non-photographic content that essentially exists (Pony, then Illustrious, then probably some new-fangled thing by now that I don't even know about), thanks to the meticulously tagged booru image corpus. However, as strong as these models are on matters of anatomy and kinks, they're limited in other ways due to the hugely biased dataset and dependence on tag soup prompts rather than natural language (many find the latter a plus, not a minus, though).
I haven't heard of any proprietary/cloud-based NSFW model that would be massively better than what's available for free. There are many NSFW-friendly services, but by and large they're just frontends to models trained by other people.
Because models can be used to alter existing images, you can use open and commercial models together in content creation workflows (and also the available findings of open models, and the ability to further tube them very specific used, are quite powerful on their own), so the censorship on the commercial models has a lot less effect on what motivated people can produce than you might think.
I still think, even with that, that like most predictions of AI taking over any content industries, the short-term predictions are overblown.
Doesn't Grok allow users to create lewd content or did they roll that back?
Also, I suspect that we'll soon see the same pattern of open weights models following several months behind frontier in every modality not just text.
It's just too easy for other labs to produce synthetic training data from the frontier models and then mimic their behavior. They'll never be as good, but they will certainly be good enough.
I don't think so. Talking to people in this space, I've found out about broad camps. There are probably more:
-They simply aren't into real women/men (so you couldn't even pay a model to do what they're looking for).
-They want to play out fantasies that would be hard to coordinate even if you could pay models (I guess this is more on the video side of things, but a string of photos can put be together into a comic)
-They want to generate imagery that would be illegal
Based on this, I would guess fetish artists (as in illustrators) are more at risk than OF models. However, AI isn't free. Depending on what you're looking for, commissions might be cheaper still for quite a while...
Jaded, but if I knew there was a possibility of a bunch of incriminating footage of me (images, video, etc.) out there in the pre-AI days, I would do my absolute best to flood the internet with as many related deepfakes (including of myself) as possible.
It stands for "OnlyFans" a website originally for creators to engage directly with their audiences but quickly became a website where women sold explicit pictures of themselves to subscribers.
They still run ads trying to push the narrative that it's for comedians and musicians.
But at this point, OnlyFans is so synonymous with egirls that suggesting someone has an account is used as a way to insinuate they sell pictures of themselves.
Oh we’ve seen nothing yet of the chaos that generative ai will unleash on the world, looking at Meta platforms it’s already a multi million dollar industry of selling something or someone that doesn’t exist. And that’s just the benign stuff.
This has been true for a while with digital art, photoshop, etc. Over time, people's BS detectors get tuned. I mean, scrolling by quickly in a feed, yeah, you might miss if an image is "real" or not, but if you see a series of photos side by side of the same subject (like an OF model), you'll figure it out.
Also, using AI will not allow you to better express yourself. To use an analogy, it will not put your self-expression into any better focus, but just apply one of the stock IG filters to it.
> a series of photos side by side of the same subject
Cameras are now "enhancing" photos with AI automatically. The contents of a 'real' photo are increasingly generated. The line is blurring and it's only going to get worse.
It's shitty, but I think it's almost as bad that people are calling everything AI. And I can't even blame them, despite how infuriating it is. It's just as insidious that even mundane things literally ARE AI now. I've seen at least twice now (that I'm aware of) where some cute, harmless, otherwise non-outrageous animal video was hiding a Sora watermark. So the crazy shit is AI. The mundane shit is AI. You wonder why everyone is calling everything AI now. :P
It seems like a low level paranoia - now I find myself double checking that the youtube video I'm watching isn't some AI slop. All the creators use Getty b-rolls and increasingly AI generated stuff so much that it's not a far stretch to have the voice and script all be auto generated too.
I suppose if the AI was able to tell me a true and compelling story, I might not even mind so much. I just don't want to be spoon fed drivel for 15 minutes to find it was all complete made up BS.
What they've chosen as examples to illustrate the strength of the new model surprises me.
The "cubism" example seems like it would be a closer fit to something like stained glass or something. I don't think the thing really understands what cubism was all about. Cubist painters were trying to free themselves from the confines of a single integral plane of perspective by allowing themselves to show various parts of the image from different viewpoints, different times, different styles, etc.
The division of the image into geometric shapes is just a by-product of that quest, whereas the examples here have made it the sum total of the whole piece.
This feels to me like an example of how LLMs still don't "understand" what the art means, and are just aping its facade.
I had a similar thought before realizing that I'm pretty sure what they were demonstrating wasn't art style, but adherence to correct physical dimensions and construction of the buildings referenced, that was then expressed in an art style (or reasonable facsimile thereof). The before prompts would just conjure a random building out of thin air, the after prompts searched the web for reference material and then used that in image generation.
And actually, the link I saw a bit ago was this [0] which is more in-depth and has a lot more examples + prompts.
I'm sure this has been written about but here's what happens long term - images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.
Probably about half of us here remember photos before the cell phone era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
With image/art generation the same thing will happen and I can already feel it happening. Things that used to be beautiful or fantastic looking now just feel flat and AI-ish. If claymation scenes can be generated in 1s, and I see a million claymation diagrams a year, then claymation will lose its charm. If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
I believe this is the reason for a return to interest in analog media with both my generation (millenials) and gen-z. I do wedding photography on the side, and the past ~2 years have seen a huge increase in requests for film photography, either exclusively film or as an add-on to digital. Offering film has been one of the best things I've done for my side hustle.
Likewise with the sort of resurgence of vinyl, and the obsession over "old" point and shoot digicams.
The best weddings I've been to had a photo booth where you can have photos printed out (any number) and texted to you. I think that's the best way to do it. I agree, people like physical photos still. I've bought my wife several different ways to print photos, including a smaller portable printer, and one of those Instant photo cameras.
Interesting how this matches the Matrix timeline. According to Agent Smith, 1999 represented the height of human civilization before things started to decline.
Not only 1999 prevents humans from becoming too advanced and invent new AI again, it is a believable and comfortable era. A perfect time, perfectly balanced between analog and digital.
This is something I predicted when image/music/other creative art models first came out, as many were crying that art as a medium was dead thanks to Stable Diffusion. And it does seem like I've been right (so far).
The introduction of massive of low-quality creations has made high-quality art much more in demand. Low-quality AI art and music has become a huge blinking indicator that says "SLOP". Hand-made, uniquely styled, quality art now has a "luxury goods" vibe, and people are willing to pay a premium.
When film photography came out in the 1830s, painters and intellectuals were really mad about it commoditizing and cheapening images compared to paintings.
* On first seeing a photograph around 1840, the influential French painter Paul Delaroche proclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" [1]
* Charles Baudelaire, in 1859: "As the photographic industry was the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the character of blindness and imbecility, but also the color of vengeance. [...] it is obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy" [2]
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. [...] But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos
I don't think I fully agree. Sure people make so many photo's that they don't have the time or the will to start looking through them all.
You can't just whip out your phone and start scrolling through thousands of photo's with friends. It would get so boring so fast.
But if you put some effort into making a nice little selection of the best photo's, that emotion is 100% still there.
In my childhood, slide shows were very deliberately curated, in no small part because the presentation of the slides was a relatively elaborate, shared family event.
But curation was done mainly by the creators, who were the people who were able to do the creation in the first place (professional photographers, people who could afford to buy the expensive camera, people who could afford the software for editing photos/slideshows in mass etc.). Now everyone can curate, and consumers can actually pick which curated collection is truly the best.
But what does 'best' even mean in this context? A photographer sharing their 'best' photos was some combination of sharing their personal perspective and their effort to capture shared memories on behalf of others. So yeah it was a limited/privileged (often patriarchal) role. What they picked was interpretive, but that curation was part of the expression/information the viewer was experiencing.
We can mix and match the media we choose to view or keep so easily, when previously there was so much more material and opportunity cost to choosing what to shoot, develop, keep, and share. I think that inevitably loses some meaning.
Curation was implicit when the cost of image creation was high and authors had to consider the photos they were taking beforehand. Now curation comes afterward.
Had a meeting with a friend the other day, discussing the 'times' and all that is happening around us.
I sit here thinking how wonderful and terrible of a time it is. If you can afford to sit in the stands and watch, it's exciting. There's never been so much change in such a short period of time. But if you're in the arena, or expecting to end up in the arena at some point, what terrifying moments lay ahead of you.
I never thought I'd say this, but I expect the arena is where I'll end up...I've enjoyed my time in the stands, but I'm running low on energy, capital and the will to keep trying.
I see it as a metaphor for those who are having to battle to survive and those who are already retired or wealth enough not to care how things turn out. So i guess it could be job market, it could also be...a literal battlefield lol
It reminds me of the Star Wars content thats come out recently - before there was the Original Trilogy which we all watched many times and the lines became iconic. Since then it's all become a mismash and blur of mediocrity due to over-exposure.
(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)
edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.
And that is the gist of the problem, isn't it? As we approach our forties and beyond, chances are we have lived more than half our lives. So do I really want to spend hours watching something I might hate and might leave a bad taste in my mouth? (See game of thrones season 8 or worse, Westworld the HBO series which I don't even want to know what happened in season 3 or 4). I am sure there are people who will enjoy those but for the average person it is highly unlikely.
Yes, and also many fandoms lack the maturity to know when to say "no, I do not want to know MORE details, and certainly not about this obscure secondary character's difficult childhood that explains everything they did later in life".
See:
- All of Wookiepedia and most of Star Wars Expanded Universe.
- "The Hunt for Gollum".
- Every movie in the franchise after "Alien" and "Aliens".
- The sadly upcoming expanded universe/sequels/shows for Blade Runner.
Etc, etc. Everyone has their exceptions ("this one was cool"), but in general the point stands: fandoms ruin everything. They simply don't believe in the adage that "less is more". They always want MORE, and the industry is only happy to oblige.
Andor is fantastic, but I think it's important to set expectations before going in. Compared to other SW content it's much slower-paced and more restrained/cerebral.
Mandalorian didn't do much for me; too gamey/Marvel-ey/cartooney.
I've heard Andor described as having the same vibe as The Mandalorian's episode "The Convert"; the one about the former Imperial scientist being rehabilitated and living in an apartment block with other former Imperials.
If so, I will like Andor. I really liked "The Convert".
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
I take a hundred photos on a trip, my phone uses AI (not even the new fancy AI, but old 5-10 year old stuff to detect smiling faces and people in frame) to pull out less than a dozen that are worth keeping. Once a month or so I get fed a reminder of some past trip.
This isn't any different than before. The number of photos taken is greater, but the overall number of worthwhile photos from a given trip is about the same.
You know, all of a sudden, I am starting to lose interest in meticulously drawn Mermaid diagrams in README, perfect grammar and spelling in doc reviews, or neat generated general photographs. They are all correctly presented, of course. But the ideas are mostly wrong, too.
I guess my stick figure hand drawn diagrams, a doc with few mistakes in grammar or spelling would be seen as more worthy to read as long as my ideas are sound. Right? :-)
The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.
I don't fully agree. Perhaps you're right when it comes to images as a whole, but I think individual images themselves still capture that emotional value for me.
Even if there were a million fake Tom Cruise movies I would still like Edge of Tomorrow (even if it had been AI made).
Yeah I mean edge of tomorrow is a great concept though and would have worked without him. Whereas a movie that’s got less going for it like MI 5 will seem bland once he’s commodified
I totally get this, but on the other hand, we have definitely benefited from being able to take more photos. I have some older friends (pushing 80 or so) who sucked at taking photos, so 9 of 10 photos they have from their prime adult years raising their family are blurry to the point of not recognizing the people if you don't already know who they are.
They have great photos from the last 15-20 years, but of course they do, phone cameras are vastly superior to the point-and-shoot cameras from the 70s, and when you reflexively shoot a dozen photos every time you pose for a picture your odds are way better that one will come out clear, everyone looking at the camera, smiling, etc.
I really don't get that. I look at pictures I've taken in a digital world and I'm moved, just as I am when I see pre-digital pictures. Perhaps older images are sometimes "more special" but that's an artifact of the distance between who I was then vs now. Why would I stop feeling an emotional attachment to photos just because I have many? I really can not understand this at all.
Strictly speaking, I don't think it is the generation or creation that diminishes their value. it is the consumption.
You said it too:
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
The trick of course is to keep yourself from seeing that content.
The other nuance is that as long as real performance remains unique, which so far it is, we can appreciate more what flesh and blood brings to the table. For example, I can appreciate the reality of the people in a picture or a video that is captured by a regular camera; it's AI version lacks that spunk (for now).
Note that iPhone in its default settings is already altering the reality, so AI generation is far right on that slippery axis.
Perhaps, AI and VR would be the reason why our real hangouts would be more appreciated even if they become rare events in the future.
"One of the primary properties of anything with Mana is a feeling of uniqueness. That one has never encountered something like this before, and therefore it is important. The uniqueness of the thing is a property that pulls you in to focus more closely, to attempt to understand more closely why the thing is unique."
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
My generation generally only had photos from birthdays, holidays, vacations, weddings, graduations and reunions. We looked at the three albums which contained every family photo often and I know them all by heart.
My kid was born in 2009 and our family digital album has nearly 1,000 photos per year of her life. And she's seen virtually none of them and seems to have little interest in ever seeing them since she creates so many of her own photos every day which are ephemeral.
I guess some of the appeal of those sparse photos is the element of fantasy and imagination. Wondering what it could have been. Looking at a low quality yellowing wedding photo of your grandma... It allows you to think and wonder. Seeing it in 4K video or a volumetric 4D gaussian splat in VR robs you of all that sentimental mystery.
Nostalgia and idealization of the past is also harder when you have a more representative cross section of past moments.
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
I often call this over-saturation the media equivalent of semantic satiation. Anything commoditized or mass-manufactured isn't going to have emotional appeal.
I've often had an "addictive" personality and now I see it as an over satiation, in a semantic way, sort of thing. When I found something I liked I would over saturate my self in it, and lose interest and move on faster than others I knew.
Feels like what you described describes that inner personality trait better than I have heard before.
As somebody who juggles both figuratively and literally a lot of hobbies, I can definitely relate! One of my friends is a bit like you, they tend to experience the sudden flash of interest in various hobbies, dive extremely deeply and then experience a "bit flip". (a quote describing John Romero's hot/cold personality when he worked at id Software)
With respect to people with a consumptive addictive personality though - I really feel for them, it's a rough time to be alive.
Agree. But there are some use-cases where images can still be of huge help. Making textbooks come alive for instance. We are trying to do that and make a whole bunch of Indian textbooks into comics and free for students. (zerobyheart.com if anyone's interested and would like to make suggestions; the panel-to-panel continuity is still off and something we are working on )
A kind of the same happend to music. With a LP or a tape, you had to listen to all songs. Later with a CD you just skipped the not so good songs. And with MP3, you don't even bothered to save not so good songs. And now with TikTok etc. a song just have to be 20sec but has to bang hard for this short time.
Unimaginable abundance may sound good (it does to me), but scarcity has value too. We might just find put that its value is too important. I just hope that if we do, it’s not too late.
Don't disagree but being the social animals we are, images and videos will never not be important. Things will always feel better when I can connect it with a friendly face.
The source, personal significance, and intent of images and videos will matter a lot, though. I'll cherish photos of my family members forever, regardless of technical excellence.
Or a photo of my freshman dorm room during exam season. Subpar image quality, lousy lighting, etc. but so many memories, positive and negative, are elicited by that fleeting glimpse from an era of excitement, boredom, stress, uncertainty, and optimism, not knowing where I was going in life, when I'd ever look back at that snapshot, but deciding on a whim to grab it during a break from cramming topics now long forgotten.
But I roll my eyes at the idea of injecting my likeness into a short clip depicting random over-the-top action sequences, no matter how photorealistic, because I've never wanted to do that.
I have a photo of a friend I’ve since drifted from, it’s her in her army fatigues after basic. She was had just went through a horrible divorce and that was a shining achievement for her.
The story behind the photo is what makes it matter.
Not the format.
However I will agree AI is a poor substitute. You’ll have people creating AI photos of a fake marriage and fake pets in a big fake house, while they sleep in a bunk bed in a halfway house.
To what extent were they correct and to what extent not? Is their correctness also linked to the correctness of the similar argument today or you're just noting the analogy?
There's already a book about this: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)[0]
> The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.
> They were rare
> and special
> and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
None of these things are true for me as a millennial in the 35-45 age group. And my family was poor to boot, and we were still drowning in photos and photo albums.
I lived plenty of my life prior to the cell phone era (born early 80s).
I do not have the same feeling you seem to have about photos from this era. Some are fine, sure, but looking back on them, most of them are very bad photos and most do not capture anything close to what I'd call an emotional feeling.
I would go so far as to say 99% of the photos from my life prior to 2000s really suck, like really badly. Some also degrade visually and lose their impact over time.
Since you couldn't be sure what you caught more than often what is captured is poorly framed, blurry, weird, poorly timed, and often left out a lot of stuff that was actually going on. You also had to try and be super selective because each photograph had a real tangible cost.
Conversely, I find being able to take many photos in quick succession and across a long period of time at a very high clarity allows me to select a photo that most closely matches my feeling in those moments at that event.
Even more so with AI photos. Although many models cannot do this well, their abilities get better each day and can allow you to compose or edit/modify a photo in such a way that matches your internal feelings rather than the blandness of what is essentially a random photo of random stuff that may or may not convey an emotion anywhere near to what I was feeling or remember feeling in that moment.
Probably some of us here remember paintings before the photography era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few painting per YEAR to look back on. The feel of paintings back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
There is still room for art. Any photographer sees lots of pictures, but can tell the good from the bad, and find pleasure. They don't dismiss photography altogether.
> images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.
No, ALL CONTENT is asymptotically approaching 0. This includes photos, videos, stories, app features, even code. Code is now worthless. If you want better security from generated code, wait 2 months and it will be better. If you want a photo, you just prompt and it will generate it on the fly.
AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP. Do you want a movie where Deadpool fights The Hulk? Easy. And just like how ad technology knows your preferences, each movie will be individually tailored to YOUR liking just so that your engagement will increase. Do you like happy endings? Deadpool and Hulk will join forces and defeat Thanos. Do you prefer dark endings? Deadpool and Hulk fight until they float off into the Sun and get atomized but keep regenerating for eternity.
If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look. This is the world we are facing now, where authenticity is meaningless. And while YOU may not prefer it, think about the kids who aren't born yet and will grow up in a world where this exists.
> AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP.
> If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look.
Sure, but why would any of this media have any emotional significance?
The reason we enjoy media of friends and family is because it depicts a moment in the life of our loved ones. A fake image or video of them is of absolutely zero value to anyone.
The reason we enjoy cinema is because a talented group of people had an interesting story to tell and brought it to life in a memorable way. Me, or a random person with no filmmaking talent, prompting a tool to generate a particular scene wouldn't be interesting at all. Talented individuals will also rely on this technology, of course, but a demand for human creativity will still exist, possibly even stronger than today, once everyone is exhausted from the flood of shitty Deadpool vs Hulk videos.
I suspect the same will eventually happen with every other product these tools are currently commoditizing, including software.
All of this seems like a neat technology in search of a problem to solve, while actually introducing countless societal problems we haven't even begun to acknowledge, let alone address. But it sure is a great money and power grab opportunity for giant corporations to further extend their reach. And they have the gall to tell us it will bring world prosperity. Most of these sociopathic assholes should be prosecuted and jailed. And you, dear reader who is generously employed by these companies, are complacent with all of this.
It won't have any emotional significance to those that remember how the world was before. But there's billions of kids that are going to be born that won't know anything except AI-generated content. They will find emotional significance to it.
My kids don't know what a dial tone is. They don't know dialing 7 digits instead of 10 or 11. They don't say "bye" when we get off the phone and none of their friends do either, they just hang up. They don't sit through movies because their expectation is that they can start it back up whenever they want. The world is changing and just because we experienced something doesn't mean that the next generation will value it.
Every time in human civilization there's a new technology, existing humans rail against it and want the Good Old Days back, existing children grow up to get used to it, the generation-to-be-born knows it as the normal baseline, then maybe future generations rediscover the past and take the best things about how things used to be without being held back by how bad they were. (see retro games made after retro games died)
There is more to that, globalization. Now we have 8 billions humans. They are connected to the same infospace (internet) and share much more and more diverse content. Which means a lot more of emotional/interesting/helpful things. While each of them becomes less emotional.
Well, world changes dramatically. Connected old folks are like neanderthals in big city now. However not connected are still living locally in their minds. Youngsters are just accepting the world as it is. Nobody is amused by computers and cameras anymore. (at least in developed areas)
I think you're being tricked by nostalgia. It's about the fact that of course older photos you remember have a stronger emotional tie to you (they've had more time to form that bond), and it just so happens that older photos are not digital.
In my experience, a digital photo of myself and my partner used as the lock screen of my phone has the same emotional weight as the one sitting on my desk (which is a print out of a digital photo). Additionally, printing out a photo of you and your partner and gifting it to them has the same weight as going through childhood photo. A scrapbook of a recent vacation filled with printed digital photos evokes memories just as vividly as one from the 80s. On the flip side of this, a photo in a box in the basement has the same weight as a photo sitting in the cloud.
I'll offer you some more food for thought: are Aardman Animations films charming because they use claymation? Or is it the creative force of people like Nick Park and Peter Lord?
“Still” isn’t the right word. Once Polaroid stopped making the film, closed their factories, and sold or junked their machines, their supplies did the same, and so some of the components stopped being manufactured and available for purchase. What’s sold now as Polaroid film was a reinvention of the same idea. And it’s notably not as good. The dwindling stock of unused true Polaroid film is getting absurdly expensive as a result.
The one factory you refer to was the last one, and was purchased by the Impossible Project (now Polaroid BV). So they were able to save one set of machines. But the actual process of making the film was lost. So it’s an old set of machines making a new but similar product.
> The dwindling stock of unused true Polaroid film is getting absurdly expensive as a result.
what's the point? ain't all of this stock expired, with photos ending up just blobs or being gamble at best? (even for film stored in freezers)
People here like to say "Commoditize your Compliment" but to a company the size of google or amazon literally EVERYTHING is your compliment. Too bad no philosopher or political scientist or economist every thought about this stuff before or we might have some kind of plan to make the future less miserable and alienating.
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
Um yeah I don't know. I fully resonate with the _emotional_ appeal here, but realistically I remember going round to people's houses to be shown analog photo albums that nobody was that bothered about seeing, because they didn't really care -- they weren't their photos.
The special photos (a few a year) still exists in digital form.
What a great thing this didn't exist in the past. We likely wouldn't have had any of the amazing artworks that we have now. Imagine an AI generated Mona Lisa, Nightwatch or Sistine Chapel ceiling because prompting would have been so much cheaper than paying Leonardo, Rembrandt or Michelangelo...
Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.
I hear this often and it's such a strange view of art, like the only thing that matters is scale and speed. It's a perspective so colored by mechanization that it fails to account for other philosophies in art. Think of what, say the Arts and Crafts movement was all about!
That is unlike any artist that I know and I know quite a lot of them. They love their work and the process but they also need to eat. And that included those mentioned above.
There is a tremendous amount of "art" that is produced for purely commercial reasons. It employs many thousands of people. These roles are definitely threatened by image generators.
Agree that if you are Artist this is not going to be a big concern to you.
Also, many (I would even venture to say most) of the great artists most people know of earned their bread with intermittent commercial contracts, even rote advertising commissions in the 19th/20th century.
Art is about creating something from scratch. This isn't creating anything but cobbling together elements of scraped/stolen content to generate an imitation of prior work.
I think this is a fundamentally adverserial mindset and so you should be prepared for others to treat you in kind (i.e. to attack you and minimize the value of your work)
Modernism wasn't about "pushing limits of what's possible" either. It was first and foremost a period style itself. That style included experimentation and "pushing some limits" but art in general wasn't that, then, before or after (which is also why those limits went right back, and literature for example returned to far more classical forms after modernism's era passed - it didn't kept pushing at limits).
An aspect of art is this pursuit of pushing boundaries within the confines of what is considered good. Would an artist with an infinite image generator be interested in pushing said boundaries? Maybe but they will definitely miss out on getting stuck on an idea and coming up something completely new
AI isn't a tool for creating art in the same way as a paintbrush or clay. AI is describing a painting you want, then having someone else creating the artwork for you. You aren't doing art in the same way hiring a sculptor isn't doing sculpting.
AI is well on the way to eliminating human made art since the skills to actually make art will be lost to the skill of being able to describe art. You know, since the only thing that matter is reducing costs.
AI is a productivity tool.
Instead of working on a single graphic, the artist can now work on the entire marketing campaign.
Instead of spending a year working on background special effects for a single scene, one could now personally produce full featured films.
It will be a golden age where the core differentiating factor is true talent and ideas and execution and not any gatekeeping by degrees, connections or budget.
A very large fraction of everything we collect as great art marking our history was made on commission. The GGP is showing their complete ignorance of the history of art.
>Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits
Says who?
Being an artist means different things to different people, but at the very least I believe it requires an interest in your craft, a desire for personal growth, and a yearning to express yourself.
I think of it more as that AI will destroy the profit motive in all things, not just art. What we used to think of as talent/skill/experience will no longer be scarce, because anyone will be able to make anything with a prompt. The perceived value will be in wholes built of valueless parts (gestalts).
AI is incompatible with capitalism, but the world isn't ready for that. So we'll have a prolonged period of intense aggregation where more and more value is attributed to systems of control that already have more than they could ever spend, long after the free parts could have provided for basic human needs.
In other words, the masters existed because they had benefactors and a market for their art and inventions. Today there are better artists and inventors toiling in obscurity, but they won't be remembered because they merely make rent. Which gets harder every day, so there's a kind of deification of the working class hero NPC mindset and simultaneously no bandwidth for ingenuity (what we once thought of as divine inspiration).
Terence McKenna predicted this paradox that the future's going to get weirder and weirder back in 1998:
(McKenna tangent). I like this version of that talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL0yfxDe6jE. It's about 12 minutes and animated with some hand-drawn whiteboard drawings. Good stuff.
That's true, but you forgot a key piece in this puzzle. The AI can only produce things that already exist. It can combine new things, this is why you can it for a picture of Jesus planting a flag on the Moon. But it only works because Jesus is a concrete concept that already exists in our world. If you ask for a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon the result will be nonsensical.
Nano Banana 2 has an image search tool that looks up pictures of things and uses them in the context (and arguably, an agent could eventually figure out who jacquesm is and hunt for a photo).
However, I tried "a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon" for a laugh, and I have to hand it to Google as the person was in a spacesuit, as they should be, and totally unidentifiable! :-D
I have the creativity of someone not at all creative (couldn't even come up with a good analogy) and the stuff I created with AI art tools is awful compared to what I see from "AI artists" on social media.
Just being able to generate a vision and then be able to capture it in a prompt is an art within itself.
Ironically we live in a time that, overall, is probably better for artists than the world any of those guys grew up in. People have always valued art but not the artists, and many artists through history, including the famous ones, died broke with their works only posthumously attaining value.
These days, through commissions, art is a much more viable profession than it ever was.
It was until ~2021 and it going rapidly downhill. I know some people that are really good at art and they got work on commission from publications, venues and so on. They have seen a significant drop in their bookings and the ones that they do get negotiate hardball because (1) everybody else is desperate too and (2) if they can't get to a deal then AI is now an alternative for the not-so-discerning public which was a fairly large chunk of the usecases.
So you were making book covers? Ah, so sorry. Nobody really cared that it was you.
And you can probably extend that to what's between the covers...
I'll just be extremely candid: a lot of people don't give a shit about these art pieces or art in general. It's okay if you do, there is nothing wrong with that, but it's a myopic view that the world would be worse off if we didn't have a portrait of Mona Lisa.
That's not the point, but okay. I'm simply pointing out the fact that there'd still be art, just not those pieces created by those specific people and the world would be just fine. Humanity would've fared okay if Nano Banana was created 500 years ago.
Absolutely not a chance. You see, in the past there was nothing to train it on. And that's sort of the point: the only reason that this AI image generation works at all is because it is lifting on the hard work of the people that had the skills, put the time and the effort in.
I disagree. On the one hand, yeah, On This Day... 1776 is terrible, and it is sad to compare it to Requiem for a Dream or Pi, but even in this age where AI is available, we see tons of critically successful art being made without the use of AI.
So far it does feel more iterative than an entirely new leap in terms of capabilities, but I haven't run it through the more multimodal aspects such as editing existing images.
That being said, it actually managed the King Louie jump rope test which surprised me.
This will stay useless for editing personal pictures so long as virtually every prompt with a person in it is met with "I can't edit images of some people". For whatever reason, they've made the celeb detection so ultra-aggressive that almost everyone is detected as a (lookalike) celeb.
I think this tech is cool, from an engineering perspective. I’m trying to figure out if there’s any justification for using it in a business world outside of: “We don’t want to pay an artist.”
You can argue things like code generation are an extension of the engineer wielding it. Image generation just seems like a net negative overall if it’s used at scale.
Edit: By scale, I mean large corporations putting content in front of millions. I understand the appeal for smaller businesses where they probably weren’t going to pay an artist anyway.
We're using voice generation from clipchamp for our promotional videos.
It's an ethical conundrum because we're not paying anyone, but we don't have the money to pay anyone, and it's good enough for our budget.
But we're getting used to the process of changing a part of the text in a few seconds without any artist involved and for 0$.
I guess that soon we'll be able to create voice sample from know personalities for a few $ with prices based on the popularity of the artist and some sanity check based on the artist preferences.
I think this is where I see the benefit for small business. I don’t want to speak for you, but I imagine it’s either “no voice over, we can’t afford it.” or “inexpensive AI voice over to make it more accessible and appealing.”
My thought is the large corps that could afford it, still won’t because it’s a cost they don’t need to incur. For them it’s not even a moral conundrum.
It can also backfire. AI slop ads and marketing material imply cut corners and poor quality products. If a bakery isn’t going to bother touching up its AI slop banner, I don’t expect their cookies to be great either.
FWIW I've never seen a correlation between a small company's website and the quality of their product. Slick website? Maybe they care for their craft, maybe they're all marketing and no content. Website stuck in 1998? Maybe they're sloppy and don't care; maybe they care about their core product, not a slick marketing brochure. I don't see any reason AI would be different in that regard.
That’s true. I think it’s more of a problem of getting someone in the door. Anecdotally going to art festivals I’m much more likely to enter the booth of someone who has handcrafted marketing over the person who has generated marketing.
Basic marketing theory says that spending extra to make your ads signals (term of art) to your potential customers that (1) you are successful, since you can afford it and (2) you are confident your product is superior, since you’re effectively paying people to try it, and expect doing this will generate revenue in return.
Much like the star bellied sneetches, when the quality of some ad format becomes untethered from the cost of production and placement, then marketers will flock to some alternative.
YouTube influencers fill[ed] that niche for a while because content milling SEO spam and fake reviews is a lot more expensive if you present the results in video form with good production values. (Not sure how long that will be true, since AI is getting better at short-term video).
Every local business I deal with is completely lacking on the online side. They might have square POS terminals and all that stuff, but their website either doesn't exist, sucks (not updated in years) or they throw me to Facebook (also sucks).
This is like the last mile for online presence. The average barber out here doesn't use Squarespace, barely knows how to use Facebook and doesn't touch GenAi. But they can still cut your hair pretty well - tech savvyness doesn't have a huge connection to business competence out here.
The amount of lost revenue due to the implication of cut corners needs to be higher than the cost of hiring an artist by enough of a margin that the managers who make the decision start to care, and enough that they're willing to put the effort into hiring an artist.
> It can also backfire. AI slop ads and marketing material imply cut corners and poor quality products. If a bakery isn’t going to bother touching up its AI slop banner, I don’t expect their cookies to be great either.
Average person won't notice, and would not care either way.
This assumes that models won't improve and you'll always be able to tell that it's "AI slop" ... that seems like a bad bet. Five years ago you'd be laughed out of the room for suggesting that a computer could produce images from a natural language prompt and that it'd be accessible to everyone -- not just corporations with deep pockets.
Yeah if/when it becomes indistinguishable I think most people won’t care. That being said I do think someone finding out something is AI generated will be met with poor response. Does that ultimately matter? Probably not in a business world.
It will be a begrudged but normalized compromise of modern life, like GMO, Auto-Tune and foreign child labour. Which of those it will be perceived as the closest to is hard to say right now
I've been using it to replace things that I used to do for personal projects in photoshop/gimp. Remove a background, add a person, put a letter in here that looks like the same crayon as the other letters.
Things that would take me an hour or so the old way takes three minutes with NB.
But I can see this applying to small businesses. Something that some random person would have to spend on hour photoshopping can be done in a few minutes with NB.
All things traditionally done by artists or artist adjacent roles. I can understand at an individual level, say for a solo gamedev who wasn’t going to pay an artist anyway. That’s not at scale though.
Larian Studios most recently was under fire for this [1]. Like I can see a director going “what would X look like?” and then speeding over to the concept artists for a proper rendition if they liked it. I don’t think this is at scale though. Any large business is just going to get rid of the concept artists.
There are many places in general office work where you need some kind of graphics. Slides, reports, info graphics, dataviz. Or academic papers. Some are just illustrations, like a fancy clipart or stock photos, some are drafts for a proper tikz or svg or something that you then redo in draw.io etc. There is much more use for graphics than the use cases where people would ever even consider hiring an actual artist. I've seen good results for iterating on eg model architecture figures quickly between PhD students and supervisors, faster than dragging boxes around and fiddling with tikz. Obviously you don't simply paste the result into the paper. You redo it but it's a good discussion basis. That's for info graphics stuff. But the same can apply to creative stuff, like an event poster, an invitation card to your wedding, storyboards, mood boards, DIY interior design, outfit planning etc etc
Same answers you'd use beyond "we don't want to pay an engineer". 100x shorter iteration speed, and the associated workflow (stream of microrevisions and spaghetti throwing), top quartile outputs in many langs/styles/contexts without having to source, hire, and maintain a fleet of separate specialists who can quit when they feel like it.
I'm torn on the scale thing. It definitely seems net negative. But I think we collectively underestimate just how deeply sick the existing thing already is. We're repulsed by image gen at scale because it breaks our expectation that images are at least somewhat based on reality, that they reflect the natural world or what we can really expect from a product, from a company, from the future. But that was already a bad expectation: when's the last time you saw a mcdonalds meal that looked like the advert? Or a sub-30$ amazon product that wasn't a complete piece of shit? Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better. It was already slop. All the grieving we do about the loss of truth, or the extent to which corps will gleefully spray us with mind-breaking waterfalls of outright lies, I think those ships sailed a long time ago. The disgust, deceit, the rage we feel about genAI slop is the way we should have felt about all commercials since at least the 80s IMO.
> Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better.
This is a good point. My gut reaction is “well at least someone was paid to do it and can continue to keep society/the economy going ”.
I can see the other side where that’s a soulless job. Not sure what’s worse. Soulless job where your skills apply or even less jobs in a competitive industry.
Sora is already a flop. People are sick of slop and are getting good at identifying it. Grok is the only player that has any semblance of success in the visual gen market, only because they do the one thing that will always make money.
"A macro close-up photograph of an old watchmaker's hands carefully replacing a tiny gear inside a vintage pocket watch. The watch mechanism is partially submerged in a shallow dish of clear water, causing visible refraction and light caustics across the brass gears. A single drop of water is falling from a pair of steel tweezers, captured mid splash on the water's surface. Reflect the watchmaker's face, slightly distorted, in the curved glass of the watch face. Sharp focus throughout, natural window lighting from the left, shot on 100mm macro lens." - Only major problem i could find at a glance is the clasps don't make sense probably, and the drop of water inside the watch on the cog doesn't make sense/cog mangled into tweezers.
"A candid photograph taken from behind an elderly woman sitting alone on a park bench in late autumn. She is gently resting one hand on the empty seat beside her, where a man's weathered flat cap and a folded newspaper sit untouched. Fallen golden leaves cover the path ahead. The low afternoon sun casts her long shadow alongside a second, fainter shadow that almost seems to be there, the suggestion of someone sitting next to her, visible only in the light on the ground. Muted, warm color palette, shallow depth of field on the background trees, photojournalistic style." - I don't know why but it internal errored twice on this one but then got there.
Results are in for `gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview` (NB 2) for the GenAI Showdown site in the editing comparisons. Remember to click the "Pass/Fail" button to toggle between pass/fail and a weighted score to account for additional factors like steerability, image quality, etc.
Unfortunately, unlike the leap from NB to NB Pro, we did not see significant gains from NB Pro to NB Pro 2.
In several cases (such as the Jaws Poster), we observed that it was substantially more difficult to prevent NB Pro 2 from making significant changes to the rest of the image. Localization of edits, in general, seems to have changed and not necessarily for the better.
This looks like a response to Seedream 5.0 lite that was published two days ago.
I use all those fancy image models editing capabilities for my fast fashion web shop. I must say: product photography for clothing and accessories product is dead. Those models are amazing at style transfering and garment transferring.
We will see how good will be Seedream 5.0 full version.
Seedream 5 Lite is honestly extremely disappointing, its text to image is way worse than 4.5, image editing is fine but that's it. It's way, wayy behind NB2.
ChatGPT's image generator has been able to do this since last year. That NBP still can't is baffling. They should at least train it to respond to requests for transparency with a solid colour pink background.
This. Gpt-image-1/1.5 are the only ones that have this built in - though I'd love to have an insider view if its natively considering the alpha channel or just feeding it through a rembg-style post processor.
I know. It sounds like a perfect task for AI to do it though (wasn't the whole premise of AI do to mundane things for us), yet they fail to do it, and I need to use an external tool.
It's notable that this model is less advanced that the previous "Pro" model, and also that the Gemini interface is defaulting all requests to "Fast" even if you've previously changed it to Pro.
If any AI image generation companies are reading this, I want the image to be in layers which can also be exported, so I can 1) do post processing of my own or 2) arrange for an AI image generation model to process just the layers i specify.
While the overall aesthetic matches the minimal white-stroke style and technical design you requested, and the provided step descriptions are included, please note that there are a few minor rendering artifacts in this specific generation:
The text on the banner entering the vault in step 8 is illegible.
There is a small typo in the caption for step 6 ("CONFLSCT" instead of "CONFLICT").
Despite these small imperfections, this layout should work well as a guide for your canvas implementation.
It still seems to have the same pitfalls as all the other image generation models. I ran it through my test prompt (wary of posting it here, lest it gets trained on) - it still cannot generate something along the lines of "object A, but with feature X from Y", where that combo has never been seen in the training data. I wonder how the "astronaut riding unicorn on the moon" was solved...
EDIT: after significant prompting, it actually solved it. I think it's the first one to do so in my testing.
Funny timing. I just migrated my personal styling app off of Nano Banana.
My main use case is editing user uploads to enhance their clothing images. A large part of it is preserving logo, graphics and other technical details. I noticed over time it felt like Nano Banana has gotten worse at this.
I have a test set of graphic t-shirts that I noticed the model seeming getting worse with it. This combined with price and the terrible experience of their cloud console got me to migrate off.
Pretty close to Gemini 3 Pro Image (aka Nano Banana Pro) in most benchmarks, even without thinking+search, and even exceeding it in 2 most important ones of 'Overall Preference' and 'Visual Quality'. I'm excited about the big jump in Infographics/Factuality (even without thinking+search; I'm surprised that text+image search grounding doesn't make an even bigger dent).
I saw an item for sale on Ali Express's video and I thought "Wow, they hired some really attractive actors to pitch their little gadget." 30 seconds in, I realized they used GenAI. Not because it looked AI, but because the production values looked too high and professional for the item. I would get in on this if you sell anything online.
One thing I notice is that the voices in video AI are absolute hogwash. Voice AI is great, video AI is great, but AI videos where humans speak give me the feel of really poorly dubbed foreign TV - the timing is not quite right and the facial expressions don’t always match up with the words being spoken.
They can even combine the models, create the presenters with nano banana and then use that as the reference for a video model and paste in your product
I have Google AI Ultra. Where can I test this? They say its in aistudio, which says its a paid model and I need to setup billing (as if paying for Ultra isnt enough). They say its available in antigravity, but I cant seem to find it there?
Kind of surprised it hasn't been pulled yet. Have seen some very disturbing (grok tier) examples of completely bypassing whatever censors they have in place by simply asking gemini to write the prompt
Name recognition has big value. People remember what an advancement the first banana was. Nowadays it's no longer so unique, ChatGPT's and Grok's image editors are also strong.
I really really want to see how these images are starting to form into videos. The stills are clearly getting better and better, but what about when you need the stills to organically conform to a keyed script?
I'm seeing more and more AI video memes and they are getting really good. Still just bunch of short clips, long shots are not working well enough, but typical Hollywood movies have few second cuts anyway so this is almost good enough to make a marvel fanfic.
the workflow right now would be to take this images, make a sequence of them for key "shots" and send them to an I2V model. LTX-2 is the model the r/stablediffusion folks are playing with right now, but there are a fair few.
Interesting they get to rev this with the release of a new flash model. I'm speculating part of the distil pipeline includes the image gen stuff; that seems like internal tooling that will pay dividends over time, if true. New frontier model -> automatic new image model. Even if it's just incremental updates, it's good for both the product cadence and compounding improvements.
I don't have inside info, but everything we've seen about gemini3.0 makes me think they aren't doing distillation for their models. They are likely training different arch/sizes in parallel. Gemini 3.0-flash was better than 3.0-pro on a bunch of tasks. That shouldn't happen with distillation. So my guess is that they are working in parallel, on different arches, and try out stuff on -flash first (since they're smaller and faster to train) and then apply the learnings to -pro training runs. (same thing kinda happened with 2.5-flash that got better upgrades than 2.5-pro at various points last year). Ofc I might be wrong, but that's my guess right now.
Interesting. Whatever they are doing it's a bit different than Anthropic and oAI, which is good for the consumer. I'm curious about their ML Ops internally; would be fascinating to learn more.
Google updated it early in AI Studio so I've been experimenting:
- Base pricing for a 1024x1024 image is almost 1.6x what normal Nano Banana is ($0.067 vs. $0.039), however you can now get a 512x512 image for cheaper, or a 4k image for cheaper than four 1k images: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-3.1-fla...
- Thinking is now configurable between `Minimal` and `High` (was not the case with Nano Banana Pro)
- Safety of the model appears to be increased so typical copyright infringing/NSFW content is difficult to generate (it refused to let me generate cartoon characters having taken psychedelics)
- Generation speed is really slow (2-3min per image) but that may be due to load.
- Prompt adherence to my trickier prompts for Nano Banana Pro (https://minimaxir.com/2025/12/nano-banana-pro/) is much worse, unsurprisingly. For example I asked it to make a 5x2 grid with 10 given inputs and it keeps making 4x3 grids with duplicate inputs.
However, I am skeptical with their marquee feature: image search. Anyone who has used Nano Banana Pro for awhile knows that it will strongly overfit on any input images by copy/pasting the subject without changes which is bad for creativity, and I suspect this implementation appears the same.
Additionally I have a test prompt which exploits the January 2025 knowledge cutoff:
Generate a photo of the KPop Demon Hunters performing a concert at Golden Gate Park in their concert outfits.
That still fails even with Grounding with Google Search and Image Search enabled, and more charitable variants of the prompt.
tl;dr the example images (https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/flash/) seem similar to Nano Banana Pro which is indeed a big quality improvement but even relative to base Nano Banana it's unclear if it justifies a "2" subtitle especially given the increased cost.
They may be victims of their own success here. At a certain point, if you can consistently make perfect images indistinguishable from reality, you’re done improving. All that’s left to do is make it faster or cheaper or better-aligned - but these aren’t going to show up readily in ways the typical user can understand.
What is annoying about Nano Banana, is how bad is experience when you try to iterate or, especially, repeat same task for another photo. After second of third image it starts randomly ansering with complete nonsense like "I'm just a language mode and can't assist with that" or "I can't do that" (with absolutely the same prompt it had no issues 2 photos in a row in the same chat).
It also gaslights me, when I point out on an error. I tried to create a cartoon portrait of the person from photo and use background from another photo. It got wrong the order of photos. I provided filenames and explicitly told which one is for person and which for bg. It generated it wrong again, and all attempts to explain that it got it wrong were met with "No, it's YOU incorrect". So frustrating.
Would be interesting to see latency vs quality tradeoffs here. Are they targeting consumer-facing generation speed or prioritizing fidelity for professional workflows?
Did gemini-2.5-flash-image get an upgrade as well? I just got the following, which is fascinating, and not something I've seen before:
> I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill your request as it contains conflicting instructions. You asked me to include the self-carved markings on the character's right wrist and to show him clutching his electromancy focus, but you also explicitly stated, "Do NOT include any props, weapons, or objects in the character's hands - hands should be empty." This contradiction prevents me from generating the image as requested.
My prompts are automated (e.g. I'm not writing them) and definitely have contained conflicting instructions in the past.
A quick google search on that error doesn't reveal anything either
I’ve been exploring this exact problem space from the angle of extreme constraints (single-digit MB memory, no cloud assumptions).
I documented what broke first and why here, in case it’s useful:
https://github.com/nullclaw/nullclaw
I only needed help of this banana boy twice, it managed to disappoint me each time. The most recent one, I was trying different beard and mustache styles on myself, on a photo I imported from my own Google photo gallery, and it consistently rejected me, claiming I'm a public figure. Nobody ever told me that I look like any famous person, so that's googles own bananination. ChatGPT nicely handled the job.
It's not working very well at all. I started with a picture of a girl sitting at a cafe table and asked it to zoom in, and it enlarged her head to the size of a balloon.
I really wish they opened a version of this up for adult content. They would make immense amounts of money and it could be fenced off behind some sort of paywall where they could verify the age of the person.
My naive question, can image generation make something novel eg. "show me a DNA structure that cures cancer" can it do that, or it has to have seen something before to generate it.
Just think we conceptually know what a brushless motor design looks like and it's just pixels. I guess even if it did produce the image we wouldn't know what it means.
What about it is extreme? It's a concept, like "generate an xray image" eventually hopefully the cure to cancer could be represented as a simple molecule or whatever, I'm not saying I know.
There is currently no knowledge nor progress for what a cure for cancer, and nothing a LLM can draw upon.
You could generate "pregnant Elon Musk with four arms and three eyes doing yoga poses" because the image models have enough visual concepts of each of those individual things, but that specific image is (likely) not in any training dataset.
What I'm saying is if this thing can generate random things (noise) couldn't it make that or new tech like negative mass. Anyway I get it too if we don't know then something we made wouldn't know.
I don't know what the cure of cancer would look like ha (not an organic chemist or biology, genomist... not even sure what field that would be).
But yeah I am slowly trying to incorporate AI into my life (the delegation, work in my sleep part). I develop it is the funny thing (RAG agents) but yeah. Sometimes I get sold on it like "wait a minute maybe it can do that" but no. Can probably tell I don't get deep into the technical part I'm an API consumer. That's the thing I realize too, can only know so much about a topic if you're spread thin/a generalist.
Some random predictions about what AI image generation tools will do/are doing to art:
1. The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. The most successful artists are ones that craft a story around their life and art, and don't just create stuff and stop. This will become even more important.
2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
3. Those that bother to learn the actual art skills, and not merely prompting, will increasingly be miles ahead of everyone else. People are lazy, and bothering to put in the time to actually learn stuff will stand out more and more. (Ditto for writing essays and other writing people are doing with AI.)
4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
5. Art with physical materials will become increasingly popular. That is, stuff that can't be digitized very well: sculpture, installation art, etc. Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form. This uncoolness will push people away from the screen and towards things that are more material.
I mostly disagree.
> 1... The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.
When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
> 2... Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist.
It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
> 4... It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Just like AI now is way more capable than it was 20 years ago, and able to write interesting texts and make interesting pictures - something which at the time wasn't considered a technical problem - with time what we perceive as "taste" may likely improve.
> 5... Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form.
AI critics are for a long time mistaking the level with trend. Or, giving a comparison with SpaceX achievements, "you're currently here" - when there was a list of "first, get to the orbit, then we'll talk", "first, start regular payload deliveries to orbit, then we'll talk", "first, land the stage... send crewed capsule... do that in numbers..." and then, currently "first, send the Starship to orbit". "You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.
You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.
> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :)
I can't tell if you're being facetious. But being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets. We'd do well to remember.
> being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets
This is a very, very weak criterion for divinity. If this is truly it, we should prepare with great haste for the arrival of our artificial gods.
Because by this (IMO silly) metric it seems they will be more divine than us.
Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine. Do you think it's an impossible task or just one we need more time to figure out?
Physicalists say consciousness emerges from matter. The other camp says matter comes from consciousness. Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor, says consciousness cannot emerge from matter because matter is inert and not self-conscious, so it cannot produce consciousness. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Time will tell. But it is also wrong to claim that consciousness emerges from matter until it is proven (aka the “hard problem of consciousness.”)
So some kind of ether conscious energy animated cells to fight entropy?
Being alive is divine. It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It's a beautiful thing to have a consciousness in this world, and to have the ability to create, to love. It takes a huge intellectual effort to try to trick yourself out of believing something so intuitive as that.
There are many examples when scientists strongly believed something to be obviously impossible and yet being wrong - Poisson spot or heavier-than-air flight machines coming to mind. So what you believe might be intuitive - that doesn't preclude it from potentially being wrong, unless you proved the impossibility.
I wish you happiness.
What is intuitive to you, may not be to others. Might you be engaging in intellectual self trickery?
I guess there is people that are willing to die over the hill that there is nothing sacred or divine about being alive. I'm not very interested in playing that game.
Given that this is the one problem that neither scientists nor philosophers have made any progress on in 3000 years, we don't have the tools to begin tackling it and nobody is making serious attempts, it may very well be impossible.
We can't know if consciousness emerges but does it actually matter ?
These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society.
I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact.
Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ?
We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
Even if LLM will one day be autonomously updated, they started from us, from our knowledge. The human brain « is smart », it’s wired up to be in any kind of culture or knowledge. We fill up to be smarter from experience but LLM can’t do that, I can’t teach Claude something that it will use with you the next day, it needs to be retrained with knowledge stopping at some point. Even if technology catches up and the machine becomes more autonomous, what will say this machine would ever want to integrate to our society or share anything with us ? They have eternity, given there is electricity. Why would they want anything to do with humans if you go that way ? If it’s really conscious, should we consider it a slave then ? Why couldn’t « it » have fundamental rights and freedom to do whatever it wants ?
>>These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
See, I don't believe that for even one second. They are just very clever calculators, that's all. But they are also dumb like a brick most of the time. It's a pretend intelligence at best.
We will never prove machines are intelligent.
We will only prove humans are not.
It's a pretend intelligence at best.
The best time to start paying attention was ten years ago, when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence." I sure wish I had.
The next best time to start paying attention is now.
>>when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence."
A computer playing GO is intelligent now? Is this the kind of conversation we're having?
>>I sure wish I had.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
>>The next best time to start paying attention is now.
I am paying attention, I use these tools every day - the whole idea that they are intelligent and if only you gave them a robot body they would be just normal members of society is absurd. Despite the initial appearance of genius they are just dumb beyond belief, it's like talking to a savant 5 year old, except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
"Dumb beyond belief" doesn't perform at the gold-medal level at IMO.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
I'd have dropped everything else I was doing and started learning about neural nets -- a technology that, for the previous couple of decades, I'd understood to be a pointless dead end.
As for Go, the defeat of Lee Sedol caught my attention in part because a friend and colleague, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, had spent a lot of time working on Go-playing AI as a hobby. He was strongly convinced that a computer program would never reach the top levels of play, at least not during our careers/lifetimes. The fact that he'd turned out to be wrong about that was unnerving, and it should have done more than "catch my attention," but it didn't.
Today, my graphics card can outdo me at any number of aspects of my profession, and that's more interesting (to me) than anything I've actually done.
...except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
Like I said: it's a good time to start paying attention. Start taking notes, so to speak, like the models are doing now.
Humanity made no meaningful progress in getting "to the stars" for thousands of years too, then in the space of a few decades we did.
It's kind of like the difference between something being enjoyable for you, and something being widely popular?
In a hypothetical world of "AI can produce a lot of extremely high quality art", you can easily find (or commission) AI art you would absolutely love. But it probably wouldn't be something that anyone else would find a lot of value in?
There will be no AI-generated Titanic. There will be many AI-generated movies that are as good as Titanic, but none will become as popular as Titanic did.
Because when AI has won art on quality and quantity both, and the quality of the work itself is no longer a differentiator against the sea of other high quality works? The "narrative/life of the artist" is a fallback path to popularity. You will need something that's not just "it's damn good art" - an external factor - to make it impactful, make it stick in the culture field.
Already a thing in many areas where the supply of art outpaces demand. Pop music, for example, is often as much about making sound as it is about manufacturing narratives around the artists. K-pop being an extreme version of the latter lean.
Was Titanic actually that good of a film? Perhaps I should watch it again now that almost three decades have passed.
It was pretty good, but many movies were that good. I picked Titanic specifically because it was broadly popular and culturally relevant.
Are you a woman? If not you can't really judge it since it was intended for women, not being the target audience doesn't mean it was bad, women absolutely loved the movie.
as someone who had a DiCaprio lookalike in his middle school when it came out, who attracted ALL the girls' attention, and also as someone whose first date ever was to see Titanic
I begrudgingly have to admit it is a very good movie
> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
I’m fairly certain the original comment was referring to instances where the artist is the character/primary subject.
I agree with everything you said, except that #1 is clearly wrong. I can prove it with one word: autotune.
At least in popular, mainstream culture, the viewer is heavily invested in the identity of the artist. The quality of the "art" is secondary. That's how we get music engineered by committee. And it's how we get paparazzi, People Magazine, and so forth.
On the other hand, this isn't anything new at all. We've had this kind of thing for decades. Real art still manages to survive at the margins.
All this being said, I think comparing the art market and popular music markets is foolish. 12yo boys aren't buying emerging mixed-media artists. But they are picking Spotify songs.
When I buy art, I have often spoken with the artist in the past couple days, or I am aware of their history and story and how they developed their art as a response to some other movement or artist collective.
It's rare for people to buy art just bc oil paints go brrrrrm
> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life.
And here we come back to the aged old "can you seperate an artist from their art" because I'd argue when you watch a movie you are watching a product of their life
1. I meant artists writ large, not specifically movies. My point being that community management, PR, having a brand, etc. are becoming a key element of an individual artist’s career. Examples of this abound – see the recent Markiplier film as a case in point. That movie did well because Mark’s audience wanted to help him, not because it’s such an original genius concept for a movie.
But even then – people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor. People want to watch people, not imitations of them.
The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.
A technical company like Space X really has nothing to do with this conversation, and I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.
At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.
Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.
Just look at the images in the link: this is the best they can do? A kangaroo at a cafe in Paris? Could anything be more devoid of good taste?
In response to having a community and building a brand. This is not necessarily human anymore. Most famous people are not someone you will actually meet. Plenty of people do meet them, but nowhere near the amount that composes their fans.
And we have AI generated influencers now, ex. https://www.instagram.com/imma.gram, so why wouldn't people care about an AI the same way they do about people they never meet?
> At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it.
There was a study around this exact thing:
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-gauges-h...
> Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.
I suspect here we have underlying disagreement regarding assumption that AI - in general, not necessarily today's models - isn't qualitatively different than human mind. The part "Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it" isn't an accepted truth, and even today AIs do interact, in a limited sense, with the world - so "None, of course" is questionable. And even if so, concluding "Hence... slop..." seems like a jump in reasoning. For example, why don't you think this slop is more like child's early paintings? Just because today's AIs have limited means to learn in the process?
> I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.
What it is about culture at large? SpaceX analogy was brought to illustrate how much arguments about AI incapabilities are applicable today, but not necessarily tomorrow - just like arguments about SpaceX inability to reach a particular goal quite a few times turned out to be a matter of - not so long - time.
I agree that many AI results today can be uncool. But how do you know it's not passing the uncanny valley period? How can you know they can't be cool eventually?
> people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor.
Let me stretch a little to illustrate here. Imagine "personal" experiences of AI - making AIs unique. One of those AIs consistently produces good movies, which, if you're honestly don't judge by the authorship - are actually good. Yes, people may not care about non-existent AI actors, but they may still care about existent AI author :) . Do you think it's impossible?
> People want to watch people, not imitations of them.
How can you tell the difference? You're watching a movie with actors who are not familiar to you. Would you refuse to watch just for this reason? You just came to somebody's party, and here's a movie going on, and you watched it to the end, because it looked interesting, and you don't know anything about producers, actors etc. - you still can talk about the movie, will you be predominantly worried that it's "AI slop" even if it looks great? Suspiciously great maybe?
> The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.
It's hard to define taste, to be honest. People can definitely have different tastes, almost by definition. But more importantly - why do you think AI products may not have tastes?
> At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.
Yes. But doesn't it look like a prejudice? Of course we can point to how many times we looked at it and didn't get some perceived value out of the work, and got annoyed that we spent time and efforts, but didn't get some results - but what if we'll mostly get results from AI works? Do you think that's impossible?
> why do you think AI products may not have tastes?
Because it can't feel. Get used to it. It can't feel, and what ever it comes up with, would be an imitation of someone real who can feel. So it can generate stuff that can cater to a taste, but the thing itself can't have tasts.
It is fundamental. Arguing about it all day wont change it.
I don't think you understand, but you effectively shutting down the discussion. Your choice.
Well, there are definitely people who care about the vision and style of movies from certain directors. It's not so much "story" like plot, but story in the sense of a "brand story" where there's recognizable elements in all the work, repeated themes, changes and decisions and evolution to how they approach things.
> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
Every human being is unique, both biologically and experientially. Until an AI can feel and have a lived experience, it can not create art.
Will smith eating spaghetti is art, sorry.
If everything is art, then nothing is art. Conceptual art, and everything that followed in Duchamp's wake, is mostly meaningless nonsense, sorry.
Fresh take
There's nothing special about art re humans and it doesn't require feeling or lived experiences. That's an arbitrary wall you're putting up.
Demonstrably wrong. The most highly regarded AI artist today is Refik Adanol. His work was recently described by Jerry Saltz as a "glorified lava lamp".
I don't think this is a demonstration of impossibility, just a lack of demonstration of possibility.
Why should anyone care about either of those two people?
The art establishment clearly does. Refik has a show at MoMA at the moment. Saltz won a Pulitzer for his art criticism, so I guess the Pulitzer committee cares.
But normal people doesn't care about the art establishment, it has no impact on their lives, it could die tomorrow and almost nobody would notice.
>Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones.
Art is not a problem to be solved.
Art is a reaction to life. AI is thereby incapable of producing anything with any degree of authenticity unless it conveys the experience of being an agent to the world.
What is AI if not "a reaction to life"?
With how much data goes into the frontier systems, and how much of it gets captured by them, an AI might have, in many ways, a richer grasp of human experience than the humans themselves do.
You were only ever one human. An LLM has skimmed from millions. You have seen a tree, and the AI has seen the forest it stands in.
The AI has not "seen" or "experienced" anything, as it's not a sentient life form.
Two comments here.
First, "AI is thereby incapable" is a hypothesis, not a fact - how would you prove that you have to "live" to produce art? You might feel this way, you may suggest some correlations here - but can you really prove that?
Second, I don't see impossibility for AI to be - to various degrees - an agent to the world. I think that's already happening actually - they are interacting with world even today, in some limited sense, through our computers and networks, and - today - not many of them actually "learn" from those interactions. But we're in the early days of this - I suspect.
>It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
Humans do that a lot but it's not all we do. Go to a museum that has modern(ish) art. It's pretty incredibly how diverse the styles and ideas are. Of course it's not representative of anything. These works were collected and curated exactly because they are not average. But it's still something that humans made.
I think what people can do is have conceptual ideas and then follow the "logic" of those ideas to places they themselves have never seen or expected. Artists can observe patterns, ask how they work and why they have the effect they do and then deliberately break them.
I'm not sure current genAI models do these sorts of things.
> I'm not sure current genAI models do these sorts of things.
You might be right here. Two points though - first, we don't know if current AI is actually incapable of something in particular; we didn't find this, didn't prove it. Second, we might have a different AI approach, which would actually be capable of these things you mention. To me, it's way too early to dismiss AIs - at least in principle - regarding all of this.
> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
The target audiences for art and film are not the same. The latter is far more pop culture. You can't apply them the same way, and the narrative of the artist has been extremely important for decades. People will watch slop movies. They don't pay $30K for slop art. They're paying that for historical importance or, if contemporary, artist narrative.
I'm in fandom spaces, and the prejudice against AI art is overwhelming. I also run in art collecting circles, being somewhat wealthy but not a billionaire. They also care about authenticity.
That is to say, the people who pay for original art, and participate in art spaces, are generally educated who actively hate AI. Filmgoers are probably a standard deviation lower in education, and are far more willing to part with the cost of one unit of consumption (a $10 ticket) than art buyers.
AI is a threat to graphic designers and those in their orbit.
The only way I see AI being a threat to professional artists is AI copies of their work. And AI isn't anything new there. I have a friend who gets commissioned by hotels to do one-off pieces for display all over the world. People have been making knockoff pieces of her style and selling them for at least a decade. And that's her lower margin, small pieces made for a couple thousand dollars to hang at your house, not her $100K+ pieces for hotels where they fly her out to supervise reassembly and mounting.
Yeah, those people love authenticity. They pay a lot for authentic Modiglianis.
> They don't pay $30K for slop art
I beg your pardon, but have you heard of Jeff Koons or Kaws?
> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important
We are 50 years into post-modernism. Can't imagine it can get any more important.
I predict emergent design will be the next big thing. Czinger[1] is a great example of what it may look like. Rick Ruben-esque world, where the creator is more a guide.
[1] Czinger uses stochastic optimization to converge to designs - https://www.czinger.com/iconic-design
God, thank you.
Finally, someone pointing out all of this is just people announcing what has been in play for half a century.
Post-modernism says that the artist isn't important. Dead, in fact. Art is something that happens when we perceive it, not when the author creates it.
Is that what putting a camera in the hands of everyone with a smartphone (basically everyone) did for photography?
Or making video editing + free, global publishing platform did for film? (see: doom scrolling).
> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.
Less the narrative of the art's production and more the message that it's conveying.
I don't mean (necessarily) a political message or a message that can be put in to words. But the abstract sense of connecting with the human who created it some way.
This isn't just art though. An example: soon, Sora will be able to generate very convincing footage of a football match. Would any football fan watch this? No. A big part of why we watch football is that in some sense we care about the people who are playing.
Same with visual art. AI art can be cool but in the end, I just don't really give a shit. Coz enjoying art is usually about the abstract sense that a human person decided to make the thing you are looking at, and now you are looking at it... And now what?
This is why every time someone says "AI art sucks" and someone replies "oh yeah? But look at THIS AI art" I always wonder... What do you think art is _for_?
>Would any football fan watch this?
Depends what the future of VR worlds look like, and what the viewers place is in them.
The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity?
We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.
The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.
We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.
I think we fall into the trap of seeing art from a consumption point of view. “Of what use is a human vs AI piece of art to Me?” Art is residing in the productive space too, the artist is considering not his/her utility but his/her presence in the world. Maybe what you describe is the way forward for art monetisation but not for art, and we know experientially how the production of real art is not always in tandem with its appreciation.
My prediction: KNOWLEDGE of whether something is made by AI or a human will be alpha and omega, and will eventually be regulated used in commercial contexts. You will always be able to generate something, but if you somehow get exposed presenting it as human made, the sanctions will hurt you.
We'll get to the point, if we're not already there, where you won't be able to tell if the artist actually did the work or just could have done it, and to which extent. Everything in the process can be essentially faked. If you put a massive emphasis on proving human work, you're essentially conceding you cannot tell without some sort of notary certification. We're in the lab diamond stage and clutching at some artificial authenticity.
I don’t know that this has to be the way. One thing that is really going to confound this very common idea that taste and quality and personal characteristics will win the day, is that you can use AI to represent all of these to other people.
It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money.
I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.
This is a great and worthwhile discussion. People are loosing sight of what art is. The art is the idea, not the medium. And just because something is easy, doesn't mean it will be good.
I've seen some fantastic original pictures that actual artists have generated through AI. I can't wait to see what current and future artists can do with the new tools at their disposal.
> 4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
I agree on current AI art taste, but disagree that it can't be improved. I think art AI companies can hire skilled "taste makers" and use their feedback loop as RL for AI art models. I think this area will always be in flux, and will vary by subpopulation so it will be a job role always in demand.
Do you think taste is something that cannot be taught/learned? Are certain individuals just born with good taste; it's an immutable property?
AI art is certainly considered uncool today in many circles.
I do wonder though… were there other innovations that were uncool in their early years, where now nobody bats an eyelid?
Is that point just a generational/passage of time issue?
Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.
Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
> Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
This is...not true? Or at least I can find no basis for your claims.
UK Copyright for books and sculpture predated the invention of photography and existed in a completely recognizable form ("a copyright term of 14 years, with a provision for renewal for a similar term, during which only the author and the printers to whom they chose to license their works could publish the author's creations.[4] Following this, the work's copyright would expire, with the material falling into the public domain"[1]).
Paintings and photographs gained copyright protection at the same time, in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, seemingly because it seemed natural to extend the haphazardly covered fine arts more completely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
Digital Photography and digital painting. Both were considered deeply offensive to a lot of artists. I have witnessed both first hand and the criticisms were verbatim the same as AI.
They said you couldn't become a good photographer if you didn't learn it with the limitation of film that forced you to make each shot count. Photoshopping a picture made it "not a real photo" and was banned from online communities and irl events, drawing in photoshop was not considered art. I find it very ironic that digital artists are repeating the exact same argument as the one used against their art
Apple AirPods.
> Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.
Well, it can be both.
You're focused on the visual arts—I'll add that live music will become more treasured, sought after than recorded music.
Because it's real.
I think the most important is number 2. People are now looking for things that are made by humans. Most detest AI slop. And if they find out that you are peddling slop, you lost trust.
It seems to me that we will go through the same phases that chess went through when chess on computers became a thing. First, people thought that this will kill chess, then people start using it as a tool to play better chess. Now, chess is thriving, despite AI being used in chess. I can see a similar path with art. Using AI to generate ideas, still create art by humans.
I am also glad the commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe.
Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.
>2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
How can you say this? These models can trivially create things that have never existed, and you can easily test this yourself.
Re: But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
Is it possible for a character in a novel to have novel experiences? Or for you to experience a novel dream? I would argue yes. You can know the rules of the environment and the starting conditions, but with a bit of randomness (or not) you can generate from that novel experiences which were unexpected - so too from the data & distribution that AIs are already trained on they can experience new experiences.
Another source of novelty is from good verifiers/recognition of a class of object which is hard to construct but easy to verify - here the AI can search and from that obtain novel solutions which were unthought of before.
N.B novelty itself is basically trivial - just generate random strings. But both of the above are mechanisms to generate novel samples inside some constraint of "meaningfulness"
I'm building my personal home right now. The AI image models have been a game-changer in designing the look of the house. My architect did an OK job, but the details that Nano Banana added really bring the house up a notch. I just do hundreds of renders from the basic 3D models and I find looks that I like and iterate from there. We are implementing the renders from Nano Banana over our Interior Designers designs. We would not have hired the Interior Designers again after using Nano Banana to do our interiors.
I think part of the issue with architects and designers today is that they use CAD too much. It's easy to design boxes and basic roof lines in CAD. It's harder to put in curves and more craftsman features. Nano Banana's renders have more organic design features IMO.
Our house is looking great and we're very happy how it's going so far with a lot of the thanks to Nano Banana.
Part of the job of interior design is delivering the promised images in … yknow, physical reality? How are you going from nano banana images to actual plans, materials, finishes, products, paint codes, … ?
I just gave the renders to the cabinet makers and they had no problems recreating.
Interesting. I model interior architecture as "here's $xxxK, make it nice" and they do a bunch of work to figure out what you mean by nice, and a bunch more work to codify your definition of nice into, like, SKUs of sconces and so on. Seems like NB helped you figure out your definition of nice, and your subcontractor had a good designer on staff to execute on that.
A sufficiently detailed render won't require a designer to figure out the materials. Any (reasonably competent) contractor can take a sufficiently detailed render with him to the store and find matching products. At least assuming the thing in the render actually exists.
He can also send back a picture of the real product for approval. I think the primary difference here is the level of involvement. A quick consult and then the professional "makes it all work" versus hands on design with the client figuring out all the details for himself.
A designer knows things from experience and would be aware of small details that if not designed correctly, become very apparent when built in reality.
The interior designer doesn't really do squat. They can do plan drawings and have some off the shelf cupboards and furniture. They don't implement anything
Presumably you give the render to a designer and they recreate it using real materials.
not the op, but this is what i did too and bypassed the designer. I iterated with nano banana and gave the result to the company that builds the kitchen. the middleman is gone now.
interesting! Discovered any prompting best practices while iterating with nano banana?
This is what I would do too
NB Pro can do some seriously impressive edits around interior decorating - see the prompt that replaces the window with a mirror which correctly reflects the room. It's not perfect, but it's still damn impressive.
https://mordenstar.com/blog/edits-with-nanobanana
I'm deeply impressed, especially with the "replace window by mirror". It did not only do the window thing right, it also changed the illumination of the whole room while keeping all the other details unchanged.
Right? That part kind of blew my mind too - the multimodal model actually altered the overall lighting in the room by eliminating all the reflections and specular highlights when the natural light was taken away WITHOUT being asked in the prompt.
Same! I redid my backyard entirely and needed ideas. Gemini took a pile of dirt and gave me countless ideas, improved my plans, recommended materials, etc. a designer gave me two out of the box ideas that Gemini didn’t come up with, but it did everything else perfectly. (Designer said, put a patio out in the yard and put your table there, and take your ugly shed and make it the center of attention, since you’ll never succeeed trying to hide it)
Same thing here. I took a picture of some gravel/grass and asked it to show me what it'd look like with tiles. I showed it another part of the property, and asked it to show me what it would look like with a raised lawn. Super impressive to be able to see a cloudy idea in the physical realm like that.
Did you do this in Gemini or Nano Banana? Should I give multiple view points and top view of the back yard? I'm trying to see how much info to give.
Related: I asked AI to find me a house to buy and went with the first recommendation. It did a better job searching than I did.
Curious on this - what was the prompt like? How did you give it access to listings?
Is any of this intrinsically a strength of Nano Banana, while not of other models/generative tools? Have you tried doing the same with say Klein, ZIT, etc.?
I actually built an app to accomplish this exact thing as I was finishing building my home and was clueless when it came to interior design. I'm genuinely astonished by the capabilities of these models with regards to this, and it feels vastly underutilized by the general populace. Being able to try out multiple paint colors in seconds, or add real furniture or wall decor from Ikea, or move objects around instantly - it still blows my mind.
Can you write a bit more about your workflow? I've been thinking about doing the same, but since I'm very non-interior-design minded have struggled to ask the right things.
Like... What are your inputs to the model? Empty renders of the space, or more fully decorated views/ photos? Do you have a light harness around this to help you discover the style you like and then stay consistent with it?
Do you find that giving a lot of context around the space you're designing helps (it hasn't in my attempts)?
I started with sketchup to make basic floor plans and house shapes. I had a rough idea of the style of the home. I picked "Transitional English Estate" since the build site is out on a farm that sorta looks like the Cotswolds. I used AI in this process to get rough renders and feedback on the floorplan. I then took that basic floorplan and house dimensions to a Draftsman who did a lot of tweaking to get it up to code and fix issues. I got his plans and took it to a Sketchup Pro on Fivver . They made a detailed sketchup model. I then took that model and took screenshots from different perspectives and tweaked the prompt to get renders I liked. These changes were reencorprated into the blueprints. I did the same thing with the interior. Took screenshots from sketchup and put them into AI and tweaked the prompt. https://imgur.com/a/lSIYTYr
super interesting - can you share some of the other elements. screenshots of the sketchup model, the AI image output, etc?
would you recommend this workflow to others, or just noting that it is what you did? any regrets, road blocks, frustrations?
a ball park price would also be interesting: total cost of sketchup license + ai token cost + fivver modeler + draftsman etc. I assume under $1k?
Mine was far more lightweight, but u just uploaded pics of my yard and prompted manually a bunch of times. Sometimes id find reference images to give as context, draw on the image to call out specific areas, etc.
It wouldn’t show me the exact things I wanted, but got close enough that I could test ideas and iterate quickly.
Out of curiosity: what is your input to the model? A CAD file or a drawing?
I find it does a good job at isometric views from floor plans. However, I needed Gemini 3.1 Pro to be able to have a chance at rendering 3D human point of view images from floor plans.
Any chance you'd be willing to share an album? I've considered doing this for my own home and I'd be psyched to study practical examples. Honestly this would make one helluva blog post (imo).
Did you have to change anything based on cost and what the contractors can actually do?
What tooling are you using to use this and manage it?
These image gen models are getting so advanced and life like that increasingly the general public are being duped into believing AI images are actually real (ex Facebook food images or fake OF models). Don't get me wrong I will enjoy the benefits of using this model for expressing myself better than ever before, but can't help feeling there's something also very insidious about these models too.
It's more likely than not that every single person who uses the internet has viewed an AI image and taken it as real by now.
The obvious ones stand out, but there are so many that are indiscernible without spending lots of time digging through it. Even then there are ones that you can at best guess it's maybe AI gen.
People will continue to retreat into walled, trusted networks where they can have more confidence in the content they see. I can’t even be sure I’m responding to a real person right now.
At the point now where basically any photo that isn't shared by someone I trust or a reputable news organisation is essentially unverifiable as being real or not
The positive aspect of this advance is that I've basically stopped using social media because of the creeping sense that everything is slop
Maybe not an actual argument for anything, but even before these image models everyone that used the internet had seen a doctored image they believed to be real. There was a reason that 'i can tell by the pixels' was a meme.
At least some of the comments here are likely AI-generated
people only notice when they are prompted to look for AI or scrutinize AI
a lot of these accounts mix old clips with new AI clips
or tag onto something emotional like a fake Epstein file image with your favorite politician, and pointing out its AI has people thinking you’re deflecting because you support the politician
Meanwhile the engagement farmer is completely exempt from scrutiny
Its fascinating how fast and unexpected the direction goes
I actually think this was a good thing. Manipulating images incredibly convincingly was already possible but the cost was high (many hours of highly skilled work). So many people assumed that most images they were seeing were "authentic" without much consideration. By making these fake images ubiquitous we are forcing people to quickly learn that they can't believe what they see on the internet and tracking down sources and deciding who you trust is critically important. People have always said that you can't believe what you see on the internet, but unfortunately many people have managed without major issue ignoring this advice. This wave will force them to take that advice to heart by default.
> By making these fake images ubiquitous we are forcing people to quickly learn
That's quite the high opinion on the self-improvement ability of your Average Joe. This kind of behavior only comes with an awareness, previously learned, and an alertness of mind. You need the population at large to be able to do this. How if not, say, teaching this at schools and waiting for the next generation to reach adulthood, would you expect this to happen?
I agree that improvement for the Average Joe will be very hard. I also think that taking more attention to teach the younger generation is vitally important. But mostly I don't see an alternative. I don't think we can protect people from fake information without giving up our freedom, and that isn't a viable alternative in my mind. So what is left but trying our hardest to teach people to think critically?
I remember telling my parents at a young age that I couldn't be sure Ronald Reagan was real, because I'd only ever seen him on TV and never in real life, and I knew things on TV could be fake.
That was the beginning of my journey into understanding what proper verification/vetting of a source is. It's been going on for a long time and there are always new things to learn. This should be taught to every child, starting early on.
I used to also have this optimistic take, but over time I think the reality is that most people will instead just distrust unknown online sources and fall into the mental shortcuts of confirmation bias and social proof. Net effect will be even more polarization and groupthink.
> By making these fake images ubiquitous we are forcing people to quickly learn that they can't believe what they see on the internet and tracking down sources and deciding who you trust is critically important.
Has this thought process ever worked in real life? I know plenty of seniors who still believe everything that comes out of Facebook, be AI or not, and before that it was the TV, radio, newspapers, etc.
Most people choose to believe, which is why they have a hard time confronting facts.
> I know plenty of seniors
And not just seniors. I see people of all ages who are perfectly happy to accept artificially generated images and video so long as it plays to their existing biases. My impression is that the majority of humanity is not very skeptical by default, and unwilling to learn.
When it comes to graphic content on the internet I usually consume it's for entertainment purposes. I didn't care where it came from before and don't care today either. Low quality content exists in both categories, a bit easier to spot in AI generated, so it's actually a bonus.
In reality: millions of boomers are scrolling FB this very minute reacting to the most obviously fake rage/surprise/love bait AI slop you've ever seen.
They were scrolling through fake bait long before generative AI
I feel like there is one or two generations of people who are tech savy and not 100% gullible when it comes to online things. Older and younger generations are both completely lost imho, in a blind test you wouldn't discern a monkey from a human scrolling tiktok &co
How so? This "tech savvy and not 100% gullible" generation, gave birth to a political landscape dominated by online ragebait.
Boomers used to tell us to never trust anything online and now they send their life savings to "Brad Pitt"
New generations gets unlimited brain rot delivered through infinite scroll, don't know what a folder is, think everything is "an app" and keep falling for the "technology will free us from work and cure cancer"
There was a sweet spot during which you could grow alongside the internet at a pace that was still manageable and when companies and scammers weren't trying so hard to robbyou from your time money and attention
>fake OF models
Soon many real OF models will be out of job when everyone will be able to produce content to their personal taste from a few prompts.
People already have access to every form of niche pornography they could dare to imagine (for absolutely free!), I really doubt that 'personal taste' is the part that makes OF models their money. They'll be fine.
I think you're under-estimating how much personal taste applies in that industry. Yes, there's a lot of free content but it's often low quality and/or difficult to find for a particular niche. The OF pages, and other paid sites, are curated collections of high quality stuff that can satisfy particular cravings repeatedly with minimal effort.
A big part of it also the feeling of "connection" with the creator via messages and what not, but that too can be replicated (arguably better) by AI. In fact, a lot of those messages are already being generated haha.
I was mostly hinting towards the 'connection' part of it, yes - I think that's really where the money is made more than anything else. That's the part that'll start killing the industry once some company tunes it in.
This is the dystopia of that pacified moon from "Mold of Yancy" by PKD but taken to the next level.
What's astonishing abut the present is that even PKD did not foresee the possibility of an artificial being not only being constructed from whole cloth but actually tailored to each individual.
We looked forward to the future, but it turns out the future smashed into our blind spot from the side.
For a podcast on this topic (niche pornography and how it was affected by the advent of pornhub and the likes) check out "the butterfly effect"
Even ignoring the model censorship making high quality sexual imagery/videos not possible, this is a crazy take. You think OF models are making money because it's the only way to see a nude man/woman with particular characteristics on the internet?
You're completely misunderstanding what the product being sold is.
If you don't think that OF models are using AI to reply to incoming chats from users, well I've got a bridge to sell ya.
No, I don't think OF models aren't using AI to respond to chat. Where did I say I thought that?
Then please explain what you're talking about.
Their point is that the point of OF is that there is (supposed to be) a real human. It's a (para)social relationship that no image generator model is going to give you.
If you can make X money running one client at a time you can make ( X × N ) money if you work with N clients at a time. You have to give just enough human to keep'em hooked.
Yes, and my point is that the (supposedly) real human is also AI. You're chatting with a bot.
> Soon many real OF models will be out of job when everyone will be able to produce content to their personal taste from a few prompts.
net positive to society
In what way? Certainly not for the models, who lose their income/job. Probably not better for the consumer, either.
or the taxpayer
the high end probably pay the same sort of tax as professional footballers
Sex work shouldn't be shunned, but it's not a normal profession either. Mental health, addiction and abuse is just as much of a problem online and in countries where prostitution is legal and normalized.
lose the income, but likely they will live a more fulfilling life.
More fulfilling life starving on the streets with beginner programmers looking for a job?
You can’t really because these powerful models are censored. You can create lewd pictures with open models but they aren’t nearly as good or easy to use.
I’ve seen some very high quality NSFW AI video in the last few months. Those models are not far behind and the search and training space for porn is smaller than being able to generate anything
> I’ve seen some very high quality NSFW AI video in the last few months. Those models are not far behind and the search and training space for porn is smaller than being able to generate anything.
Agreed. In my opinion, the primary limitation of the porn models is actually poor labeling of the training set. The company that manages to produce a well-labeled, porn-tuned AI image model is going to absolutely clean up.
The extractive dark patterns that will emerge from a parasocial chat "AI relationship" that can generate porn images relevant to the chat on the fly will be staggering. Once that proceeds to being able to generate relevant video, all holy hell is going to break loose.
> The company that manages to produce a well-labeled, porn-tuned AI image model is going to absolutely clean up.
For anime/non-photographic content that essentially exists (Pony, then Illustrious, then probably some new-fangled thing by now that I don't even know about), thanks to the meticulously tagged booru image corpus. However, as strong as these models are on matters of anatomy and kinks, they're limited in other ways due to the hugely biased dataset and dependence on tag soup prompts rather than natural language (many find the latter a plus, not a minus, though).
I haven't heard of any proprietary/cloud-based NSFW model that would be massively better than what's available for free. There are many NSFW-friendly services, but by and large they're just frontends to models trained by other people.
Because models can be used to alter existing images, you can use open and commercial models together in content creation workflows (and also the available findings of open models, and the ability to further tube them very specific used, are quite powerful on their own), so the censorship on the commercial models has a lot less effect on what motivated people can produce than you might think.
I still think, even with that, that like most predictions of AI taking over any content industries, the short-term predictions are overblown.
Doesn't Grok allow users to create lewd content or did they roll that back?
Also, I suspect that we'll soon see the same pattern of open weights models following several months behind frontier in every modality not just text.
It's just too easy for other labs to produce synthetic training data from the frontier models and then mimic their behavior. They'll never be as good, but they will certainly be good enough.
Just a matter of time and open models will get there. Not once have we seen a moat across the model spectrums.
And this can't come soon enough.
Coming soon... YOU!
I don't think so. Talking to people in this space, I've found out about broad camps. There are probably more:
-They simply aren't into real women/men (so you couldn't even pay a model to do what they're looking for).
-They want to play out fantasies that would be hard to coordinate even if you could pay models (I guess this is more on the video side of things, but a string of photos can put be together into a comic)
-They want to generate imagery that would be illegal
Based on this, I would guess fetish artists (as in illustrators) are more at risk than OF models. However, AI isn't free. Depending on what you're looking for, commissions might be cheaper still for quite a while...
Lily Allen Says Her OnlyFans Feet Pictures Make More Money Than Spotify Streams: ‘Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game’ : https://variety.com/2024/music/news/lily-allen-onlyfans-feet...
And they might have to gasp! get an honest job!
I don't know much about that side of things, but I presume that's hard work! Maybe not always so honest though.
That's a pretty wide brush you are painting with there
That OF is not a honest job?
That's the narrowest of brushes. Anybody thinking otherwise is the one painting with an overly broad mind, and not in a good way.
Don’t think the demand for real OF is going anywhere
How do you know they’re real right now?
A lot of escorts have OF profiles.
Jaded, but if I knew there was a possibility of a bunch of incriminating footage of me (images, video, etc.) out there in the pre-AI days, I would do my absolute best to flood the internet with as many related deepfakes (including of myself) as possible.
> Facebook food images or fake OF models
What in the world is a fake OF model?
Does "OF" stand for "of food"?
It stands for "OnlyFans" a website originally for creators to engage directly with their audiences but quickly became a website where women sold explicit pictures of themselves to subscribers.
TIL it wasn't created to be a porn site
They still run ads trying to push the narrative that it's for comedians and musicians.
But at this point, OnlyFans is so synonymous with egirls that suggesting someone has an account is used as a way to insinuate they sell pictures of themselves.
Surely this is a problem that we will never be able to solve.
Oh we’ve seen nothing yet of the chaos that generative ai will unleash on the world, looking at Meta platforms it’s already a multi million dollar industry of selling something or someone that doesn’t exist. And that’s just the benign stuff.
This has been true for a while with digital art, photoshop, etc. Over time, people's BS detectors get tuned. I mean, scrolling by quickly in a feed, yeah, you might miss if an image is "real" or not, but if you see a series of photos side by side of the same subject (like an OF model), you'll figure it out.
Also, using AI will not allow you to better express yourself. To use an analogy, it will not put your self-expression into any better focus, but just apply one of the stock IG filters to it.
> a series of photos side by side of the same subject
Cameras are now "enhancing" photos with AI automatically. The contents of a 'real' photo are increasingly generated. The line is blurring and it's only going to get worse.
It's shitty, but I think it's almost as bad that people are calling everything AI. And I can't even blame them, despite how infuriating it is. It's just as insidious that even mundane things literally ARE AI now. I've seen at least twice now (that I'm aware of) where some cute, harmless, otherwise non-outrageous animal video was hiding a Sora watermark. So the crazy shit is AI. The mundane shit is AI. You wonder why everyone is calling everything AI now. :P
It seems like a low level paranoia - now I find myself double checking that the youtube video I'm watching isn't some AI slop. All the creators use Getty b-rolls and increasingly AI generated stuff so much that it's not a far stretch to have the voice and script all be auto generated too.
I suppose if the AI was able to tell me a true and compelling story, I might not even mind so much. I just don't want to be spoon fed drivel for 15 minutes to find it was all complete made up BS.
What they've chosen as examples to illustrate the strength of the new model surprises me.
The "cubism" example seems like it would be a closer fit to something like stained glass or something. I don't think the thing really understands what cubism was all about. Cubist painters were trying to free themselves from the confines of a single integral plane of perspective by allowing themselves to show various parts of the image from different viewpoints, different times, different styles, etc.
The division of the image into geometric shapes is just a by-product of that quest, whereas the examples here have made it the sum total of the whole piece.
This feels to me like an example of how LLMs still don't "understand" what the art means, and are just aping its facade.
I had a similar thought before realizing that I'm pretty sure what they were demonstrating wasn't art style, but adherence to correct physical dimensions and construction of the buildings referenced, that was then expressed in an art style (or reasonable facsimile thereof). The before prompts would just conjure a random building out of thin air, the after prompts searched the web for reference material and then used that in image generation.
And actually, the link I saw a bit ago was this [0] which is more in-depth and has a lot more examples + prompts.
[0] - https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/flash/
I'm sure this has been written about but here's what happens long term - images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.
Probably about half of us here remember photos before the cell phone era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
With image/art generation the same thing will happen and I can already feel it happening. Things that used to be beautiful or fantastic looking now just feel flat and AI-ish. If claymation scenes can be generated in 1s, and I see a million claymation diagrams a year, then claymation will lose its charm. If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
What a time to be alive.
I believe this is the reason for a return to interest in analog media with both my generation (millenials) and gen-z. I do wedding photography on the side, and the past ~2 years have seen a huge increase in requests for film photography, either exclusively film or as an add-on to digital. Offering film has been one of the best things I've done for my side hustle.
Likewise with the sort of resurgence of vinyl, and the obsession over "old" point and shoot digicams.
The best weddings I've been to had a photo booth where you can have photos printed out (any number) and texted to you. I think that's the best way to do it. I agree, people like physical photos still. I've bought my wife several different ways to print photos, including a smaller portable printer, and one of those Instant photo cameras.
What about yoldo potato, turn any photo into a vintage looking gem you can print out.
Interesting how this matches the Matrix timeline. According to Agent Smith, 1999 represented the height of human civilization before things started to decline.
Not only 1999 prevents humans from becoming too advanced and invent new AI again, it is a believable and comfortable era. A perfect time, perfectly balanced between analog and digital.
> huge increase in requests for film photography
Also for VHS camcorder footage
This is something I predicted when image/music/other creative art models first came out, as many were crying that art as a medium was dead thanks to Stable Diffusion. And it does seem like I've been right (so far).
The introduction of massive of low-quality creations has made high-quality art much more in demand. Low-quality AI art and music has become a huge blinking indicator that says "SLOP". Hand-made, uniquely styled, quality art now has a "luxury goods" vibe, and people are willing to pay a premium.
When film photography came out in the 1830s, painters and intellectuals were really mad about it commoditizing and cheapening images compared to paintings.
* On first seeing a photograph around 1840, the influential French painter Paul Delaroche proclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" [1]
* Charles Baudelaire, in 1859: "As the photographic industry was the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the character of blindness and imbecility, but also the color of vengeance. [...] it is obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy" [2]
[1] https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/early-photography
[2] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/10/16/photo-mortal/
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. [...] But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos
I don't think I fully agree. Sure people make so many photo's that they don't have the time or the will to start looking through them all.
You can't just whip out your phone and start scrolling through thousands of photo's with friends. It would get so boring so fast.
But if you put some effort into making a nice little selection of the best photo's, that emotion is 100% still there.
And there’s software to help you with that. For example, using faces, time stamps and GPS info iOS creates collections for you.
Yes, it’s crude, and you have to do the face tagging, but I think it’s a huge improvement over not having that.
So now the value is created through curation. Before it was inherent at creation. If you never curate it might seem like it lost value in comparison.
In my childhood, slide shows were very deliberately curated, in no small part because the presentation of the slides was a relatively elaborate, shared family event.
But curation was done mainly by the creators, who were the people who were able to do the creation in the first place (professional photographers, people who could afford to buy the expensive camera, people who could afford the software for editing photos/slideshows in mass etc.). Now everyone can curate, and consumers can actually pick which curated collection is truly the best.
But what does 'best' even mean in this context? A photographer sharing their 'best' photos was some combination of sharing their personal perspective and their effort to capture shared memories on behalf of others. So yeah it was a limited/privileged (often patriarchal) role. What they picked was interpretive, but that curation was part of the expression/information the viewer was experiencing.
We can mix and match the media we choose to view or keep so easily, when previously there was so much more material and opportunity cost to choosing what to shoot, develop, keep, and share. I think that inevitably loses some meaning.
Curation was implicit when the cost of image creation was high and authors had to consider the photos they were taking beforehand. Now curation comes afterward.
Had a meeting with a friend the other day, discussing the 'times' and all that is happening around us.
I sit here thinking how wonderful and terrible of a time it is. If you can afford to sit in the stands and watch, it's exciting. There's never been so much change in such a short period of time. But if you're in the arena, or expecting to end up in the arena at some point, what terrifying moments lay ahead of you.
I never thought I'd say this, but I expect the arena is where I'll end up...I've enjoyed my time in the stands, but I'm running low on energy, capital and the will to keep trying.
Wait what does the arena stand for?
I see it as a metaphor for those who are having to battle to survive and those who are already retired or wealth enough not to care how things turn out. So i guess it could be job market, it could also be...a literal battlefield lol
Job market.
It reminds me of the Star Wars content thats come out recently - before there was the Original Trilogy which we all watched many times and the lines became iconic. Since then it's all become a mismash and blur of mediocrity due to over-exposure.
(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)
edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.
Rogue One was very good, to the point that I consider it on equal standing to the original trilogy and prequels
It's a blur of mediocrity due to its mediocrity, not its overexposure
Yea, if the new stuff coming out was great then people would be begging for more.
> except The Mandalorian,
To each their own, but I think Andor is, by far, the best post-ROTJ output.
> To each their own,
And that is the gist of the problem, isn't it? As we approach our forties and beyond, chances are we have lived more than half our lives. So do I really want to spend hours watching something I might hate and might leave a bad taste in my mouth? (See game of thrones season 8 or worse, Westworld the HBO series which I don't even want to know what happened in season 3 or 4). I am sure there are people who will enjoy those but for the average person it is highly unlikely.
Andor is fantastic. The good content still stands out. Mediocre content will have to compete with AI slop at an increasing rate.
That is something that annoys me with fandoms
You could ask "how many more movies should we make?" and the answer would be "there is no limit, I always want more"
"I like this thing therefore more of it is obviously better"
I think it takes maturity to say "I like this thing and I don't want more of it."
Yes, and also many fandoms lack the maturity to know when to say "no, I do not want to know MORE details, and certainly not about this obscure secondary character's difficult childhood that explains everything they did later in life".
See:
- All of Wookiepedia and most of Star Wars Expanded Universe.
- "The Hunt for Gollum".
- Every movie in the franchise after "Alien" and "Aliens".
- The sadly upcoming expanded universe/sequels/shows for Blade Runner.
Etc, etc. Everyone has their exceptions ("this one was cool"), but in general the point stands: fandoms ruin everything. They simply don't believe in the adage that "less is more". They always want MORE, and the industry is only happy to oblige.
> except The Mandalorian
Mandalorian started strong, with cool spaghetti Western vibes, and then ended up devolving into mediocrity too. In my opinion.
Haven't watched Andor yet.
Andor is fantastic, but I think it's important to set expectations before going in. Compared to other SW content it's much slower-paced and more restrained/cerebral.
Mandalorian didn't do much for me; too gamey/Marvel-ey/cartooney.
I've heard Andor described as having the same vibe as The Mandalorian's episode "The Convert"; the one about the former Imperial scientist being rehabilitated and living in an apartment block with other former Imperials.
If so, I will like Andor. I really liked "The Convert".
I quite literally couldn't stay awake for Andor. Five minutes into each episode I was out cold. Saying it's a "slow burn" is quite the understatement.
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
I take a hundred photos on a trip, my phone uses AI (not even the new fancy AI, but old 5-10 year old stuff to detect smiling faces and people in frame) to pull out less than a dozen that are worth keeping. Once a month or so I get fed a reminder of some past trip.
This isn't any different than before. The number of photos taken is greater, but the overall number of worthwhile photos from a given trip is about the same.
To add to this, on family trips in the 90s we would take a few disposable cameras and each was ~27 shots.
And we were lucky if even 1 picture per roll was worth keeping long term. And my family almost never looks through those photo albums.
Digital picture frames with a curated rotation of old scans and new digital pictures are what made pictures great for my family.
You know, all of a sudden, I am starting to lose interest in meticulously drawn Mermaid diagrams in README, perfect grammar and spelling in doc reviews, or neat generated general photographs. They are all correctly presented, of course. But the ideas are mostly wrong, too.
I guess my stick figure hand drawn diagrams, a doc with few mistakes in grammar or spelling would be seen as more worthy to read as long as my ideas are sound. Right? :-)
Yes, genuineness, authenticity, quirky imperfection will be prized. But presumably some of that can also be trained into the models so...
If this becomes a trust signal, you can prepare for next gen models to do stick figure hand-drawn-like diagrams with spelling mistakes.
The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.
> I'm sure this has been written about
Scott Alexander has written about it:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
I don't fully agree. Perhaps you're right when it comes to images as a whole, but I think individual images themselves still capture that emotional value for me.
Even if there were a million fake Tom Cruise movies I would still like Edge of Tomorrow (even if it had been AI made).
Yeah I mean edge of tomorrow is a great concept though and would have worked without him. Whereas a movie that’s got less going for it like MI 5 will seem bland once he’s commodified
> a few photos per YEAR to look back on
I totally get this, but on the other hand, we have definitely benefited from being able to take more photos. I have some older friends (pushing 80 or so) who sucked at taking photos, so 9 of 10 photos they have from their prime adult years raising their family are blurry to the point of not recognizing the people if you don't already know who they are.
They have great photos from the last 15-20 years, but of course they do, phone cameras are vastly superior to the point-and-shoot cameras from the 70s, and when you reflexively shoot a dozen photos every time you pose for a picture your odds are way better that one will come out clear, everyone looking at the camera, smiling, etc.
I really don't get that. I look at pictures I've taken in a digital world and I'm moved, just as I am when I see pre-digital pictures. Perhaps older images are sometimes "more special" but that's an artifact of the distance between who I was then vs now. Why would I stop feeling an emotional attachment to photos just because I have many? I really can not understand this at all.
It sounds like you've been reading Susan Sontag. For others, I recommend:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others
Considering half of the memes are still rage comics drawn with MSPaint i'm kind of skeptical of this statement.
As Grayson Perry described the instagram age: “photography rains down on us like sewage from the sky.”
Strictly speaking, I don't think it is the generation or creation that diminishes their value. it is the consumption.
You said it too:
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
The trick of course is to keep yourself from seeing that content.
The other nuance is that as long as real performance remains unique, which so far it is, we can appreciate more what flesh and blood brings to the table. For example, I can appreciate the reality of the people in a picture or a video that is captured by a regular camera; it's AI version lacks that spunk (for now).
Note that iPhone in its default settings is already altering the reality, so AI generation is far right on that slippery axis.
Perhaps, AI and VR would be the reason why our real hangouts would be more appreciated even if they become rare events in the future.
> The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now.
I dare say, the feel of photos from back then is much stronger than of the photos taken today. See e.g.:
https://plfoto.com/zdjecie/413363/bez-tytulu?from=autor/beak...
https://plfoto.com/zdjecie/619173/bez-tytulu?from=autor/beak...
https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m...
"One of the primary properties of anything with Mana is a feeling of uniqueness. That one has never encountered something like this before, and therefore it is important. The uniqueness of the thing is a property that pulls you in to focus more closely, to attempt to understand more closely why the thing is unique."
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
My generation generally only had photos from birthdays, holidays, vacations, weddings, graduations and reunions. We looked at the three albums which contained every family photo often and I know them all by heart.
My kid was born in 2009 and our family digital album has nearly 1,000 photos per year of her life. And she's seen virtually none of them and seems to have little interest in ever seeing them since she creates so many of her own photos every day which are ephemeral.
I guess some of the appeal of those sparse photos is the element of fantasy and imagination. Wondering what it could have been. Looking at a low quality yellowing wedding photo of your grandma... It allows you to think and wonder. Seeing it in 4K video or a volumetric 4D gaussian splat in VR robs you of all that sentimental mystery.
Nostalgia and idealization of the past is also harder when you have a more representative cross section of past moments.
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
I often call this over-saturation the media equivalent of semantic satiation. Anything commoditized or mass-manufactured isn't going to have emotional appeal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
I've often had an "addictive" personality and now I see it as an over satiation, in a semantic way, sort of thing. When I found something I liked I would over saturate my self in it, and lose interest and move on faster than others I knew.
Feels like what you described describes that inner personality trait better than I have heard before.
As somebody who juggles both figuratively and literally a lot of hobbies, I can definitely relate! One of my friends is a bit like you, they tend to experience the sudden flash of interest in various hobbies, dive extremely deeply and then experience a "bit flip". (a quote describing John Romero's hot/cold personality when he worked at id Software)
With respect to people with a consumptive addictive personality though - I really feel for them, it's a rough time to be alive.
Agree. But there are some use-cases where images can still be of huge help. Making textbooks come alive for instance. We are trying to do that and make a whole bunch of Indian textbooks into comics and free for students. (zerobyheart.com if anyone's interested and would like to make suggestions; the panel-to-panel continuity is still off and something we are working on )
A kind of the same happend to music. With a LP or a tape, you had to listen to all songs. Later with a CD you just skipped the not so good songs. And with MP3, you don't even bothered to save not so good songs. And now with TikTok etc. a song just have to be 20sec but has to bang hard for this short time.
> you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on
My parents took way more photos with film than I do with my cellphone camera.
While it wasn't really rare, it was far from common. It was almost full time hobby back then. (I grew up in sixties/seventies.)
> The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift.
I think this is still true if you shoot film today.
This.
Unimaginable abundance may sound good (it does to me), but scarcity has value too. We might just find put that its value is too important. I just hope that if we do, it’s not too late.
There is something that's not easy to scale: humans. Live concerts, performance, etc. They are local
… education …
Don't disagree but being the social animals we are, images and videos will never not be important. Things will always feel better when I can connect it with a friendly face.
The source, personal significance, and intent of images and videos will matter a lot, though. I'll cherish photos of my family members forever, regardless of technical excellence.
Or a photo of my freshman dorm room during exam season. Subpar image quality, lousy lighting, etc. but so many memories, positive and negative, are elicited by that fleeting glimpse from an era of excitement, boredom, stress, uncertainty, and optimism, not knowing where I was going in life, when I'd ever look back at that snapshot, but deciding on a whim to grab it during a break from cramming topics now long forgotten.
But I roll my eyes at the idea of injecting my likeness into a short clip depicting random over-the-top action sequences, no matter how photorealistic, because I've never wanted to do that.
scarcity creates value. Good observation, never thought of AI images this way.
Your photos of your dog mean nothing to me.
I have a photo of a friend I’ve since drifted from, it’s her in her army fatigues after basic. She was had just went through a horrible divorce and that was a shining achievement for her.
The story behind the photo is what makes it matter.
Not the format.
However I will agree AI is a poor substitute. You’ll have people creating AI photos of a fake marriage and fake pets in a big fake house, while they sleep in a bunk bed in a halfway house.
This is the same argument illustrators made upon the invention of photography.
To what extent were they correct and to what extent not? Is their correctness also linked to the correctness of the similar argument today or you're just noting the analogy?
There's already a book about this: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)[0]
> The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.
[0] https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
Agree the same is happening with tools and services
You're presenting this as an argument against AI, but really it's an argument against all human endeavor.
https://xkcd.com/915/
You're presenting this as an argument against snobbery, but really it's an argument against all humanity.
> They were rare > and special > and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
None of these things are true for me as a millennial in the 35-45 age group. And my family was poor to boot, and we were still drowning in photos and photo albums.
I lived plenty of my life prior to the cell phone era (born early 80s).
I do not have the same feeling you seem to have about photos from this era. Some are fine, sure, but looking back on them, most of them are very bad photos and most do not capture anything close to what I'd call an emotional feeling.
I would go so far as to say 99% of the photos from my life prior to 2000s really suck, like really badly. Some also degrade visually and lose their impact over time.
Since you couldn't be sure what you caught more than often what is captured is poorly framed, blurry, weird, poorly timed, and often left out a lot of stuff that was actually going on. You also had to try and be super selective because each photograph had a real tangible cost.
Conversely, I find being able to take many photos in quick succession and across a long period of time at a very high clarity allows me to select a photo that most closely matches my feeling in those moments at that event.
Even more so with AI photos. Although many models cannot do this well, their abilities get better each day and can allow you to compose or edit/modify a photo in such a way that matches your internal feelings rather than the blandness of what is essentially a random photo of random stuff that may or may not convey an emotion anywhere near to what I was feeling or remember feeling in that moment.
contrary to that i use it to restore old pictures and it has increased their emotional appeal
Probably some of us here remember paintings before the photography era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few painting per YEAR to look back on. The feel of paintings back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
There is still room for art. Any photographer sees lots of pictures, but can tell the good from the bad, and find pleasure. They don't dismiss photography altogether.
> images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.
No, ALL CONTENT is asymptotically approaching 0. This includes photos, videos, stories, app features, even code. Code is now worthless. If you want better security from generated code, wait 2 months and it will be better. If you want a photo, you just prompt and it will generate it on the fly.
AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP. Do you want a movie where Deadpool fights The Hulk? Easy. And just like how ad technology knows your preferences, each movie will be individually tailored to YOUR liking just so that your engagement will increase. Do you like happy endings? Deadpool and Hulk will join forces and defeat Thanos. Do you prefer dark endings? Deadpool and Hulk fight until they float off into the Sun and get atomized but keep regenerating for eternity.
If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look. This is the world we are facing now, where authenticity is meaningless. And while YOU may not prefer it, think about the kids who aren't born yet and will grow up in a world where this exists.
I can't tell if you are advocating for such a future or not.
What does advocacy have any relevance to what I was saying? That's completely orthogonal.
> AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP.
> If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look.
Sure, but why would any of this media have any emotional significance?
The reason we enjoy media of friends and family is because it depicts a moment in the life of our loved ones. A fake image or video of them is of absolutely zero value to anyone.
The reason we enjoy cinema is because a talented group of people had an interesting story to tell and brought it to life in a memorable way. Me, or a random person with no filmmaking talent, prompting a tool to generate a particular scene wouldn't be interesting at all. Talented individuals will also rely on this technology, of course, but a demand for human creativity will still exist, possibly even stronger than today, once everyone is exhausted from the flood of shitty Deadpool vs Hulk videos.
I suspect the same will eventually happen with every other product these tools are currently commoditizing, including software.
All of this seems like a neat technology in search of a problem to solve, while actually introducing countless societal problems we haven't even begun to acknowledge, let alone address. But it sure is a great money and power grab opportunity for giant corporations to further extend their reach. And they have the gall to tell us it will bring world prosperity. Most of these sociopathic assholes should be prosecuted and jailed. And you, dear reader who is generously employed by these companies, are complacent with all of this.
It won't have any emotional significance to those that remember how the world was before. But there's billions of kids that are going to be born that won't know anything except AI-generated content. They will find emotional significance to it.
My kids don't know what a dial tone is. They don't know dialing 7 digits instead of 10 or 11. They don't say "bye" when we get off the phone and none of their friends do either, they just hang up. They don't sit through movies because their expectation is that they can start it back up whenever they want. The world is changing and just because we experienced something doesn't mean that the next generation will value it.
Make Theatre Great Again
IMO this would be a positive side effect were it true. Do you really long for the day Hollywood exploited your emotions for profit?
Every time in human civilization there's a new technology, existing humans rail against it and want the Good Old Days back, existing children grow up to get used to it, the generation-to-be-born knows it as the normal baseline, then maybe future generations rediscover the past and take the best things about how things used to be without being held back by how bad they were. (see retro games made after retro games died)
Yeah, pixel games are huge now.
But I think it's more because of growing up with it have now pc, money. Not because people rediscover pixel games.
There is more to that, globalization. Now we have 8 billions humans. They are connected to the same infospace (internet) and share much more and more diverse content. Which means a lot more of emotional/interesting/helpful things. While each of them becomes less emotional.
Well, world changes dramatically. Connected old folks are like neanderthals in big city now. However not connected are still living locally in their minds. Youngsters are just accepting the world as it is. Nobody is amused by computers and cameras anymore. (at least in developed areas)
And with all that the worst is yet to come...
I think you're being tricked by nostalgia. It's about the fact that of course older photos you remember have a stronger emotional tie to you (they've had more time to form that bond), and it just so happens that older photos are not digital.
In my experience, a digital photo of myself and my partner used as the lock screen of my phone has the same emotional weight as the one sitting on my desk (which is a print out of a digital photo). Additionally, printing out a photo of you and your partner and gifting it to them has the same weight as going through childhood photo. A scrapbook of a recent vacation filled with printed digital photos evokes memories just as vividly as one from the 80s. On the flip side of this, a photo in a box in the basement has the same weight as a photo sitting in the cloud.
I'll offer you some more food for thought: are Aardman Animations films charming because they use claymation? Or is it the creative force of people like Nick Park and Peter Lord?
You can still buy a Polaroid, there is one factory left in the world able to produce the film required but they still make them.
“Still” isn’t the right word. Once Polaroid stopped making the film, closed their factories, and sold or junked their machines, their supplies did the same, and so some of the components stopped being manufactured and available for purchase. What’s sold now as Polaroid film was a reinvention of the same idea. And it’s notably not as good. The dwindling stock of unused true Polaroid film is getting absurdly expensive as a result.
The one factory you refer to was the last one, and was purchased by the Impossible Project (now Polaroid BV). So they were able to save one set of machines. But the actual process of making the film was lost. So it’s an old set of machines making a new but similar product.
> The dwindling stock of unused true Polaroid film is getting absurdly expensive as a result. what's the point? ain't all of this stock expired, with photos ending up just blobs or being gamble at best? (even for film stored in freezers)
Yeah I know but it's still incredible that we have something like that in 2026 being produced.
Agreed! The whole film world is on fire right now, it’s pretty cool to see.
People here like to say "Commoditize your Compliment" but to a company the size of google or amazon literally EVERYTHING is your compliment. Too bad no philosopher or political scientist or economist every thought about this stuff before or we might have some kind of plan to make the future less miserable and alienating.
> Too bad no philosopher or political scientist or economist every thought about this stuff before
I see what you did there and know exactly the political economist you are talking about, but if you Speak His Name, the shrieking hordes descend.
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
Um yeah I don't know. I fully resonate with the _emotional_ appeal here, but realistically I remember going round to people's houses to be shown analog photo albums that nobody was that bothered about seeing, because they didn't really care -- they weren't their photos.
The special photos (a few a year) still exists in digital form.
What a great thing this didn't exist in the past. We likely wouldn't have had any of the amazing artworks that we have now. Imagine an AI generated Mona Lisa, Nightwatch or Sistine Chapel ceiling because prompting would have been so much cheaper than paying Leonardo, Rembrandt or Michelangelo...
Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.
I feel like the complete opposite is true.
Artists aren't doing it for the money. With advanced tools like these they wouldve iterated much faster and created much grander designs.
Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits.
I hear this often and it's such a strange view of art, like the only thing that matters is scale and speed. It's a perspective so colored by mechanization that it fails to account for other philosophies in art. Think of what, say the Arts and Crafts movement was all about!
> Artists aren't doing it for the money.
That is unlike any artist that I know and I know quite a lot of them. They love their work and the process but they also need to eat. And that included those mentioned above.
There is a tremendous amount of "art" that is produced for purely commercial reasons. It employs many thousands of people. These roles are definitely threatened by image generators.
Agree that if you are Artist this is not going to be a big concern to you.
Also, many (I would even venture to say most) of the great artists most people know of earned their bread with intermittent commercial contracts, even rote advertising commissions in the 19th/20th century.
Art is about creating something from scratch. This isn't creating anything but cobbling together elements of scraped/stolen content to generate an imitation of prior work.
Have you talked to "artists"? In my experience the vast majority say the opposite of what you worded here.
They are just gatekeeping and upset their skillet is devalued or completely trivialized which hurts both their pockets and ego.
I think this is a fundamentally adverserial mindset and so you should be prepared for others to treat you in kind (i.e. to attack you and minimize the value of your work)
>Art is about pushing limits of what's possible
That's engineering, if that.
Art isn't, and has never been about that.
Sure it has. See the modernism as a whole.
Modernism wasn't about "pushing limits of what's possible" either. It was first and foremost a period style itself. That style included experimentation and "pushing some limits" but art in general wasn't that, then, before or after (which is also why those limits went right back, and literature for example returned to far more classical forms after modernism's era passed - it didn't kept pushing at limits).
An aspect of art is this pursuit of pushing boundaries within the confines of what is considered good. Would an artist with an infinite image generator be interested in pushing said boundaries? Maybe but they will definitely miss out on getting stuck on an idea and coming up something completely new
AI isn't a tool for creating art in the same way as a paintbrush or clay. AI is describing a painting you want, then having someone else creating the artwork for you. You aren't doing art in the same way hiring a sculptor isn't doing sculpting.
AI is well on the way to eliminating human made art since the skills to actually make art will be lost to the skill of being able to describe art. You know, since the only thing that matter is reducing costs.
AI is a productivity tool. Instead of working on a single graphic, the artist can now work on the entire marketing campaign. Instead of spending a year working on background special effects for a single scene, one could now personally produce full featured films.
It will be a golden age where the core differentiating factor is true talent and ideas and execution and not any gatekeeping by degrees, connections or budget.
I agree, but surely your description is art in itself?
Yet somehow with AI art we end up with https://i.redd.it/3v2uwwxxkhkg1.png more often than https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Michelan...
The only thing AI art makes possible that wasn't possible before is the scale of slop
The Sistine Chapel was a commission.
A very large fraction of everything we collect as great art marking our history was made on commission. The GGP is showing their complete ignorance of the history of art.
Taste is not scaleable.
>Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits
Says who?
Being an artist means different things to different people, but at the very least I believe it requires an interest in your craft, a desire for personal growth, and a yearning to express yourself.
I'd say these models only exist because we had amazing artworks in the past.
Absolutely.
I think of it more as that AI will destroy the profit motive in all things, not just art. What we used to think of as talent/skill/experience will no longer be scarce, because anyone will be able to make anything with a prompt. The perceived value will be in wholes built of valueless parts (gestalts).
AI is incompatible with capitalism, but the world isn't ready for that. So we'll have a prolonged period of intense aggregation where more and more value is attributed to systems of control that already have more than they could ever spend, long after the free parts could have provided for basic human needs.
In other words, the masters existed because they had benefactors and a market for their art and inventions. Today there are better artists and inventors toiling in obscurity, but they won't be remembered because they merely make rent. Which gets harder every day, so there's a kind of deification of the working class hero NPC mindset and simultaneously no bandwidth for ingenuity (what we once thought of as divine inspiration).
Terence McKenna predicted this paradox that the future's going to get weirder and weirder back in 1998:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KZ2ZtTsHqO0
(McKenna tangent). I like this version of that talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL0yfxDe6jE. It's about 12 minutes and animated with some hand-drawn whiteboard drawings. Good stuff.
On the contrary, the talent will be more scarce because there is no longer a motivation to acquire it in the first place.
Humans with a given talent being scarce doesn't mean that access to said talent is scarce.
> Imagine an AI generated Mona Lisa
Let's give him 2015 tech instead. Imagine if he used Illustrator to create the Mona Lisa. Is that much better?
That's true, but you forgot a key piece in this puzzle. The AI can only produce things that already exist. It can combine new things, this is why you can it for a picture of Jesus planting a flag on the Moon. But it only works because Jesus is a concrete concept that already exists in our world. If you ask for a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon the result will be nonsensical.
Nano Banana 2 has an image search tool that looks up pictures of things and uses them in the context (and arguably, an agent could eventually figure out who jacquesm is and hunt for a photo).
However, I tried "a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon" for a laugh, and I have to hand it to Google as the person was in a spacesuit, as they should be, and totally unidentifiable! :-D
It worked semi ok? A poor depiction, but not entirely nonsensical
https://g.co/gemini/share/028ab360006b
I have the creativity of someone not at all creative (couldn't even come up with a good analogy) and the stuff I created with AI art tools is awful compared to what I see from "AI artists" on social media.
Just being able to generate a vision and then be able to capture it in a prompt is an art within itself.
Would anyone even care about Mona Lisa if the exact same painting was done by a random nobody? It's just a portrait.
Da Vinci is maybe only the 5th most interesting thing about the Mona Lisa.
Most people no. Then again most people are idiots barely aware of the world they live in, much less culture.
People who actually care about art, if given a chance to see it, yes.
Of course, it being done by Davinci is not some random fact about the painting - as if a painting is a mere artifact.
Ironically we live in a time that, overall, is probably better for artists than the world any of those guys grew up in. People have always valued art but not the artists, and many artists through history, including the famous ones, died broke with their works only posthumously attaining value.
These days, through commissions, art is a much more viable profession than it ever was.
It was until ~2021 and it going rapidly downhill. I know some people that are really good at art and they got work on commission from publications, venues and so on. They have seen a significant drop in their bookings and the ones that they do get negotiate hardball because (1) everybody else is desperate too and (2) if they can't get to a deal then AI is now an alternative for the not-so-discerning public which was a fairly large chunk of the usecases.
So you were making book covers? Ah, so sorry. Nobody really cared that it was you.
And you can probably extend that to what's between the covers...
Is it though? It was for the last 20 years but I’d imagine sales of commissions are down immensely and going down every day
Michelangelo at least would have been okay with that. He would have rather been working on sculptures.
I'll just be extremely candid: a lot of people don't give a shit about these art pieces or art in general. It's okay if you do, there is nothing wrong with that, but it's a myopic view that the world would be worse off if we didn't have a portrait of Mona Lisa.
Yes, who gives a shit about culture, after all humanity doesn't really need it...
If culture revolves solely around exclusivity of technique then indeed, who should give a shit about it? I don't think that's the case though.
That's not the point, but okay. I'm simply pointing out the fact that there'd still be art, just not those pieces created by those specific people and the world would be just fine. Humanity would've fared okay if Nano Banana was created 500 years ago.
What would you have trained it on?
Photos, I guess? Your original comment implied access to AI so they'd also have ways to take pictures, probably.
We would have tons of great artworks if it existed in the past. The works would be both more numerous and at a higher quality.
Absolutely not a chance. You see, in the past there was nothing to train it on. And that's sort of the point: the only reason that this AI image generation works at all is because it is lifting on the hard work of the people that had the skills, put the time and the effort in.
I disagree. On the one hand, yeah, On This Day... 1776 is terrible, and it is sad to compare it to Requiem for a Dream or Pi, but even in this age where AI is available, we see tons of critically successful art being made without the use of AI.
I've only had a brief opportunity to try out NB Pro 2 (`gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview`), so I haven't had a chance to update GenAI Showdown.
Here's some of my captions that tend to trip up even state-of-the-art models.
https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-pro-2-tests
So far it does feel more iterative than an entirely new leap in terms of capabilities, but I haven't run it through the more multimodal aspects such as editing existing images.
That being said, it actually managed the King Louie jump rope test which surprised me.
Nice test. Nitpicking. Isn't it NB Pro and NB 2? Not NB Pro 2.
You're totally right. THROW THE WHOLE THING OUT!
Seriously thanks - will update the site.
I love your website, art and projects!
Thanks I appreciate it!
This will stay useless for editing personal pictures so long as virtually every prompt with a person in it is met with "I can't edit images of some people". For whatever reason, they've made the celeb detection so ultra-aggressive that almost everyone is detected as a (lookalike) celeb.
It's only for Europe, you should try a US VPN or, in the worst case, use it over Vertex AI, which allows you to generate anyone.
I think this tech is cool, from an engineering perspective. I’m trying to figure out if there’s any justification for using it in a business world outside of: “We don’t want to pay an artist.”
You can argue things like code generation are an extension of the engineer wielding it. Image generation just seems like a net negative overall if it’s used at scale.
Edit: By scale, I mean large corporations putting content in front of millions. I understand the appeal for smaller businesses where they probably weren’t going to pay an artist anyway.
When a company uses a photocopier, they don’t want to pay a scribe.
When a company sends an email or docu-sign, they don’t want to pay a courier.
Technology supplements or replaces jobs, often reducing costs. This is no different.
Art isn't just a job or a way to make money, like being a courier is.
For corporate art it is. Nobody draws memphis out of passion.
The real victims here are going to be the graphic designers who worked for firework importers.
Advertising? "We don't want to pay an artist" goes a long way for a small business with a limited budget.
We're using voice generation from clipchamp for our promotional videos.
It's an ethical conundrum because we're not paying anyone, but we don't have the money to pay anyone, and it's good enough for our budget.
But we're getting used to the process of changing a part of the text in a few seconds without any artist involved and for 0$.
I guess that soon we'll be able to create voice sample from know personalities for a few $ with prices based on the popularity of the artist and some sanity check based on the artist preferences.
I think this is where I see the benefit for small business. I don’t want to speak for you, but I imagine it’s either “no voice over, we can’t afford it.” or “inexpensive AI voice over to make it more accessible and appealing.”
My thought is the large corps that could afford it, still won’t because it’s a cost they don’t need to incur. For them it’s not even a moral conundrum.
It can also backfire. AI slop ads and marketing material imply cut corners and poor quality products. If a bakery isn’t going to bother touching up its AI slop banner, I don’t expect their cookies to be great either.
FWIW I've never seen a correlation between a small company's website and the quality of their product. Slick website? Maybe they care for their craft, maybe they're all marketing and no content. Website stuck in 1998? Maybe they're sloppy and don't care; maybe they care about their core product, not a slick marketing brochure. I don't see any reason AI would be different in that regard.
That’s true. I think it’s more of a problem of getting someone in the door. Anecdotally going to art festivals I’m much more likely to enter the booth of someone who has handcrafted marketing over the person who has generated marketing.
Basic marketing theory says that spending extra to make your ads signals (term of art) to your potential customers that (1) you are successful, since you can afford it and (2) you are confident your product is superior, since you’re effectively paying people to try it, and expect doing this will generate revenue in return.
Much like the star bellied sneetches, when the quality of some ad format becomes untethered from the cost of production and placement, then marketers will flock to some alternative.
YouTube influencers fill[ed] that niche for a while because content milling SEO spam and fake reviews is a lot more expensive if you present the results in video form with good production values. (Not sure how long that will be true, since AI is getting better at short-term video).
Every local business I deal with is completely lacking on the online side. They might have square POS terminals and all that stuff, but their website either doesn't exist, sucks (not updated in years) or they throw me to Facebook (also sucks).
This is like the last mile for online presence. The average barber out here doesn't use Squarespace, barely knows how to use Facebook and doesn't touch GenAi. But they can still cut your hair pretty well - tech savvyness doesn't have a huge connection to business competence out here.
The amount of lost revenue due to the implication of cut corners needs to be higher than the cost of hiring an artist by enough of a margin that the managers who make the decision start to care, and enough that they're willing to put the effort into hiring an artist.
> It can also backfire. AI slop ads and marketing material imply cut corners and poor quality products. If a bakery isn’t going to bother touching up its AI slop banner, I don’t expect their cookies to be great either.
Average person won't notice, and would not care either way.
This assumes that models won't improve and you'll always be able to tell that it's "AI slop" ... that seems like a bad bet. Five years ago you'd be laughed out of the room for suggesting that a computer could produce images from a natural language prompt and that it'd be accessible to everyone -- not just corporations with deep pockets.
Yeah if/when it becomes indistinguishable I think most people won’t care. That being said I do think someone finding out something is AI generated will be met with poor response. Does that ultimately matter? Probably not in a business world.
It will be a begrudged but normalized compromise of modern life, like GMO, Auto-Tune and foreign child labour. Which of those it will be perceived as the closest to is hard to say right now
Diagrams! So much documentation lacks diagrams because they are hard to make
True! Though I’d argue diagrams as code like PlantUML or Mermaid are better than an image!
Agree just from a text search perspective alone that Mermaid even ASCII diagrams are usually preferable.
I've been using it to replace things that I used to do for personal projects in photoshop/gimp. Remove a background, add a person, put a letter in here that looks like the same crayon as the other letters.
Things that would take me an hour or so the old way takes three minutes with NB.
But I can see this applying to small businesses. Something that some random person would have to spend on hour photoshopping can be done in a few minutes with NB.
I disagree with your premise that everybody should endure friction and cost such that artists can earn a living producing cookie-cutter content.
Drafting, iteration, mockups. Quite useful during ideation.
All things traditionally done by artists or artist adjacent roles. I can understand at an individual level, say for a solo gamedev who wasn’t going to pay an artist anyway. That’s not at scale though.
Larian Studios most recently was under fire for this [1]. Like I can see a director going “what would X look like?” and then speeding over to the concept artists for a proper rendition if they liked it. I don’t think this is at scale though. Any large business is just going to get rid of the concept artists.
[1]: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/baldurs-gate-3-developer-l...
There are many places in general office work where you need some kind of graphics. Slides, reports, info graphics, dataviz. Or academic papers. Some are just illustrations, like a fancy clipart or stock photos, some are drafts for a proper tikz or svg or something that you then redo in draw.io etc. There is much more use for graphics than the use cases where people would ever even consider hiring an actual artist. I've seen good results for iterating on eg model architecture figures quickly between PhD students and supervisors, faster than dragging boxes around and fiddling with tikz. Obviously you don't simply paste the result into the paper. You redo it but it's a good discussion basis. That's for info graphics stuff. But the same can apply to creative stuff, like an event poster, an invitation card to your wedding, storyboards, mood boards, DIY interior design, outfit planning etc etc
Yeah that’s a good point. I don’t think that’s what I meant by “at scale” but I can see that being useful day to day.
One major thing is photoreal use cases, which artists can't really do. A lot of that is deep fakes / scams but there are some real use cases
Isn’t that what photographers are for?
Photographers can't take photos of things that don't exist...
Same answers you'd use beyond "we don't want to pay an engineer". 100x shorter iteration speed, and the associated workflow (stream of microrevisions and spaghetti throwing), top quartile outputs in many langs/styles/contexts without having to source, hire, and maintain a fleet of separate specialists who can quit when they feel like it.
I'm torn on the scale thing. It definitely seems net negative. But I think we collectively underestimate just how deeply sick the existing thing already is. We're repulsed by image gen at scale because it breaks our expectation that images are at least somewhat based on reality, that they reflect the natural world or what we can really expect from a product, from a company, from the future. But that was already a bad expectation: when's the last time you saw a mcdonalds meal that looked like the advert? Or a sub-30$ amazon product that wasn't a complete piece of shit? Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better. It was already slop. All the grieving we do about the loss of truth, or the extent to which corps will gleefully spray us with mind-breaking waterfalls of outright lies, I think those ships sailed a long time ago. The disgust, deceit, the rage we feel about genAI slop is the way we should have felt about all commercials since at least the 80s IMO.
> Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better.
This is a good point. My gut reaction is “well at least someone was paid to do it and can continue to keep society/the economy going ”.
I can see the other side where that’s a soulless job. Not sure what’s worse. Soulless job where your skills apply or even less jobs in a competitive industry.
It is faster as well
a friend of mine was a creative director and a big tech co until recently, she was replaced by AI
Sora is already a flop. People are sick of slop and are getting good at identifying it. Grok is the only player that has any semblance of success in the visual gen market, only because they do the one thing that will always make money.
> I’m trying to figure out if there’s any justification for using it in a business world outside of: “We don’t want to pay a human.”
You could easily say the same about anytime computers or robots or automation have taken a job away. We’ve been going down this road for decades.
Those industries (computers, robots) created other jobs though. This doesn’t seem to.
The people who work at google, building this
It will. There will be people whose skillset is advanced prompting.
Won't somebody think of the window replacers?
I did some tests, my education is in digital imaging technology/film from 20 years ago so I find this stuff fun to follow.
Two what I could consider "interesting prompts" for image gen testing. Did pretty well.
https://s.h4x.club/eDuOzPDd
"A macro close-up photograph of an old watchmaker's hands carefully replacing a tiny gear inside a vintage pocket watch. The watch mechanism is partially submerged in a shallow dish of clear water, causing visible refraction and light caustics across the brass gears. A single drop of water is falling from a pair of steel tweezers, captured mid splash on the water's surface. Reflect the watchmaker's face, slightly distorted, in the curved glass of the watch face. Sharp focus throughout, natural window lighting from the left, shot on 100mm macro lens." - Only major problem i could find at a glance is the clasps don't make sense probably, and the drop of water inside the watch on the cog doesn't make sense/cog mangled into tweezers.
https://s.h4x.club/yAuNPlRk
"A candid photograph taken from behind an elderly woman sitting alone on a park bench in late autumn. She is gently resting one hand on the empty seat beside her, where a man's weathered flat cap and a folded newspaper sit untouched. Fallen golden leaves cover the path ahead. The low afternoon sun casts her long shadow alongside a second, fainter shadow that almost seems to be there, the suggestion of someone sitting next to her, visible only in the light on the ground. Muted, warm color palette, shallow depth of field on the background trees, photojournalistic style." - I don't know why but it internal errored twice on this one but then got there.
Results are in for `gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview` (NB 2) for the GenAI Showdown site in the editing comparisons. Remember to click the "Pass/Fail" button to toggle between pass/fail and a weighted score to account for additional factors like steerability, image quality, etc.
Unfortunately, unlike the leap from NB to NB Pro, we did not see significant gains from NB Pro to NB Pro 2.
In several cases (such as the Jaws Poster), we observed that it was substantially more difficult to prevent NB Pro 2 from making significant changes to the rest of the image. Localization of edits, in general, seems to have changed and not necessarily for the better.
http://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing
Comparison solely between the Gemini models (NB, NB Pro, and NB Pro 2):
http://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing?models=nb,nbp,...
This looks like a response to Seedream 5.0 lite that was published two days ago.
I use all those fancy image models editing capabilities for my fast fashion web shop. I must say: product photography for clothing and accessories product is dead. Those models are amazing at style transfering and garment transferring.
We will see how good will be Seedream 5.0 full version.
You think they created and launched this in just 2 days? These things take a lot of effort and time to develop...
Seedream 5 Lite is honestly extremely disappointing, its text to image is way worse than 4.5, image editing is fine but that's it. It's way, wayy behind NB2.
Since talking images, are there any AI models that can output real transparent gifs/pngs?
And not a (botched) fake white/gray grid background that is commonly used to visualize transparency?
This is exactly the use case I just tried, and not only does one get a non-transparent checkerboard, the squares are inconsistent & jumbled.
Example: https://gemini.google.com/share/36d66cad1764
ChatGPT's image generator has been able to do this since last year. That NBP still can't is baffling. They should at least train it to respond to requests for transparency with a solid colour pink background.
This. Gpt-image-1/1.5 are the only ones that have this built in - though I'd love to have an insider view if its natively considering the alpha channel or just feeding it through a rembg-style post processor.
Certainly the initial versions were post processing rather than native. I'd be interested to know if that has changed on subsequent releases.
You can output to a plain background and use any number of tools to mask it.
I know. It sounds like a perfect task for AI to do it though (wasn't the whole premise of AI do to mundane things for us), yet they fail to do it, and I need to use an external tool.
Alpha is a 4th image channel that 99%+ of images in the training data do not use, so it makes more pragmatic sense to just not allow it.
The output from Nano Banana, even when it is ostensibly drawing "single color" shaded areas, is so jittery that it can be challenging to threshold it.
Nano Banana Pro is better at that type of thing, so I suspect Nano Banana 2 will be sufficient.
It's notable that this model is less advanced that the previous "Pro" model, and also that the Gemini interface is defaulting all requests to "Fast" even if you've previously changed it to Pro.
I guess even Google is running out of GPUs.
If any AI image generation companies are reading this, I want the image to be in layers which can also be exported, so I can 1) do post processing of my own or 2) arrange for an AI image generation model to process just the layers i specify.
Wow it's capable of critiquing its' own output?
<OUTPUT>
While the overall aesthetic matches the minimal white-stroke style and technical design you requested, and the provided step descriptions are included, please note that there are a few minor rendering artifacts in this specific generation:
The text on the banner entering the vault in step 8 is illegible.
There is a small typo in the caption for step 6 ("CONFLSCT" instead of "CONFLICT").
Despite these small imperfections, this layout should work well as a guide for your canvas implementation.
</OUTPUT>
It still seems to have the same pitfalls as all the other image generation models. I ran it through my test prompt (wary of posting it here, lest it gets trained on) - it still cannot generate something along the lines of "object A, but with feature X from Y", where that combo has never been seen in the training data. I wonder how the "astronaut riding unicorn on the moon" was solved...
EDIT: after significant prompting, it actually solved it. I think it's the first one to do so in my testing.
Keeping track of the different AI product names is so confusing even from a single company.
Why can't Google, for example just call:
Let alone that Nano Banana 2 is Gemini Image 3.1
Funny timing. I just migrated my personal styling app off of Nano Banana.
My main use case is editing user uploads to enhance their clothing images. A large part of it is preserving logo, graphics and other technical details. I noticed over time it felt like Nano Banana has gotten worse at this.
I have a test set of graphic t-shirts that I noticed the model seeming getting worse with it. This combined with price and the terrible experience of their cloud console got me to migrate off.
Model card: https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-1-flash-...
Pretty close to Gemini 3 Pro Image (aka Nano Banana Pro) in most benchmarks, even without thinking+search, and even exceeding it in 2 most important ones of 'Overall Preference' and 'Visual Quality'. I'm excited about the big jump in Infographics/Factuality (even without thinking+search; I'm surprised that text+image search grounding doesn't make an even bigger dent).
I saw an item for sale on Ali Express's video and I thought "Wow, they hired some really attractive actors to pitch their little gadget." 30 seconds in, I realized they used GenAI. Not because it looked AI, but because the production values looked too high and professional for the item. I would get in on this if you sell anything online.
One thing I notice is that the voices in video AI are absolute hogwash. Voice AI is great, video AI is great, but AI videos where humans speak give me the feel of really poorly dubbed foreign TV - the timing is not quite right and the facial expressions don’t always match up with the words being spoken.
They can even combine the models, create the presenters with nano banana and then use that as the reference for a video model and paste in your product
I have Google AI Ultra. Where can I test this? They say its in aistudio, which says its a paid model and I need to setup billing (as if paying for Ultra isnt enough). They say its available in antigravity, but I cant seem to find it there?
Works for me with a Pro sub at https://gemini.google.com/app
Kind of surprised it hasn't been pulled yet. Have seen some very disturbing (grok tier) examples of completely bypassing whatever censors they have in place by simply asking gemini to write the prompt
I'm officially done with the Nano Banana name. It was fun, but can we go back just calling it Gemini Image?
Name recognition has big value. People remember what an advancement the first banana was. Nowadays it's no longer so unique, ChatGPT's and Grok's image editors are also strong.
I really like it. Nano banana is like the best product name in AI.
I really really want to see how these images are starting to form into videos. The stills are clearly getting better and better, but what about when you need the stills to organically conform to a keyed script?
Check out Seedance 2: https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedance2_0
Nano Banana was technically impressive the first time, but after Seedance it's not really. It's all just an internet pollution machine anyway.
The page looks promising but how can I try it out?
They have an API.
I'm seeing more and more AI video memes and they are getting really good. Still just bunch of short clips, long shots are not working well enough, but typical Hollywood movies have few second cuts anyway so this is almost good enough to make a marvel fanfic.
the workflow right now would be to take this images, make a sequence of them for key "shots" and send them to an I2V model. LTX-2 is the model the r/stablediffusion folks are playing with right now, but there are a fair few.
How does it compare to Nano Banana Pro?
Interesting they get to rev this with the release of a new flash model. I'm speculating part of the distil pipeline includes the image gen stuff; that seems like internal tooling that will pay dividends over time, if true. New frontier model -> automatic new image model. Even if it's just incremental updates, it's good for both the product cadence and compounding improvements.
The confusion here is dense, 3.1 Flash Image is not 3.1 Flash.
The banana models (image) are a different than the mainline models, but the confusingly leverage the same naming scheme.
> the distil pipeline
I don't have inside info, but everything we've seen about gemini3.0 makes me think they aren't doing distillation for their models. They are likely training different arch/sizes in parallel. Gemini 3.0-flash was better than 3.0-pro on a bunch of tasks. That shouldn't happen with distillation. So my guess is that they are working in parallel, on different arches, and try out stuff on -flash first (since they're smaller and faster to train) and then apply the learnings to -pro training runs. (same thing kinda happened with 2.5-flash that got better upgrades than 2.5-pro at various points last year). Ofc I might be wrong, but that's my guess right now.
Interesting. Whatever they are doing it's a bit different than Anthropic and oAI, which is good for the consumer. I'm curious about their ML Ops internally; would be fascinating to learn more.
Google updated it early in AI Studio so I've been experimenting:
- Base pricing for a 1024x1024 image is almost 1.6x what normal Nano Banana is ($0.067 vs. $0.039), however you can now get a 512x512 image for cheaper, or a 4k image for cheaper than four 1k images: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-3.1-fla...
- Thinking is now configurable between `Minimal` and `High` (was not the case with Nano Banana Pro)
- Safety of the model appears to be increased so typical copyright infringing/NSFW content is difficult to generate (it refused to let me generate cartoon characters having taken psychedelics)
- Generation speed is really slow (2-3min per image) but that may be due to load.
- Prompt adherence to my trickier prompts for Nano Banana Pro (https://minimaxir.com/2025/12/nano-banana-pro/) is much worse, unsurprisingly. For example I asked it to make a 5x2 grid with 10 given inputs and it keeps making 4x3 grids with duplicate inputs.
However, I am skeptical with their marquee feature: image search. Anyone who has used Nano Banana Pro for awhile knows that it will strongly overfit on any input images by copy/pasting the subject without changes which is bad for creativity, and I suspect this implementation appears the same.
Additionally I have a test prompt which exploits the January 2025 knowledge cutoff:
That still fails even with Grounding with Google Search and Image Search enabled, and more charitable variants of the prompt.tl;dr the example images (https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/flash/) seem similar to Nano Banana Pro which is indeed a big quality improvement but even relative to base Nano Banana it's unclear if it justifies a "2" subtitle especially given the increased cost.
The pricing changes are interesting. I wonder if at some point they will deprecate the less expensive model to increase their margins.
Original Nano Banana (gemini-2.5-flash-image): $0.039 per image (up to 1024×1024px)
Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview): $0.045 per 512px image $0.067 per 1K (1024×1024) image $0.101 per 2K image $0.151 per 4K image
Nano Banana Pro (gemini-3-pro-image-preview): $0.134 per 1K/2K image $0.240 per 4K image
So at the most common 1K resolution, NB2 is ~72% more expensive than the original NB ($0.067 vs $0.039), but still half the price of NB Pro ($0.134).
They may be victims of their own success here. At a certain point, if you can consistently make perfect images indistinguishable from reality, you’re done improving. All that’s left to do is make it faster or cheaper or better-aligned - but these aren’t going to show up readily in ways the typical user can understand.
For your knowledge cutoff test, did it failing mean that it generated a generic "Kpop demon hunter" or it rejected the prompt?
Generic "Kpop demon hunter". Nano Banana 2 atleast has fun with it, though.
What is annoying about Nano Banana, is how bad is experience when you try to iterate or, especially, repeat same task for another photo. After second of third image it starts randomly ansering with complete nonsense like "I'm just a language mode and can't assist with that" or "I can't do that" (with absolutely the same prompt it had no issues 2 photos in a row in the same chat).
It also gaslights me, when I point out on an error. I tried to create a cartoon portrait of the person from photo and use background from another photo. It got wrong the order of photos. I provided filenames and explicitly told which one is for person and which for bg. It generated it wrong again, and all attempts to explain that it got it wrong were met with "No, it's YOU incorrect". So frustrating.
Would be interesting to see latency vs quality tradeoffs here. Are they targeting consumer-facing generation speed or prioritizing fidelity for professional workflows?
Adding to predictions: the magic of travel might actually be reborn, as people seek authentic experiences.
It'll be great to find a web directory dedicated exclusively to good/useful prompts with nano banana
The Chinese are so much ahead in this space, their models are way better at this stuff. For example, https://hunyuan.tencent.com/image/en?tabIndex=0 and https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedream5_0_lite
which models?
we have user-preference rankings that put NB2 on top: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text-to-image
interesting, maybe this is just anedoctal experience then and I'm biased but I have been preferring theirs over Nano Banana
When it comes to image prompts, Seedream is far behind Nano Banana. "Far behind" is a ridiculous understatement here, btw.
Afaik the only real competitor is Riverflow V2.
Kind of a pointless comment without a link to such a model.
sorry, I've edited my original comment with one such example, but they're easily discoverable I assumed it was popular knowledge
- https://hunyuan.tencent.com/image/en?tabIndex=0
- https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedream5_0_lite
someone shared benchmarks that differ my experience tho, so I may be biased
Did gemini-2.5-flash-image get an upgrade as well? I just got the following, which is fascinating, and not something I've seen before:
> I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill your request as it contains conflicting instructions. You asked me to include the self-carved markings on the character's right wrist and to show him clutching his electromancy focus, but you also explicitly stated, "Do NOT include any props, weapons, or objects in the character's hands - hands should be empty." This contradiction prevents me from generating the image as requested.
My prompts are automated (e.g. I'm not writing them) and definitely have contained conflicting instructions in the past.
A quick google search on that error doesn't reveal anything either
I’ve been exploring this exact problem space from the angle of extreme constraints (single-digit MB memory, no cloud assumptions). I documented what broke first and why here, in case it’s useful: https://github.com/nullclaw/nullclaw
So this is an ultra-minimalist software platform to farm work out to enormous energy chugging AI models?
I only needed help of this banana boy twice, it managed to disappoint me each time. The most recent one, I was trying different beard and mustache styles on myself, on a photo I imported from my own Google photo gallery, and it consistently rejected me, claiming I'm a public figure. Nobody ever told me that I look like any famous person, so that's googles own bananination. ChatGPT nicely handled the job.
Wow the article narration with Umbriel is silent after the 6 second mark.
Any info or speculation about technical details?
So, I'd suspect the seedance2.0 competitive video model is coming as well soon? ;)
Is this a distillation of Nano Banana Pro?
Gemini 3.1 Flash Image is based on Gemini 3 Flash.
source: https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-1-flash-...
It's not working very well at all. I started with a picture of a girl sitting at a cafe table and asked it to zoom in, and it enlarged her head to the size of a balloon.
Open weight? How many parameters?
does it still break images with transparent pixels?
Still has context leaking into the text/random signs in the image, made worse by generating filler with an internal LLM
Just what we need, more sloperators thinking they are being creative and making art by prompting.
I would be happy to never see any more AI slop.
Can we now edit the images it spits out? All prior tests in trying to edit AI images has failed miserably and laughably
Is it just me, or is Nano banana not working in Gemini currently?
The prompt “Generate an image of an orange man riding a bicycle.” no longer generates Trump riding a bicycle. I’m guessing they fixed that.
But the prompt "can you depict a cartoonish orange man with a pooh bear in political cartoon style?” correctly generates Trump.[1] So there’s that.
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/Gvm5Zje
It's working pretty well for generating an xkcd comic for your HN profile: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/
Previous nano banana frequently made speech attribution errors, the new one seems a lot more consistent.
This was really fun. Nice job.
I really wish they opened a version of this up for adult content. They would make immense amounts of money and it could be fenced off behind some sort of paywall where they could verify the age of the person.
It's extremely slow, takes several minutes to generate an image.
My naive question, can image generation make something novel eg. "show me a DNA structure that cures cancer" can it do that, or it has to have seen something before to generate it.
Just think we conceptually know what a brushless motor design looks like and it's just pixels. I guess even if it did produce the image we wouldn't know what it means.
All image models can generate images that were not in its training dataset, but it can't generate reductive extreme cases like your example.
What about it is extreme? It's a concept, like "generate an xray image" eventually hopefully the cure to cancer could be represented as a simple molecule or whatever, I'm not saying I know.
There is currently no knowledge nor progress for what a cure for cancer, and nothing a LLM can draw upon.
You could generate "pregnant Elon Musk with four arms and three eyes doing yoga poses" because the image models have enough visual concepts of each of those individual things, but that specific image is (likely) not in any training dataset.
What I'm saying is if this thing can generate random things (noise) couldn't it make that or new tech like negative mass. Anyway I get it too if we don't know then something we made wouldn't know.
You are overestimating it's intelligence, but I bet it would hallicinate some result, why not try it yourself?
I don't know what the cure of cancer would look like ha (not an organic chemist or biology, genomist... not even sure what field that would be).
But yeah I am slowly trying to incorporate AI into my life (the delegation, work in my sleep part). I develop it is the funny thing (RAG agents) but yeah. Sometimes I get sold on it like "wait a minute maybe it can do that" but no. Can probably tell I don't get deep into the technical part I'm an API consumer. That's the thing I realize too, can only know so much about a topic if you're spread thin/a generalist.