Smarter tools won’t replace artists
“A wise fisherman solving crosswords in hell”
Sometimes a new revolutionary tool shows up and the same discussion comes back.
“Will this tool replace the jobs of artists?”
AI which can generate art and photo realistic images has just started popping up here and there. The most famous one is called DALL·E 2. All you need to do is give it a prompt, in the form of a normal sentence. Much like you would if you commissioned an artist, or if you would do a very specific google search. And it will spit out a bunch of interpretations for you.
Some accurate, some less accurate. Some beautiful and some horrendous.
Here’s a comic strip I made using DALL·E 2. Each image was generated using a text prompt, then I assembled them and added speech bubbles.
Here’s a Youtube video about it if you want to see it in action.
This is literally the type of stuff an author would make up in a science fiction novel to talk about the idea of robots replacing human labour.
Robots in factories already proved that humans can be replaced to do some tasks. But art is different.
Special effects in movies used to be mostly practical or made using stop motion. When computer graphics came around that changed.
Jurassic Park was made using large animatronic dinosaurs. Except a few scenes had to be animated in the computer. The problem was that computer animation wasn’t very good yet. An animator called Steve Williams, who worked at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), really wanted to animate 3D dinosaurs. So he spent a lot of time to figure out the tech and was the first person to animate a believable dinosaur digitally. Complete with jiggly muscles.
Steven Spielberg was thrilled when he saw it. Usually Phil Tippet would animate the dinosaurs, so he was not as thrilled. Phil Tippet was a traditional special effects artist and stop motion animator. It seemed like computer graphics and Steve Williams would take his job away.
However, even with this amazing tech, Steve Williams couldn’t nail the movement of the dinos, in particular the velociraptors. Something seemed off but nobody at ILM could tell why.
Phil Tippet didn’t know the tools or understand the code. But he knew how to make a creature appear alive.
Today I think we are all so used to computer graphics being a medium or tool of its own, it doesn’t bring to mind the great singularity of art anymore. We get used to things. Maybe the people who are most afraid of DALL·E 2 are the ones who are over 35. (in spirit if not literally)
Douglas Adams’s rules about technology from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy goes like this.
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
I think what Phil Tipett learned is that you can be relevant even if your whole craft loose the relevance it once had. Either you can be scared by innovation, or you can make use of it. James Shedden’s art is great example.
First he creates a reference image, with the full rendering of the art work. An image that could stand well on its own. Then he creates alternative versions of this image and use a tool called EbSynth to transfer the style of the source image onto the new much simpler “blueprints”. This way he can make new animation frames with a lot less effort.
He has a twitter thread explaining it way better if you’re curious.
With certain mediums, some things are harder to do than others. The difficulty with DALL·E 2 is to tame it. To give it good instructions that are useable and worth sharing.
Art created using DALL·E 2 will be judged just like any other medium. The way we judge wether art is good shouldn’t be about how much labour went into drawing every painstaking detail. But rather how it makes us feel.
Any tool that gives us more time to focus on ‘why’, instead of ‘how’ is an improvement for everyone.
Tools like DALL·E 2 opens up art creation to people who might not have been able to do it before. If you struggle holding a pen for example. While it might replace the necessity for some roles, such as in-between animators. It comes with new opportunities for others.
Tools alone aren’t enough to create great art, even when it appears as if they can think for us.
Let’s see how well this article ages.
