Are you really complaining that ", from the British Museum." leads to it a painting in the actual British Museum? Just remove the sentence, and you'll be fine. Now good luck trying to make Midjourney place the image at the museum!
I'm a paying MJ user and am impressed by Nano Banana. They're different models. They each serve their purpose.
This analysis is just noise. Yawn.
Ironically, even an LLM with its fake reasoning capabilities can point out the issue with the prompts if you ask it to critique this article.
Eg instead of focusing on the artist, it focuses on the location
This makes sense! I imagine it was trained in some sort of rlvr like way where you give it a prompt and then interrogate "does this image ..." (where each question examines a different aspect of the prompt)
It's obviously an incredible model. I think there's a limit to how useful another article praising it is in contrast with one expressing frustration
I would also welcome someone writing a short takedown where they fix the prompts and get better-than-2022 results from nbp
NBP (and the new ChatGPT generator) are integrated with LLMs to various degrees, so seems like the obvious starting point is a reverse approach: ask them to describe the old images which has the esthetics that Fernando Borretti likes, and start generating from those prompts. If you can recover the old images, then it was just a prompting issue. ("Sampling can show the presence of knowledge but not the absence.") If you can't even with their own 'native' descriptions, then that points to mode-collapse (especially all of the 'esthetic tuning' like DPO everyone does now) as being the biggest problem.
The new models have prompt adherence precise enough to distinguish what "British Museum" or "auction at Christie's" is from the art itself, instead of blending a bag of words together into a single vector and implicitly copying all of the features of all works containing "museum" or "ArtStation" in their description.
> A painting sold at Sotheby's
and
> A painting in the style of something that would be sold at Sotheby's
convey very different meaning (to me).
> It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
> "By the time a whole technology exists for something it probably isn't the most interesting thing to be doing."
Midjourney is optimized for beautiful images, while Nano Banana is optimized for better prompt adherence and (more importantly) image editing. It should be obvious for anyone who spent 20 minutes trying out these models.
If your goal is to replace human designers with cheaper options[0], Nano Banana / ChatGPT is indefinitely more useful than Midjourney. I'd argue Midjourney is completely useless except for social media clout or making concept art for experienced designers.
[0]: A hideous goal, I know. But we shouldn't sugarcoat it: this is what underpin the whole AI scheme now.
It has happened each and every time, it just haven't affected you personally. Starting of course with the original luddites - they didn't complain out of some philosophical opposition to automation.
Each time in changes like this a huge number of people lost their jobs and took big hits in their quality of life. The "new jobs", when they arrive, arrive for others.
This includes the post 1990s switch to service and digital economies and outsourcing, which obliterated countless factory towns in the US - and those people didn't magically turn to coders and creatives. At best they took unemployment, big decreases in job prospects, shitty "gig" economy jobs, or, well, worse, including alcohol and opiods.
With AI it's even worse, since it has the capacity to replace jobs without adding new ones, or a tiny handful at a hugely smaller rate.
For the purposes of the discussion, even considering automation and outsourcing alone, the effect is the same though: the human job dissapears from the local market, but the company still gets the thing made.
And not everyone gets new jobs, because usually the new job is fundamentally different and might not be compatible with the person or their original desire out of their employment.
AI is not the problem. Late-stage capitalism and wealth disparity is.
> In a British textile industry that employed a million people, the [Luddite] movement’s numbers never rose above a couple of thousand.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/rage-against-the-machine
Whether or not it comes to fruition, it's making large portions of society feel uneasy, and not just programmers, or artists, or teachers.
Like, you know... creating art.
It will leave not-yet-automatable grudge work to people instead.
There's the concept, and then there's the painting.
AI slop from a generic prompt is not the same as "using AI to get my concept in physical form faster."
Imagine, for example, a one-man animated movie. But, like, with a huge amount of work put into good, artistic, key-frames; what would previously have been a manga. That's possible, soon, and I think that's huge and actual art.
Completely out of touch to downplay the entire manga industry as "skill issue".
Akira Toriyama totally created Dragonball as a manga because he was just wasn't good enough to make an animated movie!
Berserk is a book because Kentaro Miura just had skill issue!
Only imagine if Tolkien wanted to create the Lord of the Rings if he had AI!
As if a medium only artistic merit because sufficiently advanced technology just didn't exist yet. groooaaaaan
By what metric? One way is to look at the Gini coefficient - that’s worse than ever.
The bottom 20% has 2-3% of total net worth in the US. The middle 40% has seen a decline from 36% in 1989 to 28% in 2020. The top 0.1% has seen their net worth capture double from 7% in 1989 to 14% today.
The subtle thing that net worth ignores of course is inflation from growth in costs, so actually it’s harder for most people than in 1989, unless you’re talking about the ease of buying a TV or phone. Technology is more available and cheaper than ever but food and medicine is more expensive than ever.
You're also wrong about costs -- people are wealthier today than in 1989 in constant, inflation-adjusted terms. It's true that some good are more expensive; but others are less expensive, and quality has increased significantly across most categories.
It has happened every single time.
As long as the older tools still exist to make art, I don’t see what the problem is. Use NBP to make your marketing pics, MJv2 for your art
I think the whole point is that in optimizing for instruction following and boring realism we’ve lost what could have been some unique artistic elements of a new medium, but anyway.
There aren't many pictures of it, but my mind jumped to that right away. I think I've seen a documentary where it looks a lot more similar.
In particular that hallway in the middle, where I remember that there was a statue kind of as a worship place. And on the right side of that dark halway there is what appears to be a statue.
Sadly all I was able to find were these:
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
Given these and that it changed over its history I think it's kind of a stretch to just say "it looks nothing like the Kowloon Walled City".
A large part of the magic of art is the human choices that go into it.
This is more akin to going to a supermarket and buying peanut butter (prompt: peanut butter, filter by brand/price/taste). The product may be tasty and enjoyable but I am not impressed by that.
