It’s interesting how diffusion models are getting bitter lessened by LLMs. I suspect anthropic has tens of thousands of RL environments recreating famous paintings with code because it was anthropic employees who first started posting about these capabilities on X.
Opus is also getting decent pixel art. I have ran some experiments with Opus 5.5 to turn 90s pinball displays (black and white pixel art) into double resolution colored remastered pixels.
I prompted it a lot but didn’t draw any pixels. Seems to be bad at hands still. I think a skilled pixel artist could greatly speed up their work with Claude code.
It also makes me sad for artists. They didn’t get paid much anyway. Art should be something human to human like writing text. Although, most large commercial art products (marvel movies) already lack any human to human connection you see in paintings or indie games. The large commercial art products will be 50% AI soon.
AI doesn't have to cause human extinction to be harmful. It just needs to make it impossible for humans to get by doing the things that make us human.
And even in a hypothetical utopia, I'd like to ask the AI boosters how much art they think would be created if every piece was equivalent to a kindergartener's best scribbles: held onto not because it's good, but becase "aww, a human did it, now let's go look at some quality work".
The history of science has been one of increasing humility.
First Earth was not the center of the universe. Then the Sun wasn’t either. Then the galaxy wasn’t. Then we learn that we were not literally made by a deity but a product of a natural process, and are closely related to monkeys.
Now we’ve learned how to build machines that can do things we once thought only we could do, and it took no magic. It’s just a lot of math. We are learning how it works.
We are not special. That’s been the lesson, over and over.
For many this induces existential despair. I wonder now if it’s behind what seems to be “peak narcissism” at least in our culture. Maybe it’s compensatory narcissism, a reaction on some deep level to the fact that science keeps knocking us off pedestals. The narcissist fears the truth because the truth does that.
But there’s a way out of that despair.
Stop needing to be special. Stop caring. You don’t have to be the main character to have the right to just exist.
I’ll continue to enjoy human art because it speaks of the lived experience of another human. It doesn’t have to be the greatest most elaborate possible art. Art isn’t like that anyway. It just is.
I’ll also continue to be fascinated by the fact that machines can now at least emulate it, and can do so in amazing ways like writing an ad hoc program.
Now wait until we meet extraterrestrials. That’ll be another notch. Earth isn’t even special. Life isn’t even special. There’s probably a trillion biospheres at least.
moojacob · · focus · HN ↗
Opus is also getting decent pixel art. I have ran some experiments with Opus 5.5 to turn 90s pinball displays (black and white pixel art) into double resolution colored remastered pixels.
<a href="https://files.catbox.moe/tbx2u7.png" rel="nofollow">https://files.catbox.moe/tbx2u7.png
I prompted it a lot but didn’t draw any pixels. Seems to be bad at hands still. I think a skilled pixel artist could greatly speed up their work with Claude code.
It also makes me sad for artists. They didn’t get paid much anyway. Art should be something human to human like writing text. Although, most large commercial art products (marvel movies) already lack any human to human connection you see in paintings or indie games. The large commercial art products will be 50% AI soon.
0c3ca83 · · focus · HN ↗
And even in a hypothetical utopia, I'd like to ask the AI boosters how much art they think would be created if every piece was equivalent to a kindergartener's best scribbles: held onto not because it's good, but becase "aww, a human did it, now let's go look at some quality work".
api · · focus · HN ↗
First Earth was not the center of the universe. Then the Sun wasn’t either. Then the galaxy wasn’t. Then we learn that we were not literally made by a deity but a product of a natural process, and are closely related to monkeys.
Now we’ve learned how to build machines that can do things we once thought only we could do, and it took no magic. It’s just a lot of math. We are learning how it works.
We are not special. That’s been the lesson, over and over.
For many this induces existential despair. I wonder now if it’s behind what seems to be “peak narcissism” at least in our culture. Maybe it’s compensatory narcissism, a reaction on some deep level to the fact that science keeps knocking us off pedestals. The narcissist fears the truth because the truth does that.
But there’s a way out of that despair.
Stop needing to be special. Stop caring. You don’t have to be the main character to have the right to just exist.
I’ll continue to enjoy human art because it speaks of the lived experience of another human. It doesn’t have to be the greatest most elaborate possible art. Art isn’t like that anyway. It just is.
I’ll also continue to be fascinated by the fact that machines can now at least emulate it, and can do so in amazing ways like writing an ad hoc program.
Now wait until we meet extraterrestrials. That’ll be another notch. Earth isn’t even special. Life isn’t even special. There’s probably a trillion biospheres at least.
xyzsparetimexyz · · focus · HN ↗