vanadium1st

Home Sports is a collection of five sports that includes amazing AR pickleball and badminton, and a pretty good AR mini-golf. So I would recommend starting with it. But it does need quite a bit of space—about 2 × 1.5 m. I had to rearrange my room to make it fit.

I get that there needed to be tradeoffs, I just disagree with this particular one. I could suggest many other ways to save ten bucks in hardware costs. Any other cost saving measure would still allow to play the same games, just with worse performance. But this choice cuts the stock device off from an entire class of apps - in my opinion the best of them all.

Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one.

In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, and I don’t think it ever will be, no matter how good the graphics get. That’s assuming they even solve the motion sickness problem, which doesn’t seem solvable to me at this point.

The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings. You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both. So the controls have to become really stiff and avoid requiring wide movement, at which point you might as well just push buttons on a gamepad.

But AR is a completely different thing. No motion sickness, no risk in any movement, you can move around without silly threadmills, and no exclusion from the world. It’s truly amazing. The AR boxing, pickleball, ping pong and golf are so much closer to real thing then to a videogame adaptation, even the shitty Quest graphics don't ruin the magic. Those AR experiences don't work on videogame rules and really deserve their own name and category - they're as different from gaming as books are from movies. If VR headsets don’t die out, AR is going to be the thing that brings them to the mainstream. I just wish it had more attention, more apps, and more non-Meta mainstream platforms. Not this time, sadly.

Glad that you used this exact example! This guy doesn’t have a photorealistic memory. At least it’s far from as good as it’s claimed to be. He’s an artist proficient in a particular style - better than most, but not superhuman. When he’s not drawing from a direct reference, he’s simply making up details based on assumptions, not on photorealistic memory. Here’s a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyPqQIHkasI

He looks at a city and then draws a picture of it. It’s very detailed, so we assume he remembered all of it and recreated it accurately. But if you compare any part of it it to the actual photo of the city he saw, you’ll see that he only recreated it roughly — some landmarks, the general shape of the coastline. He probably got the number of bridges right.

But you couldn’t use this as a map. If you were trying to find a particular building that isn’t among the top 15 most memorable ones, it’s probably not in his drawing, with a completely random building taking its place instead. Every part of that drawing is filled with mistakes and assumptions that would never be made by someone who could actually see the landscape in their mind like a photo.

And it’s the same with every other claim of photorealistic memory - it’s always some kind of trick where people have a decent but realistic level of memory. And then they fill the gaps with tons of generated detail that we either can’t check, or wouldn't bother to check.

I mean - it's either similar or it's not. Things I see with my eyes are definetely photo-realistic. So mental visualisations similar to that would also be photo-realistic. If they're not - they can have interesting qualities, but they're not similar.

Speaking of the Apple test, as many other commenters here I truly believe that people who describe themselves as being at 1 are actually much closer to 4, they just aren’t aware of it or don’t understand the concept well. https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...

I’m an artist - I draw professionally and studied drawing in a group setting. It seems like a profession that would require the highest level of visual imagination. And I wish I could see clear pictures in my head, but I don’t. I need to have a reference in front of me, constantly compare it with my sketch, and refine it using knowledge and techniques that took years to learn.

When discussing this concept with my artist peers, many say they’re at 1. But they clearly aren’t - I can see that in their work process. There’s an immediate difference in art quality depending on whether the artist is drawing from reference or not. If someone could truly see the picture in their head and draw from it, they could skip years of art training and become good almost immediately. Such a genius would be clearly obvious to their peers. But I haven’t met a single person like that - it seems like everyone works with roughly the same hardware as I do and has to develop the same workarounds to become good.

I believe that Kim Jung Gi was a 1. I’m sure there were other historic geniuses with such a superhuman ability. But I’m also sure that 99% of people just aren’t there - whether they admit it or not.

When you're standing in front of a mirror, can you ask yourself a question and then answer it without saying anything out loud?

There's a guy who is a genius at creating Reface DX patches, and he uploads them all for free on SoundMondo. I recommend everyone checking this video to see how wonderful Reface DX can sound. After discovering those patches I've sold my Reface CP because I've liked the DX simulated Rhodes just as much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWcEruvc9eA&t=72s https://soundmondo.yamahasynth.com/user/7744

I was really pro open internet. I remember the old internet and feel nostalgia about it that probably won't ever completely fade.

I am Ukrainian, and when some years ago my government banned the most popular social network at our country - Russian-made VK, I felt strange about it. I kind of understood some of the security concerns, but didn't feel like they were enough to turn off my open internet fantasies and free-speech absolutism.

Now I totally get it and am happy that it happened sooner that later. Turns out that the security concern was as real as it gets. Russia gets info from VK to jail hundreds of people, and at least they one less weapon to use against Ukrainians.

And I have to admit that I've used VK and probably wouldn't stop doing it if my government didn't ban it. Now I am kind of hoping that they will do the same with TikTok. With all of this experience I still have no strength to quit it by myself.

I have several artistic lives.

My first one was in graphic design. I've studied it in college and done it professionally for many years. At first it was fascinating and artistically fulfilling. Each new logo was a small new adventure. I've worked on them for weeks, I fought with clients to keep my ideas, It took tons of effort from me and from them to achieve something. Through the years I became so much better at logo making. It took me a week to produce a logo that I was kind of happy with. Now I can do 5 better ones just in a couple of hours. I went through the same process that the author of the article went and became an art-producing machine. But at the same time I burned out and lost the love for my artworks. They lost their story and meaning. They were not special anymore. I remember the projects I've worked on in the first months of my career, but it's hard to remember what I've worked on last month. My hands are having fun doing what they know, but the artistic soul feels empty and unfulfilled.

At some point of burning out on graphic design I've picked up music. Started singing, learning instruments from scratch, writing simple stuff. Five years later, I have about 10-15 songs that I am really happy with. I don't have children, but those songs are the most similar that I've experienced to fatherhood. I am so proud of them. They don't feel like mine, or even like a part of me, but I love them and am happy that I did what was needed for them to exist.

My musical life is an absolute struggle. It was so hard starting learning music in my 20s from scratch. It was hard picking up each instrument, hard to perform before people. Each song takes me months of stressful rewriting. I still haven't recorded most of my stuff and am sticking to live performance for now. Of course I spend most of my practice time thinking of how I can improve this process, get better, more efficient. I love my songs and I want to be able to create much more of them and much faster.

But at the same moment, do I?

I am not happy or unhappy about it. I just don't have a moral problem with it.

I did the same thing to get into the logo industry. In the process of learning I've analysed hundreds of logos made by other artists. I've tried hard to understand how they work, copy the best practices and styles and do the my best effort so my logos could be as good. I've trained on this dataset and got to be successful enough to become a part of it.

I don't have a moral problem with AI doing the same. It will probably be hard to compete with it, but for now I manage. If I won't be able to compete anymore - I will adapt and apply my skills elsewhere.

When we get to $0 for any possible artwork of any quality - yeah, it's game over for everyone, the end of the industry. Right now we are far from it, thankfully. AI still can't produce usable commercial quality files. Most of them are simply not good enough, and even those that look kind of good have to be fine-tuned and reformatted by a human artist. Which takes real skill and effort and costs money.

And until someone does any job for some amount of money, a beginner can start his career by doing the same job for less money. This will still be the case no matter what technology comes next.

Her style isn't original and unique to her from the art world perspective. There are dozens of people who draw exactly like this, and hundreds who can draw like it and just choose not to. This is not a criticism against her personally - it's practically impossible to have a truly unique style in this world with millions of other artists.

The fact that pictures in that style can be meaningfully described by her brand is only a result of the success of her personal branding effort. She kept a consistent style, she promoted her work, established a website, personal portfolio, publicised her career. She didn't invent this style, but made an effort to claim it as hers. This is a regular path for an artist. It didn't just happen to her like a robbery against her will - it took years of effort for her to establish her name like that in the public consciousness, culture and search engines. Stable Diffusion just builds out of those things.

If this artist didn't exist, the style would still exist in works of other artists. It just wouldn't have this useful tag of her name. We would have to put something like Modern-colorful-flat-vector-cute-disney-textured-cartoon-illustration to get the same results. But since she claimed this style as hers, we can just use her name to effectively describe it. I don't see it as a tragedy, I see it as a success story.

This is a hundredth time in history when technology progressed and artists had to learn new ways to make money. I've learned art in art school - none of the jobs that my art teachers had in their youth are relevant right now. The tools, the pricing, the workflow, the clients requests and expectations are all different. You can keep some of the skill, but you still need to learn and adapt to the new reality. Sometimes it takes 5, sometimes 15 years, but the job of the artist is always transforming.

The illustrator from the article is probably drawing in Procreate with an Ipad. Probably doing her promotion on social media and doing business with her clients remotely. All of those are recent technological advancements that appeared in her lifetime and completely outperformed the previous way to do commercial illustration. Illustrators that worked before that had to learn those new ways, or lose their jobs. This happened dozens of time in history. Now is the turn for current illustrators to adapt.

I am a graphic artist. In the recent months I've read dozens of articles and threads like this. I still can't see what the big deal is.

Graphic artists don't have trade secrets or unique impossible techniques. If someone can see your picture, he can copy its style. It becomes publicly available as soon as you publish it. For the vast majority of graphic styles, if one author can do it, then hundreds of his colleagues can do it too, often just as well. If one author becomes popular and expensive - then his less popular colleagues can copy his style for cheaper. The market for this is enormous and this was the case for probably hundreds of years.

I personally am a non-brand artist like that. More often then not clients come to me with a reference not from my portfolio and ask me to produce something similar. I will do it, probably five times cheaper than the artist or studio who did the original. It may not be exactly as good, but it won't be five times worse.

Some clients are happy to pay extra for the name brand, and will pay. Some want to spend less, and will settle for a non-brand copy.

The clients that are willing to pay for the name brand will still be there for the same reason they are now, and the existence of Stable Diffusion changes nothing to them. And the ones that just want the cheap copy would never contact the big name artist in the first place. The copy market will shift, but the big name artist doesn't even have to be aware of it.

Autocomplete in Gmail has been getting more and more robust. At first it only suggested grammatical correction in words. Later it started giving advice on better sentence structure and then it just started suggesting whole sentences. Each of those steps I loved. More often then not it just says what I wanted to say, with less button pushes, and without all of the mistakes that I make as a non-native english speaker. I sound smarter in gmail and I like it.

If I didn't have this experience, then giving the machine any input on what I write would seem crazy to me. I would think that language is too personal, too contextual, that I need control over every word and every letter.

But now I love writing with the help of the machine. It still feels like me speaking, the machine doesn't add any extra context that I don't approve of. It really feels like the messages are still mine, and the autocomplete just helps me extract my thoughts from my head in a better and more effective way.

I sell logos and vector illustrations. I have tons of pre-made ones in my portfolio. If someone likes one of my logos for their business - they can just buy it outright. They don't even have to contact me and can just buy the file package generated by the website.

If the client likes the logo, but can't figure out the interface, or want me to apply some changes - he contacts me. I talk to him, do everything that he requests and at the end I sell him the logo + premium for my time and additional custom work.

Usually people ask me for things similar to what they saw in my portfolio. Rarely do I get unusual requests like this graph. If I get a request that I can't do - I will say no or refer them to the graph guy. But if I am feeling creative - I tell them an unreasonably high price. Sometimes they agree and it turns out that I was a graph guy all along

Many services like that already exist - at this moment they are using stock images. Once AI generated images become as good and predictable as stock images - I have no doubt that the services will switch to them.

But, stock images have existed for many years. They are considerably cheaper than custom work, are as professional looking and are available immediately. Sounds like an absolute game changer, but in reality the market for custom design work didn't die.

I am not sure that I understand all of the reasons why people pay extra for custom design work in a world where automated stock services exist. Some of my guesses are

- People don't trust their visual taste and want a trusted human to make those decisions for them

- Discovery problem. People are simply unaware of such services and their benefits

- People are willing to pay premium for the knowledge that their design has a human author.

- Last mile problem. Even if the image looks 99% like what you want, you might still need a guy to save it / fix it / crop it / format it because you don't know how to do it yourself.

I am sure that there are more factors. And even if AI images will bridge the quality gap to human-made stock images, all of this will still apply to them. Many services and technologies have been trying to solve those problems for many years. AI will add to that process, but I don't see a reason for a dramatic change in the near future.

I am a guy who does those kinds of Fiverr commissions. Not the $10 ones, but plenty of $50-100 dollars ones. I have a lot of thoughts and concerns about the impact of Dalle-2 on visual arts as a whole, but I see no threat at all to my Fiverr business.

90% of my clients couldn't do anything without a human in chat that walks them through all the steps. There's no possible interface simple enough for them to do everything without my help. They can't figure out which files they want and what to do with them once they got it. If there's any possible customisation option - they will use it to make the pre-made template uglier, and then will ask me if I could do something to make it look good again. That's what they are paying me for.

What surprised me in your story is that you have actually written those half finished books and songs. You've spend your time, you've tried it out and have an actual understanding of how this process works. Because I've heard dozens of stories like yours, of people regretting not following their artistic pursuits. Practically all of those people didn't write anything at all and never tried to put the pen to paper. For those people the path to artistry in an eternity. But you are already there. You've made the hardest steps and now you can only get better.

I doubt it - GPT-3 is also restricted for users in Ukraine.

After confirming the ukraininan phone every page gives the same error - "OpenAI's API is not available in your country." The same goes for GPT-3. They just banned our country as a whole. For a ukraininan right now this situation is admittedly not the biggest problem in my life. Still don't see a reason for OpenAI to restrict our access.

I love that corpspeak exists. It makes it possible for me to make a living.

I am not a native english speaker. I am doing ok, but often I have to google pre-made sentences when I feel that I sound off, but can't figure out the problem by myself. I also lack the natural talent for talking with people online. I am a graphic designer, so my primary skills are in the visual art stuff, and all the speaking and project management is a secondary skill at best. But I couldn't work as a freelancer without it.

Without corpspeak culture I would constantly sound like either a robot or a dummy, and it would hurt my career by a lot. Thanks god everyone in the corporate world already sounds like that. I can just follow this simple set of tropes and pre-made sentences and it all works out well.

Why is it still closed for users in Ukraine? Are there many other countries excluded, or are we the only unlucky ones?

Yes, Dall-e 2 is definitely much better at it than other current AI services. But, most people still don't have access to it. Like me for example. I've been in the waitlist from the start, got a cool portfolio - still didn't get in. Maybe I'm just unlucky, or maybe the problem is that I'm in Ukraine. For some reason OpenAi GPT-3 Playground is restricted in our country, so I expect that other OpenAi products might be closed to me for the same reason.

I've seen many examples of Dalle-2 logos similar to yours. It seems like it got at least to a step "good enough to be usable, but with quality on the cheaper side". Which is super impressive and already puts a lot of designers out of work. I sell cheap stock logos on the side, I would feel that loss of income. But right at this moment there's definitely still a quality ceiling for it and the AI didn't put me out of the job completely. If you want a good and expensive-looking logo, you still need a professional human.

I won't be surprised when that changes too and the AI's get to my level. They are already so much closer than I could ever imagine. But at this moment they aren't there.

Using existing logos for inspiration (like the NFL ones) is a tightrope because when you get inspired too much you get into legal problems. No one wants a plagiarised or copied logo. Every small borrowed idea, color, composition or a detail is a potential problem. And if you share too much of them - you have an unusable logo. No such problem with AI logos. You can be as much inspired as you want by it, up to a straight copy if you find it good enough.

I am already doing exactly that, and am getting paid for it.

I am a logo artist and I sell pre-made logo designs. Before the current AI services I had to come up with visual ideas by myself, like a caveman. Now I use the AI to generate a bunch of sketches and blurry ideas, and then use my graphic design experience to polish them up to a usable level. Here's how it looks. https://imgur.com/a/DKTsKdC

I am absolutely sure that a lot of people are doing the same right now, just keeping quiet about it.

Yeah, it's weird. The music scene is as live as it ever was here, along with all other parts of the normal city life.

It's not really a new situation for us. This war continues for 8 years, and all this time the front was about 200 miles from us. During this new phase of the invasion the frontline got a little closer to Dnipro, but not that much.

Regular life here stopped in winter-spring, when we didn't know which cities will withstand this phase of the invasion. Tragically Kherson, Mariupol and many others are lost as of now. But we in Dnipro were lucky enough and life kind of continues here.

There are changes of course. Practically no artist in Ukraine gets paid now at any level. Every single concert is for charity, gathering funds for arms or refugees. And, as with all other life, there are constant interruptions of air raid sirens.

Other than that, music scene lives as usual. People still go to concerts and artists still perform. Predictably a lot of sad sad songs gets written now, but honestly no one really wants to hear them - everyone here gets enough negativity from everywhere else. The best bet is to stick to the happy and hopeful stuff.

Thank you for your interest. At this moment I am only performing live and am not proud enough of my performance level to record it and share it online

Outside of my regular job, I am an indie folk music artist, trying to rise in the local music scene here in Dnipro, Ukraine. Even though learning to be a musician from scratch in my 20s was a hard process that took years and years, by far the hardest part of it was trying to establish a passive income, so I could have enough free time for practicing, performing and writing music.

A lot of my talented peers are so much better then me in all of the music and performing stuff, but can't find enough time for it between regular boring work. Woody Allen said that 80% of success is just showing up, and it seems true. But now I see how a lot of talented people simply can't afford to show up. They are missing open mics and performing opportunities because they can't skip another shift as a barista, they can't find time for rehearsal because of soul killing the low paying bank job. I keep thinking about all the beautiful songs that are left to be unwritten.

I guess the life of artists was always like that - either you are struggling, or you have a source of passive income that carries you through the development years. And I do think that this moment in history is as full of opportunity as it ever was. Still, it was a surprising discovery for me. I really thought that at least at the starting level it would be mostly about who plays their chords better, and it surprisingly isn't.