Citizens of this city high in the sky imagine it so fully in their minds that no one there needs to open their eyes to walk the streets and live their normal lives. But if one makes the mistake of opening their eyes and tries to see the city directly, they would immediately fall through the clouds to the ground deep below.

Citizens there gather their tools at the bottom of a giant staircase and climb up countless stairs, only to find out that what they were planning to do has already been done by the time they reach the top.

Dissapointed, they descend to grab a new set of tools and make new plans for tomorrow, only for the same thing to happen again.

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.

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’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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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