Hiring* an AI** Artist for LessWrong/Lightcone
Over the past few years, Lightcone has started using AI art in more of our products. This is a fairly easy and fun part of our job, but I’ve noticed often there’s just a lotta art that needs to get made which we don’t quite have the bandwidth to do ourselves.
So I’m looking into hiring* an AI** artist for periodic contract gigs (this wouldn’t be a fulltime thing, I have one initial job in mind, if it goes well we may periodically have other jobs to offer).
* we aren’t sure we want to hire a person for this, this isn’t a top organizational priority, it’s more like I’m checking if someone exists who would integrate pretty quickly/easily into our workflow.
** in theory, we could hire, like, a traditional artist. I think realistically it just wouldn’t actually be worth the money. The part of me that originally got a degree in Art is sad about this, but, like, notably we didn’t have much art at all on LessWrong until AI made it much lower cost and achievable for it to be a lightweight part of product iteration.
Onboarding into the Lightcone Aesthetic / House Style
I know a lot of people are making lots of AI art for fun these days and are pretty good at it. I think it is a noticeably different task to make a bunch of art in a particular style matching particular aesthetic guidelines.
In order for this to make sense, we need someone who has good artistic taste, who is able to make high level creative decisions while tracking a lot of subtleties about what the Lightcone Aesthetic (and various sub-aesthetics) are going for.
I honestly have no idea how much makes sense to pay for this sort of role, I could imagine anywhere from “pretty cheap for someone who finds it very fun/easy and hits our minimum requirements” to “pay more serious professional artist salary for someone we can trust to make high level decisions autonomously.”
If you are interested, send me a DM with a link to a portfolio.
You might want to advertise on reddit or somewhere with more artists. You could ask for three specific arts for three specific posts to make your job easier. (I could do it for you.)
I do plan to post a couple other places but I think I do need people with both good artistic taste and good familiarity with LessWrong. (I’m planning to ask on Bountied Rationality)
For this role to actually save us work, they need to not require that much onboarding. We could hypothetically train someone with less familiarity with LessWrong but I think that’d take more time than it’s worth. (We need someone who’s able to both understand the existing LessWrong aesthetic, and what we’re going for with that aesthetic, and when/how/why it’d be appropriate to deviate from it. Most of the work often involves figuring out what broad choices would be appropriate for a given piece, so we need to be able to give pretty vague instructions and have them figure it out from context)
(The particular project I’m looking to hire for is designing cover art and ~6 illustrations for a Sequence Highlights book, which involves figuring out an overall unifying motif for the book that is somewhat-distinct from the usual LessWrong vibe but compatible with it.)
I’d like to apply because I experiment a lot specifically on variation within an area of concept space, though I’ll have to assemble a portfolio. Either way, I’d also like to throw this idea out there for consideration:
It would be nice for this to be paired with a commitment to use only ethically sourced image models, and to use that to help explain what that even means.
I am commenting as to commit publicly.
I Will: Create an AI art portfolio, and DM it to Raemon by 10pm AEST, tonight.
Did you?
I did! Thank you for the peer pressure
Are you still looking for someone to fill this role?
Hmm. So, not actively, it turned out last time it demanded a fair amount of time/context from the team to accomplish the goal we were aiming for.
I’m potentially interested in someone who thinks of themselves as having actively great taste and skill here.