Comment by ChrisArchitect
1 day ago
Appreciate that writeup. Very detailed insights into the process. However those conclusions left me on the fence about whether I 'liked' the project. The conclusions about 'unlocking scale' and commodity content having zero value. Where does that leave you and this project? Does it really matter that much that the project couldn't exist without genAI? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all. As with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. We're not ready for it. We're not ready for the scale of impact the tech touches in multitude of areas. Including the artistic world. The diminished value and loss of opportunities. We're not ready for the impacts of use by bad actors. The scale of output like this, as cool as it is, is out of balance with the loss of huge chunk of human activity and expression. Sigh.
At the risk of rehashing the same conversation over and over again, I think this is true of every technology ever.
Personally I'm extremely excited about all of the creative domains that this technology unlocks, and also extremely saddened/worried about all of the crafts it makes obsolete (or financially non-viable)...
Do you seriously believe this[1] makes any craft obsolete or financially non-viable?
[1] https://files.catbox.moe/1uphaw.png
This is a fairly cool and novel application of generative AI[2], but it did not generate pixel art and it's still wildly incoherent slop when you examine it closely. This mostly works because it uses scale to obfuscate the flaws; users are expected to be zoomed out and not looking at the details. But the details are what makes art work. You could not sell a game or an animation like this. This is not replacing anybody.
[2] It's also wholly unrepresentative of general use-cases. 99.99999999% of generative AI usage does not involve a ton of manual engineering labour fine-tuning a model and doing the things you did to get this set up. Even with all of that effort, what you've produced here is never replacing a commercially viable pixel artist. The rest of the world slapping a prompt into an online generator is even further away from doing that.
Does it really matter that much that a sewage treatment plant couldn't exist without automated sensors? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all.
> Where does that leave you and this project? Does it really matter that much that the project couldn't exist without genAI? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all. As with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. We're not ready for it. We're not ready for the scale of impact the tech touches in multitude of areas. Including the artistic world. The diminished value and loss of opportunities. We're not ready for the impacts of use by bad actors. The scale of output like this, as cool as it is, is out of balance with the loss of huge chunk of human activity and expression. Sigh.
If you don’t see these tools as a way for ALL of us to more-intimately reach more of our intended audiences,
whether as a musician, marketer, small business, whatever,
then I don’t know if you were really passionate or excited about what you were doing in the first place.