| > Is the same not true of point-and-shoot photography? Or crayons? Those have a skill floor though, even if it is quite, quite low. If you can't manage to get the object you're trying to take a photo of in-frame, or manage to draw the thing you're trying to draw, there's no amount the tool can do to compensate for that. > There's a near-endless supply of low-effort content due to tools designed to be easy-to-use. Anecdotally I still see more "crappy photographs" (many of which my own) than "crappy AI art". I mean it depends how you define crappy photographs. My phone camera is a tool, and I use that tool to document things for all manner of purposes. I wouldn't call those photos artistic in any way at all. It feels like you're deliberately saying "all photos are art, and most of them are bad" when I think the vast, vast, vast majority of those, including by the people who took them, would not be referred to as art. > There are reasons why working-class people are vastly under-represented in arts. I think limited ability to dedicate a huge chunk of time to a creative pursuit is a largely overlooked reason, not just lack of interest. Agreed wholeheartedly. But, a working class person who has things they want to express artistically is going hit various walls with generative models very quickly, in much the same way I did. Like, if you feel a creative verve at all, I just can't fathom you looking at the wide assortment of all manner of tooling, and choosing the one where you're playing telephone with a toddler that paints over-smoothed, nonsensical photo-realistic pictures. And again we go back to the notion that "the process is the point" and as a creative, I completely agree. There are certainly times I feel frustration at my tools and wish they would just make what the hell I'm trying to make, but if that was the entire process, I would get nothing from it. Figuring out what prompt will get you what kind of output is interesting, but it's not fulfilling. > I think it's also fine to want to, say, design a game without hand-painting all the normal maps - instead generating them with ML tools based on your textures. To be totally real I've never heard of someone drawing normal maps. I thought the traditional way you went about making those was having a high-detail model inside a low-detail one, and generating them that way. > Someone not specializing to have fine-level technical skills in all relevant areas doesn't imply lack of creativity/interest at a broader scale. It's not a matter of high or low skills, it's a matter of wanting skills and wanting easily made repetitive crap. If you're the kind of person who finds it fulfilling to slam text into one of these things and get your teddy bear smoking weed pictures, and that's all you want and are fulfilled, more power to you. I wouldn't personally call that art, nor would I find it nourishing to my creative spirit, I would say that's just instant gratification and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Now if you take that stuff and then go try to sell it... I mean that's your prerogative, I'm definitely not buying and I would encourage anyone else to just type a similar prompt into a generator and get it that way. |
Point-and-shoot cameras, finger painting, or crayons have a lower skill floor than even basic text-to-image generation, I'd claim. You can give those to children prior to the age where they'd have a proper grasp on describing visuals through language/writing.
Yet, I don't feel as though the glut of low-skill content subtracts from any of those mediums - regardless of whether you disqualify a child's macaroni art from being art. Probably even the opposite; I've enjoyed areas that have lowered the technical skill barrier to allow people to create who otherwise wouldn't have been able to (like the creative explosion around Flash games, with ActionScript and the tooling being relatively beginner-friendly) in addition to it leading to more (even if proportionally less) high-skill content.
> But, a working class person who has things they want to express artistically is going hit various walls with generative models very quickly, in much the same way I did. Like, if you feel a creative verve at all, I just can't fathom you looking at the wide assortment of all manner of tooling, and choosing the one where you're playing telephone with a toddler that paints over-smoothed, nonsensical photo-realistic pictures.
I think the walls of what's possible using generative techniques in your workflow are almost by definition* further out than with only traditional techniques, and that the idea generative tools must be like "playing telephone with a toddler" comes largely from not having tried out most of the generative tools available or typical workflows.
I'd recommend checking out ComfyUI, starting with some existing examples (https://comfyworkflows.com/ seems to show workflows, when you click on the image) then playing around to see what's possible. Or for something a bit less technical, NVIDIA Canvas is fun, and useful for skyboxes: https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/studio/canvas/
*: For a while 3D ML tools in particular did somewhat lock you out of other tools due to working on NeRF representations, but increasingly there's the option for regular meshes with sensible topology.
> And again we go back to the notion that "the process is the point" and as a creative, I completely agree. There are certainly times I feel frustration at my tools and wish they would just make what the hell I'm trying to make, but if that was the entire process, I would get nothing from it. Figuring out what prompt will get you what kind of output is interesting, but it's not fulfilling.
Do you not think you could be fulfilled with tools that let you focus on the bigger picture? I've worked with traditional procedural generation for cityscapes before and I don't feel it necessarily took away - just widened the scale I could create at, while still allowing me to zoom in and tweak individual buildings where I needed to.
> To be totally real I've never heard of someone drawing normal maps. I thought the traditional way you went about making those was having a high-detail model inside a low-detail one, and generating them that way.
If you have a 3D mesh sculpted then yeah you'd bake its normals from geometry - but you don't have that if you've just, for instance, painted some planks texture in Photoshop. You could hand-paint a normal map, hand-paint a height map and generate the normal map from that, or - as is increasingly common - generate normal/specular/roughness based on texture.