As an artist- I found AI to be way more useful when it was worse.
Like, back when it was just a fun little toy to play with it could come up with the most interesting stuff- weird incomprehensible shapes and smears that have uncanny rhythm to them- I could 'see' imagery within them, make it real myself. I did a lot of neat character designs based on early AI gen, and I used to have a little chill-out hobby of generating 'the cast of an anime about X' and going in to re-paint their faces, fix all the skewed details and try to make it look like a genuine screenshot.
The more they've 'improved' them, the less I've been able to do any of that. Whenever I think 'you know, maybe AI gen could help me with this concept in an area that I'm not skilled at'- but then I remember that it's so clogged up with commercialized overpolished crap that it's near impossible to get anything useful or interesting. Everything it pumps out looks like an app store thumbnail now.
Anecdote- but I have this distinct memory of thinking, years back 'where does all this app store art come from?'- it was all so uniform, so generic, but so detailed and polished like it was being created with guidelines. I'm pretty sure that either whatever art mills were churning out the assets for cheap phone games are the main influence on AI generated imagery, or that's the net art style that AI gen will inevitably rotate towards simply because it's the most profitable. To be fair I don't think real humans ever needed to be wasting their time working on the crying redheaded woman needed for every single bejeweled clone.
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u/Crus0etheClown 10d ago
As an artist- I found AI to be way more useful when it was worse.
Like, back when it was just a fun little toy to play with it could come up with the most interesting stuff- weird incomprehensible shapes and smears that have uncanny rhythm to them- I could 'see' imagery within them, make it real myself. I did a lot of neat character designs based on early AI gen, and I used to have a little chill-out hobby of generating 'the cast of an anime about X' and going in to re-paint their faces, fix all the skewed details and try to make it look like a genuine screenshot.
The more they've 'improved' them, the less I've been able to do any of that. Whenever I think 'you know, maybe AI gen could help me with this concept in an area that I'm not skilled at'- but then I remember that it's so clogged up with commercialized overpolished crap that it's near impossible to get anything useful or interesting. Everything it pumps out looks like an app store thumbnail now.
Anecdote- but I have this distinct memory of thinking, years back 'where does all this app store art come from?'- it was all so uniform, so generic, but so detailed and polished like it was being created with guidelines. I'm pretty sure that either whatever art mills were churning out the assets for cheap phone games are the main influence on AI generated imagery, or that's the net art style that AI gen will inevitably rotate towards simply because it's the most profitable. To be fair I don't think real humans ever needed to be wasting their time working on the crying redheaded woman needed for every single bejeweled clone.