The originals look like malformed mutants at 256x256 with nonsensical key bits and strange twisted handles.
Note that this does not replace a good pixel art artist either - for things like walls, anything that needs to connect together or tile like a dungeon wall or castle, or a cohesive art style, this will not do. But for rapidly identifiable different quest item drops it's not terrible.
"Within the next year or two, you’ll be able to make content in real time: 30 frames a second, high resolution. It’ll be expensive, but it’ll be possible. Then, in 10 years, you’ll be able to buy an Xbox with a giant AI processor, and all the games are dreams.".
As someone who used to take quite a lot of psychedelics, there's something quite terrifying about the promise of this premise - it takes me back to the wrong sort of trips where the ever-unfolding strata of reality became too much bear and I'd end up mentally cowering beneath the unrelenting bigness of it all.
The infinite dreamspace is unholy-big and nt somewhere I'd much choose to get lost.
Or maybe I totally will...
- ed - Notwithstanding the obvious realisation that I could just take the helmet off, or remove the contact lenses, or whatever we have in a couple of decades.
You will be able to visualize your own nightmares when you are awake.
One good quote from that era: "You should be no more concerned that a computer can beat you in chess than that a car can beat you in a race."
Technology changes the experience of being human. Chess used to be the marker of human intelligence; that passed. Now some forms of creativity will too.
In the case of DALL-E and GPT-3, I believe they will undermine human creativity and usher in a new era where fewer people care about slowly crafted skills like painting that require years or decades of practice and patience to master if the barrier to just have the art in front of you in seconds becomes so low.
It might get to the point that people will divide themselves on ideological grounds that AI art is "impure" and attack each other if they cannot prove its origin. I'm not saying that I'm one of those people that would join the pushback, given that a coming explosion in AI art is all but inevitable, but I'm describing what I think the new technology is going to cause the masses to believe - the population that aren't enthusiastic tech evangelists. When the expectations of millions of people are set by DALL-E and the like, I don't think the prospects will be universally positive.
Look at the number of people on HN asking if certain comments were written by GPT-3; they seem to appear weekly. I don't think implying that you didn't actually write the comment you posted will be taken very well by some people outside of an insular circle like HN once the general public becomes fully aware of AI, and could very well grow into a well-known insult if there ever comes to be a rift in opinions around AI art.
I don't feel the need to check for reality. I've seen screenshots from games that look more realistic than some pictures I've taken (Forza on max settings at the right angle might as well be a photograph) and this trend will only continue.
This tool can be considered more of an automated version of meme communities, where dedicated members will spend an hour photoshopping muppets into historic events and making the pictures look absolutely believable. The only novelty I see is that the computer now does a lot (but not all) work for you.
There are nice opportunities here. If you need a stock photo of something very specific, you'll soon be able to generate one with the right query and the right AI. Small companies can generate fancy brands without paying professional designer's fees, especially if all they need is a billboard and not a whole suite of office supplies. You can generate your own posters and decorations featuring interesting landscapes and scenes in any style you want.
The current iterations of these algorithms are quite limited in many aspects and sometimes uncanny or even horrifying, but I look forward to a future where I can imagine something, describe it, and have it rendered into digital art just like I pictured, without having to spend decades on honing my skills as an artist.