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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

This example perfectly encapsulates the state of generative AI art.

You can click a few buttons and instantly get artwork that is indistinguishable from stuff made by professional artists for top-quality games. Amazing!

The downside is, your game is indistinguishable from every other game. Close your eyes and pick out anything in the isometric sci-fi/cyberpunk genre from Steam and the result will look exactly like this one. Heck you can probably import it directly from Unity's asset store without even bothering with Stable Diffusion.

There's the broader question of – what is AI adding that will appeal to people wanting to buy your game, and the answer to that is still probably nothing.

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What? I got the exact opposite impression. What I took away is that you can press the button and you will get something to look at, but the moment you actually need a seamless and coherent artist driven scene a lot of the work will still need human artists who are now merely painting with a very complex brush.

Your comment sticks with me because the art generated here does look very ai generated (the lack of any consistency between something basic like a building window sticks out) and I disagree it’s indistinguishable from professional artists.

That said it reminds me quite stingingly of the work of manga artist Tsutomu Nihe whose works is quite literally about characters going through infinitely large Lovecraft-esq superstructures generated by machines

https://kagi.com/images?q=tsutomu+nihei+architecture

I feel like asking "What is AI adding that will appeal to people wanting to buy your game" can be said about a majority of games with or without AI. It's possibly also the wrong question, AI isn't necessarily adding anything special but it IS enabling much more powerful tooling for the creation of games.

The prototyping power and getting a general feel for how you'd like your design to be is only going to get stronger, utilizing these tools as a solo dev is going to be (and already is) such a gamechanger.

People like OP are also putting in the extra work that I'd argue is significantly more than just pressing some buttons and getting some results, though I do concede the next era of low effort asset-flip style of games is going to flood the market soon enough.

My concern is we’re going to see the loss of creativity akin to what we see when directors us existing film scores as “dummy scores” to help establish mood.

> when directors us existing film scores as “dummy scores” to help establish mood.

Which then means that when the actual score for that film needs to be written, it pretty much has to sound like the dummy score, because all the scenes were filmed to match the dummy score.

> that is indistinguishable from stuff made by professional artists

Er - no, absolutely not. The moment I found myself in front of the screenshots I immediately noticed the very heavy patterns of NN-based generated graphic. Chiefly the distinctively smudged shapes - like 3D Google Maps as opposed to their earlier photographic aerial view.

That's the most exaggerated "er - no, absolutely not" I've seen. This is definitely indistinguishable for the vast majority of people.

> indistinguishable for the vast majority of people

It would be a very worrisome indicator if more than a minority of people were unable to detect monstruosities - one eye above one below, one smaller one bigger, one normal one vacuous, one pupil round one merging with the eyelashes...

The poster wrote «professional artists», and they are supposed to produce Quality. That thing that, when spread, helps educated perception recognize lower quality and odd outputs.

I am still confused by the building without a roof. What exactly is inside of it that I am supposed to see?

> The downside is, your game is indistinguishable from every other game

There is not such a consistency in "every other game", neither is there only a single one AI style, so that can't happen either, you'll be able to distinguish if the designer wanted such a distinction

> what is AI adding that will appeal to people wanting to buy your game, and the answer to that is still probably nothing.

This one is also easy: price reduction, that's pretty appealing

Price reduction (within reason) is absolutely NOT how I pick games. It's not my primary concern at all.

You are missing an important point. It significantly lowers the barrier to make a game, if you have a good idea.

Like I said, you can get an entire game world (maps, artwork, backgrounds, character sprites, weapons, vehicles, animation, sound effects, music) by clicking a few buttons in the Unity asset library. The barrier to entry for making a generic cookie-cutter game that a thousand people have made before is already nonexistent.

Agreed. The power of SD is actually in its diverse styles. You should be able to aim at any specific style in latent space and get it. This is in contrast with Midjourney, which heavily favors sci-fi modern style.

With either tech, this thread is a very cynical take. If you give generic prompts, you get generic results. Want something personal, get personal and you will get personal results out of the AI.

The barrier to creation has been lowered. But, when you can create anything, you still have to dig to figure out what you actually want.

> Heck you can probably import it directly from Unity's asset store without even bothering with Stable Diffusion.

Try actually doing this though and it'll look like an absolute mess. You'll end up without any sort of cohesive art style and you'll have random variations in quality level. The thing about this AI generated stuff is that what it lacks in 'peak talent' it more than makes up for it in being able to actually produce something cohesive.

> You'll end up without any sort of cohesive art style and you'll have random variations in quality level.

Oh look: exactly the result with AI tools.

Did you miss the point where the author went through multiple variations, had to construct intricate prompts and do quite a lot of manual work for the end result to be half-decent?

And you’re missing the point that that large effort was less effort than other ways to get a prompt working

No you can't. They'll be from different people and use mutually incompatible shaders. And in the case of unity, mutually incompatible renderer plugin versions ..

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