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Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

Yes, sure. But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression.

Broad strokes are broad strokes. I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock is placed with intent.

I already think modern cartoons are fairly sterile and soulless versus their hand drawn or hybrid counterparts. It isn't even elitism, they just don't hold my attention or interest me artistically, stylistically, or in terms of content.

If you choose to express yourself in broad strokes, that's fine, whatever floats your boat. I'll continue to chase things that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them. Generic and formulaic is generic and formulaic all day long. It's also why I don't like most modern anime, it's sterile visually and isn't why I enjoyed the medium.

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Really?

For a writer, if you write out a plot, you can get the AI to actually simulate the character's responses and dialogue (even voiced by AI!). There, you've LITERALLY brought a character to life, each character is driven by a different persona simulated by a different AI, the quality of stories that will create, will annihilate what came before.

You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the writer.

No need to describe scenery, no need to describe character appearances. Feed those descriptions into txt2img, and you get portraits that would have cost $1000/pic from top tier artists.

Generic and formulaicness, comes from having TOO MANY PEOPLE. Too many people involved in production, means the creator must dilute intent, appeal to wider audiences, and limit risks, to ensure costs are reclaimed. Once AI gets going, you'll see indie creators making full anime series, and releasing them on youtube. Because for an individual creator, even ad + patreon revenue alone would be able to sustain a comfortable existence, with no dependency on corporate or teams.

I thought people who love art, would be exhilarated by AI. I realized, the majority of artists don't love art. They love drawing, but not art. They love socializing with artists, but not art. They love receiving attention and income from their art, but not art. That's all fair and fine. But there will be people, who just want to create the best possible art, no matter the method, no matter the reward, and with AI, this latter group will outcompete the first, hard.

Perhaps the resolution to your cognitive dissonance is not to conclude that artists hate art. Instead I’d suggest that often, artists’ love of art doesn’t stem from concepts like “annihilating what came before” or “outcompeting hard.” Perhaps, like the parent comment said, it comes from self-expression — the pleasure, for both creator and audience, of the “mirage created by the writer,” to borrow your poetic term.

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it” – Bertolt Brecht.

I'm neither dissenting with your or OP here, FYI.

Mediocre artists will just copy what exists more easily.

And powerful artists will have new tools to shape reality.

There is some competitive notion, for certain, since there is a lot of pushback on AI-generated art from artists.

"ars gratia artis" is something AI is not capable of.

> You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the writer.

There's something really funny about using an algorithm that predicts the next most likely token to generate unpredictable adventures.

>algorithm that predicts the next most likely token to generate unpredictable adventures

but enough about the human nervous system

Reminds me of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox

You can certainly generate unpredictability from a predictable mechanism.

It’s like saying it’s hilariously to take molecules of H2O and pretend they could form fluid dynamics. Preposterous /s

Well? So what?

If I was writing dialogue, I already know exactly what I want to say, that's why I'm writing it in the first place. Sure, some people might like that, but I never feel devoid of inspiration because I consider the greater narrative of a project.

Why would I want to ask the AI for ideas? The joy is in the process of having it my way by my own hand, word-for-word, pixel-by-pixel, note-by-note.

If other people enjoy another method, fine, but you are invalidating the traditional and highly enjoyable method. Creativity isn't about efficiency or whatever. This is why people leave AAA to go indie, and have it their way, not to whatever the budget is or what the shareholders or managers want, but because they have a vision and are naturally creative, making a labour of love they know every detail of because it's in their head.

I'd rather support the artists and pay the thousand bucks because it's all a part of the traditional process.

Indies already release anime on YouTube, Netflix, TV et al, and have done for decades.

Art isn't about the output for most artists. Art is about the process. People consume art. Artists enjoy the creative process and having it their way.

I hate attention. I haven't had a photo taken in 13 years. I've stopped all interviews. I mostly work behind-the-scenes on documentaries and games these days. I don't even care about if a project makes a return, we do it because we love it and enjoy the process.

There is no "best", art is subjective. Art isn't even a competition. Crass and vulgar. Are you sure you actually understand art and aren't conflating it with monetizing it in a business context?

>You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the writer.

I don't know if it's a symptom of Hollywood's sequelitis and nostalgia-wank, but the idea that consumers should be happy to consume art generated by a program that has simply taken the last 200 years of pop-art and averaged it all together is depressing.

When I read this it sounds like you've reduced art down to the labor and not the actual expression. Why would anyone want to read something where the character responses are simulated? Everything should at least be intentional.

> Generic and formulaicness, comes from having TOO MANY PEOPLE.

You know what else comes from the output of many people? What AIs produce.

> They love drawing, but not art. They love socializing with artists, but not art. They love receiving attention and income from their art, but not art.

Love of drawing, socializing with artists, and attention and income when people connect and buy their art are all forms of deeper engagement/investment with art.

The generous reading I can make of the mistake that sets these up as the other side of an inimical dichotomy where engaging these things is not loving art is if you're limited to the perspective of someone whose experience with art is that of a consumer and equates that perspective with loving art.

Being concerned about alienation from drawing, from connection with a community of other artists making efforts, and yes from attention and income that makes their focus socially/economically viable seems pretty reasonable.

It's also reasonable to be interested in what new tools can do and I rather imagine there will be people who enjoy that as well, some of whom may be able to produce visions that were previously inaccessible to them. That's interesting and exciting, but it doesn't mean there's no downsides.

Literally implies embodiment of an unintentional emergent nature. The characters only exist in the figurative way we think of humans existing as individuals with personhood.

Ideas such AI being alive are not universal among the public. Let’s not anthropomorphize plastic and metal we etched human like sentence construction into.

> I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock is placed with intent.

The popularity of Minecraft and other procedural games would imply that there is still a large number of people who value exploring the unknown generated content, even if it means it's not curated.

Yes the quality won't be as good, but you do get quantity instead. And the quality will improve.

Yup, I ran a Minecraft server for about 8 years, I loved a bunch of procedurally generated games. I've worked on games in the past and present that use procedural generation. Furthermore, the most interesting part of Minecraft was what people built, not what world the seed generated, IME. Usually we'd WorldEdit vast swathes of it away to have flat areas to build and have fun, or we'd WE with brushes and materials to hand create terrain because the procedural generation was so-so.

My point still remains that there's a very different experience in something intentional and exact. One feels very human.

The quality isn't the issue, the broad strokes without intent are.

This is like preferring impressionism over a Dutch master. Audiences for both. I'm not invalidating any of them, I'm just saying that for me, I prefer something more human and different.

For a long time I wondered where popular misconceptions about facts(usually historical) came from. Then I read about the history of the Encyclopedia Britannica and its checkered editorial history and realized I had found the cause: we relied a lot on truth-making authorities in the past, and they wrote in their biases.

So when we speak of intentional creation, we are in some ways looking a mode of truth reminiscent of Britannica: the world as someone experienced and described it, biases and all. Neither a sensory truth like "it feels cold today", nor an emergent collective belief like our rules of language.

What makes the LLM chatbot interesting is that it resembles a lens into collective belief; it starts with one bias, but you can tell it, "now explain it the way this other type of person would," and it will oblige you with its best in-character approximation, changing facts and details as well as aesthetics. It is capable of deep and radical changes to its output with minimal changes in prompting.

That's something that you could access in a limited sense with traditional PCG, but almost entirely in terms of mathematics operating on premade assets - fractals and chaos functions and so forth. Here you have a "fractal encyclopedia", working over an enormous reference library. It can, in fact, attempt to place every brush stroke "in the style of a Dutch master" if recursively prompted to do so, although in any existing implementation, you will run into technical limits with its dataset and working context. But if we look over towards diffusion model image generation, we know that that general idea does work - it's always a little less exact than the original human, but it can get us far past the uncanny valley.

And that's valuable because all the human creative stuff is built on references, too: original ideas emerge in one context, then get transferred to another. So there's a sense of, yes, you can definitely build a "make game" button here, and it'll be an approximation of a hypothetical human character that built the thing, but you can easily turn that output into a reference for something else that injects more bias and humanity into it or adds more structural rules to rigorously shape it. Often that's the actual path of creativity: make a longer pipeline of refinement with more layers to it, and you end up with an increased sense of transformative elements and intentional structure.

Not to mention the middleground of handmade pieces and putting them together in a randomly generated way. That's how a ton of games work - from Noita, to Cataclysm DDA, to Dead Cells.

That's quite literally how Minecraft works. That's also how games I've worked on function.

Pretty sure Minecraft uses Perlin noise for terrain, while Noita uses entire pre-made tiles. They both have setpiece structures dotted around the terrain, but I think lelandfe was making a distinction between Wang tiles vs a gradient noise generator.

You have ignored the original point made entirely that intentional level design is generally far more interesting than anything algorithmically generated.

Specifically, yes, but my point was more that there's pre-created elements thrown in there too. It's a very surface-level argument of generative art versus intentional art, the technology itself isn't what's being discussed, it's the output and how interesting it is or isn't.

I'm not even saying procedural generation et al is bad, it has its place.

People use stock/library content in games all the time, whether it's textures, rigs, whole environments, or even mechanics. Can interesting things be made? Yes. Are the usually unique or innovative? Well, generally no.

What made Minecraft so interesting for most people was what people made within it, the world seeds themselves were really whatever for most people. If they were so interesting then people wouldn't be importing schematics for models, wholly pre-built worlds, hubs, and even some creative mode servers. Sure, some people like exploring the procedurally generated stuff, but once you've done that for a few tens of hours, it's boring and you've largely seen what's worth seeing.

I spent more time using WorldEdit than screwing around with seeds because I knew exactly what I wanted my server's main area to be like rather than relying on a seed.

I was responding to the "literally how Minecraft works" part rather than the discussion further back.

That being said, world generation is a bit like a toybox, or a backdrop to a play in a theatre. Minecraft's world gen isn't worthless, and so improving the backdrop is worth discussing. The differences in the output of implementations matter a lot (to me, at least) and I think Minecraft would be much less compelling if the world was generated using a 3d implementation of Wang tiles. "A few tens of hours" is a lot of content.

Would Minecraft be even more compelling with neural networks doing some of the content creation? I think it might. Would that totally replace the need for human input and invalidate everything players build? No, but that doesn't make it worthless.

Perhaps!

But a few tens of hours is very little versus the quite literally thousands of hours spent running a server for 8 years and using plugins on it. Truth be told, I think even if a Minecraft world was literally a blank base plate and it was digital collaborative LEGO, it still would have been a hit.

I guess the thing with Minecraft is that it was many different things to different people. Some people loved "Hunger Games" style worlds/modes on servers, others like single player mods, or even just vanilla Minecraft.

> But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression.

What makes them great is that people enjoy them. Whether they were created with "Intent, attention to detail and self-expression" or monkeys banging on typewriters is irrelevant and indistinguishable.

People enjoy them because it resonates with them because it's intentful self-expression with an attention to detail. There's a reason that generative art is very uncanny valley.

>I'll continue to chase things that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them.

For someone with that POV you sure are peddling the "Everything is soulless, stop enjoying things" perspective.

Procedural generation is miles away from what these LLMs are doing. It’s not just coming up with a random maze/map for a fetch mission. Right now, it can generate a novel quest, with all of its characters, come up with a unique set of mission goals and theoretically generate those assets and characters (atleast in 2D). Turns out, all this self-expression or whatever is cheap.

Not in this context of self-expression. Neither are intentional, both are broad strokes.

Technologically? Yes, you're right, very different.

But in output? It's still generative.

“Intentional” is a weasel word in this context. It means very little in terms of the end result. Humans making art is generative as well even all the way back to cave paintings which were interpretations of animals in nature.

No, it isn't. Do you really think Alfred Hitchcock would leave his film up to others, let alone a machine? No. It wasn't his vision, thus it wasn't his self-expressive intent. Read about auteur theory.

That's not what generative art is, mate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art

I'm not arguing artists are going to go away, just that story telling is going to become a lot easier. it also doesn't mean the content produced is necessarily painted with 'broad strokes' and absolutely doesn't mean its soulless. It means the barriers to entry for producing stories just came down a whole lot - akin to the printing press did for books.

But is the person using the tool an artist? I think this is an important question. If I give detailed instructions to a human ghost writer about a story I want them to write, I don't think anyone would say that I wrote the story. It was written by the ghost writer.

If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person.

If you are in the camp that you don't care whether or not art was made by a human, this isn't even a little problem. If, however, you are in the camp that cares a lot about that, then this is a very, very serious problem.

Either way, this means that this isn't "just a tool" like a printing press. It's something completely different, and more than a tool.

Yes, the artist that chooses to use AI-tools to generate art-work are in fact artist.

For those who are afraid of AI being content generators that puts artist out of work will most likely be disappointed. However the technical gatekeeping some artist do goes away, and it makes room for more people being able to express them self creatively.

Art is about the why. We as humans will always ask that question, and we will produce answers, no matter the tools.

We've gone through multiple iterations of technology questioning if you are really an "artist" for using it, but the new creations and the new generation of artist puts that to shame in my opinion.

Digital pixels are not paint brushes. So if you do not move your mouse/brush to generate a stroke? What does it matter?

AI-tools speeds up the creative process which for some will let them go places we currently are having a hard time to imagine.

> Digital pixels are not paint brushes. So if you do not move your mouse/brush to generate a stroke? What does it matter?

If you are literally explaining every stroke, then it doesn't. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about describing something in pretty general terms and allowing a computer to make the creative decisions (what "brush strokes" to make).

No, "the computer" allows the artist to be exposed to a magnitude of various arbitrary and curated creative decisions that can help guide their work and their intent.

Here's a stupid personal and anecdotal example:

I've been trying to teach myself to do watercolor paintings of my photography.

That's been going OK, but with the help of img2img, I can "quickly" generate thousands of variations of Watercolor paintings of my OWN work, then choose the various elements I like, then I paint them into one painting. Which have led my freehand painting skills to improve at a much higher rate.

If however I just put up a feed of the generated watercolors from Sdiff, it would be immediate obvious. Of course, that's right now and doesn't speak to the vast improvements that are on the horizon.

This is what I'm personally seeing in my own circles of overlapping art creators trying to experiment with AI.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that: Artist will find ways to make their intentions stand out, whatever the tools we all have access to.

And if you move a horsehair brush, do you determine where each hair lands? If you spray paint, do you say where each drop lands? We have, for long, handed control to physical random processes. To modify that to land on mathematical random processes is not some categorical shift.

> If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person.

I completely disagree with this. According to this, no code can be art. For instance, videogames.

It has been enough time since ready-made (Duchamps urinal) and found objects, djing and sampling, and concept art. Art is not only drawing beautiful illustrations since at least the 2 world wars.

> If I give detailed instructions to a human ghost writer about a story I want them to write, I don't think anyone would say that I wrote the story.

This is exactly how many artists work today, with a small army of workers, even interns, to execute the plan of the artist. Even Rembrandt had people painting to produce more pictures. Another example would be architects: does the star architect execute everything, or do they have the vision and instruct their very large teams?

IMO it is all about the intent and interpretation of a human.

> no code can be art. For instance, videogames.

I feel like this is probably a pretty bad example, generally the "art" in video games comes from things like dialogue, storytelling, level design, graphical art, not the physics engine or the renderer. There is simply not art there, it's more engineering.

There's little more art in the code portion of video games than there is in a jet engine.

Again, I hear art here often as "that nice cover illustration, or that 3d model". A bit like people talk about "content".

Art can be anything, and I definitely consider some videogames art. The same can be said about architecture.

In the early days of Pixar, some traditionalist animators claimed that Pixar was "cheating" because they used 3D modelling tools rather than physically drawing the frames. The traditionalists didn't see computer animation as a "tool"; they saw it as the computer doing the work of the animator. Were they right? Computers make making things easier. But the human using the computer is the real creator.

Artists using 3d modeling software actually design and create the model, rigging and animation themselves, they don't tell the software "Metal articulated lamp bouncing across wooden table, 3d render, realistic lighting and shadows" and call it a day.

It's a matter of how much control you have over the end product, with AI it's very little. At best, if you want to be charitable, you could describe the role of the person using AI as an art director, but not an artist.

> they don't tell the software "Metal articulated lamp bouncing across wooden table, 3d render, realistic lighting and shadows"

They would if they could. Your premise seems to be based on you only getting to interact with the AI "art"generator once.

What makes you finish the quote with "and call it a day."?

What about a writer that uses a recorder to record themselfs speaking out a book and never actually "writes"? Would they be a singer instead?

They would be a voiceover artist, a storyteller, a voice actor, a narrator, a performer, even an entertainer. Depends whose book it is and if the book already exists to be read from.

Ever heard of radio plays? Audio dramas?

So, if I record myself talking transcribe it into a book and publish it, I would be a performer, narrator or even an entertainer -- but not a writer?

Maybe my point was unclear. If I had no arms, but still managed to publish a book, would I not be considered a writer since I do not have arms?

You'd likely be a scriptwriter.

It really depends. If someone has someone else ghostwrite them a book (this is super common), are they still a writer? No.

Are they an author? Maybe.

Are they just a brand slapped on the cover to shift units? Yeah, pretty much.

Toy Story was not generative art though. Pointless comparison.

Compare generative art tools to other generative art tools.

Programs take in input and produce output. The whole point of using any program is that the program produces more than you put into it -- otherwise why wouldn't you just use pen and paper? Either all programs are "generative" or none are.

It comes under the category of "generative art". It isn't intentional or self-expression, regardless of what the prompt engineers may kid you. Is it "art"? Sure. Is it traditional art? No.

I totally agree with this. But as an art lover, I want some real way of being able to tell if a piece of art is this, or is traditional.

Artistry is a beautiful thing. It's also why I love hearing from industrial designers on how they arrived at their design decisions, challenges they faced, intent, nuances in the design you might overlook that were difficult etc.

Unfortunately, short of more behind-the-scenes material and interviews, the only way to really get a feel for it is looking at their body of work as a whole. The great ones always have a specific style that they refine or evolve over time. It's unmistakably x.

I have to say, I've yet to see any AI artist hit a signature style, and I've yet to have an AI generated piece of art move me emotionally or conceptually.

Are they interesting? Sure. So's glitch art, but there's not much substance to any of it, and I remember none of it. Intent and self-expression is such a huge part of art.

Can you imagine what Hitchcock would say about AI anything? He wanted it 100% his way.

It is intentional, it's just a generated approximation of intention.

No, it isn't intentional, it's generative. StableDiffusion DALL-E, MidJourney et al are quite literally by definition a generative art model. This isn't up for debate. That is quite literally how they function.

> If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person.

Tell that to music producers and digital artists. They don’t know what detailed instructions are run by the cpu of the device they use, and yet it is still art and they are still artists.

But that's entirely different. A digital artist is directly engaging in art. The computer is, in that case, just a tool like a paintbrush. The artist is still the one making all the creative decisions.

To go back to my ghost writer analogy, the reason that nobody would say I was the author is because I wasn't the one who made the creative decisions. I just described what I wanted to another person who made the creative decisions. Therefore, the other person is the author, not me.

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