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Comment by ProjectBarks | Hacker News Reader

I was extremely excited until I looked closer and realized how many of these look like ... well AI. The article is such a good read and would recommend people check it out.

Feels like something is missing... maybe just a pixelation effect over the actual result? Seems like a lot of the images also lack continuity (something they go over in the article)

Overall, such a cool usage of AI that blends Art and AI well.

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Basically, it's not pixel art at all.

It's very cool and I don't mind the use of AI at all but I think calling it pixel art is just very misleading. It's closer to a filter but not quite that either.

Yup, not pixel art. I wonder if people are not zooming in on it properly? If you zoom in max you see how much strangeness there is.

It kind of looks like a Google Sketchup render that someone then went and used the Photoshop Clone and Patch tools on in arbitrary ways.

Doesn’t really look anything like pixel art at all. Because it isn’t.

Pixel art is just a style now, just like "photorealistic" and "water color".

Everything is just a style now. And these names will become attached to the style rather than the technique.

It's pixel art, just not the types of pixels most people want in pixel art.

Pixel art has a certain connotation (probably more accurately referred to as 8-bit or 16-bit).

Otherwise every digital image could be classified as pixel art.

It's pixel art in the same way that everything rendered on a computer screen is pixel art. It's all pixels.

That is reductive, why not call all everything CGI then? Or call CGI pixel art as well? As we’re talking about “art”, it’s necessarily going to be subjective, but pixel art has certain style aspects such as use of 2x1 lines (https://www.the-pixel-artist.com/articles/top-ten-things-new...). This is just an example, while I’m not saying that every convention must be met in order to qualify as pixel art, not having any doesn’t make a useful definition of a genre.

Yeah it leaves a lot to be desired. Once you see the AI it's hard to unsee. I actually had a few other generation styles, more 8-bit like, that probably would have lended themselves better to actual pixel-art processing, but I opted to use this fine-tune and in for a penny in for a pound, so to speak...

Have you looked at retro Diffusion? https://x.com/RealAstropulse

This person shares lots authentic looking ai generated pixel art. This should give the building more realistic pixel art look.

Edit: example showing small houses https://x.com/RealAstropulse/status/2004195065443549691 Searching for buildings

Yup, I'm a big fan. They'd be the first to admit that making true pixel art is very hard, and getting the AI to do it even somewhat consistently requires a lot of tuning and guardrails / processing.

At some point I couldn't fiddle with the style / pipeline anymore and just had to roll with "looks ok to me" - the whole point of the project wasn't to faithfully adhere to a style but to push the limits of new technology and learn a lot along the way

Totally understandable! I don’t want to undersell how cool this project was! Thank you so much for sharing!

For projects like this (that would have been just inconceivably too much work without the help of AI), I'm fine with AI usage.

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