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Comment by smlacy | Hacker News Reader

> When you see an elegantly designed building ...was that really made by a human or did the AI generate it as part of a much larger generation step?

Does it matter? Why?

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A good painting is never “just a good painting.” The context, the artist, etc. are part of the art. To remove that is to make it no longer art because it’s no longer an actual expression of anything personal. Pretty words with no intent behind them don’t mean anything.

Plenty of Holiday Inn’s have lovely painted landscapes on the walls. People aren’t paying for them to be in their homes.

With tools like this, the artist is not removed from the art. He just has more leverage.

I would argue the opposite even: this is more personal, as a singular artist can now do more by himself, without relying on others to do the parts that he couldn't do before.

AI strips a lot of the intention from the work. The artist might want a wooden house with a straw roof and while they design the house they might add framing and other small touches to the house and to the viewer the small decisions could be as important as the choice for a straw roof.

When the artist AI generates it they get a house with wooden house with a straw roof and nothing else has any thought or intention. Its less personal, the viewer previously did not have to question what the artists intention was now they do because its likely the artist had no intention or thought towards a particular part of the art.

So the artist simply accepts the AI generated wooden house. Might it be possible that he does not?

Furthermore, before AI, artists also used assets that came from other creators, accepting them wholesale. No intention, then?

The issue I see here is that we're judging the tool, not the artist.

It reminds me so much of the digital photography backlash. But here we are.

Digital photography is completely different. The principles do not change whether you’re shooting film or digital. You have to frame the shot. You have to make sure the exposure is what you want. You have to set f-stop. Even if you try to argue that automatic settings on cameras negate all of that, which I don’t agree with but let’s allow it, at the end of the day you have to pick the focal distance and frame, which are the anchor points of the entire photograph. That is not the same as an AI generated facsimile, and whether you’re shooting film or digital does not change that fact.

When use a LLM tool to write, paint, or generate a photograph, you are not actually writing the words, you are not actually physically painting, and you are not framing a photo. It is literally a different process and medium. You can enjoy that, even I have at times, but it’s not the same thing.

That's the issue with metaphors, they are always different. Try steelmanning the issue and see what you think. I'm not here to prove a point, and I hope you're not either. I'm here to learn.

And what I'm learning is, artists are happy.

This is rather patronizing and does not foster dialogue/learning. Nobody trying to learn talks down to somebody like this with such confidence that they are right.

This is a topic I know very intimately and have strong feelings on. You are welcome to disagree with me, I am not the god of cameras and therefore always right, but I also should not be so quickly dismissed when it comes to this topic simply because you disagree with my take on AI generated “photography.” I use air quotes not to mock you but to emphasize that I do not consider it photography. It’s a different process and medium, it’s a different tool and result. None of this is a reflection of its merits or the people who utilize it.

I believe your metaphor was a very poor one so I expressed it. If you think it’s appropriate than feel free to explain it, but IMO, prompting an image and shooting it with a camera in your hands is not the same thing. So don’t start talking down to me and lecturing me on “being willing to learn” simply because I explained my reasoning on this.

There are a lot of assumptions here about how an artist uses the AI tools. Suddenly artists stop fussing and planning and sketching and mocking and drafting and redrafting and polishing until the work is perfect and communicates their intent in the way they need, and turn into completely different people. When a person just tosses a prompt at an LLM and accepts the result, you would be hard pressed to call them an artist.

There are millions of games. When choosing which one to play, you've normally chosen one that looks polished over one that does not, because of what it signals. Now that signal is gone, can't easily discern what's a sloppy crappy game vs one that's actually fun to play.

As if this has been the case in decades. AAA studios are constantly producing polished slop while indie devs are producing great products that arguably look like shit.

If you're making decisions about what games you're playing based on how good they look, then you've been slurpin' up pure slop for a while.

To me what matters is being able to verify human authorship at a glance. It used to be that when you saw a work of visual art you were automatically 100% sure that someone had to have spent a great deal of effort producing that, but image models took it away. This is the same situation but with game environments.

Some people still care about it, or want a possibly shared experience over one that can only be experienced once by one person

I love that most of the responses to this are just begging the question lol

Because people don't want to be tricked by AI slop.

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