Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

There's maybe something cool at the core of this - help you ideate by seeing things in images! - but it's lost in all the other awful ways this gets used. More fake menus with food that looks nothing like the real thing. More fake book covers displacing real artists.

I can admire and enjoy the work of coding agents, which mostly just help solve problems and save me time. I can appreciate that there are creative uses for agents with text, that they could save people time, and that the environmental and safety concerns potentially have solutions.

I just can't see my way to appreciating these art agents, or any use of AI as a replacement for a human creative process. It's not because their output is bad, anymore (though sometimes it still isn't great). It's because it is bereft.

Even if I could, nobody in my life would be okay with my using them alongside my actual creative work. In fact, they'd be pretty upset if I did. And if I found out they'd been sharing stories with me written by AI, I'd be mad, too.

I'd rather just see the prompts.

AI art is making me realise that through my whole artistic career, the reason it's so hard to convince people that they need good design is because no one really appreciates good art and design other than people who have studied art and design.

It’s okay to make nice things for a small group of people, the challenge, obviously, is finding those people and exposing them to your work.

And getting paid…

I'm a solo coder. I love coding. Never used (or trusted) AI to generate code, only to review.

But good art and especially animation, beyond basic UI and logos, is a full-time commitment that requires giving up coding while you're working on the visuals (yes many great solo devs did their own art, but I prefer using the extra time on other shit, like making music and getting on with life)

Getting a good meat-based artist to hop on my Awesome Game Idea #458235 is easier if I can show them a running gameplay example, so they can see what the actual game will be like.

Up until recently I was just using free third-party asset packs like Kenney's: https://kenney.nl/assets/1-bit-pack

That works well but carries a risk of "painting yourself into a corner"; the longer you test a game in a particular art style (or music) the more you subconsciously tend to develop the rest of the game around that style! At least for me

AI-generated PLACEHOLDER art lets me iterate on a game closer to how I envision the final product to look like, right from Day 1.

I'd still hire/kidnap an actual artist before publishing.

I am building an app and I need illustrations. Hiring someone is out of the question.

Previously, I would either not have illustrations or try to fit a stock image to my use case.

Now I can just generate illustrations that fit my use case well, and it takes very little effort.

Mine is just one out of thousands of conceivable use cases for image generation and editing. I appreciate that this capability is now available to everyone.

As a software user, I feel just as frustrated and disappointed when I look at a projects website, code, and commit history and it’s slop, why in the world would I use this garbage when I can just prompt my model to make my own?

Realize the people using this to make slop menus and book covers feel the same way, wow this is useful and saves me so much time/money!

Notice that not a single business on earth so far is passing those time and money savings on however.

These AI tools primarily benefit single person businesses and they are creating a race to the bottom so that's not entirely true

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