How to scale intent, quality, and artistry with AI [video]
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The end result is that certain genres of art (digital paintings, video games, digital music) will die, and people will return to participating in the real world. The purveyors of artistic expression will flow back towards those who perform in the real world, with different recombinations of the genre, tending towards those that can allow for recognition of genuine expression.
AI will kill certain genres of art, and many more genres of art will be born.
I can tell an image is AI generated almost instantly, but it nonetheless stomped places like the Photographers of Threads channel. Not that it was great to begin with, but it was something. More and more I’m motivated to only discover photographers via photo books.
LLMs are butchering whimsy and wonder.
My view: every large online space was basically ruined by an ever-growing advance of inauthentic content pressures starting around 2015. The pools were already pissed in, LLMs are just producing enough piss that, finally, everyone can see it. It's a nuisance in the moment but in the medium term, the human social response will be for the better.
we insist that humans can do things better in some way or do things that ai can't do. some of that is true right now, but can't assume that will hold.
and yes it requires iterations and taste right now.
the idea that it can't happen in the future. or that humans are special in some way (which you are not claiming, but is a common claim) is the cope.
Is there a record amount of people playing video games? People spending hours in front of a computer listening to AI generated music and art?
I am pretty sure the trend will be towards the opposite. The AI fanatics believe that playing a video game is an isolated activity, but is it?
Don't people often play the latest video games (even single player) to belong to a part of a digital society? Do people play Dark Souls because it is a fun and challenging game? Or do they play it because they want to experience what the wider gaming society experiences, and participate in it?
I quote the MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS: "We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love"
Once anyone can generate any game, movie, or artwork they can imagine with a simple prompt, this shared experience will disappear along with it. The amount of content available will fragment the space so much we'll eventually lose the shared experience and novelty that brings enjoyment and fulfillment from these activities in the first place.
You can generate any thought you can imagine and write it down with a few lines of text but the amount of thoughts available haven’t fragmented the space so much that we lost shared experience of them. If anything it seems like sharing and responding to thoughts is more popular than ever and many are widely read, repeated, responded to and remixed by others.
I definitely don't think they will disappear, or the current dynamics will change substantially, only their scale will.
As someone that is not artistically inclined, I have the same chance of producing appealing art and assets with AI than I have with pre-AI tools (yes, I tried).
But for people that ARE artistically inclined, skilled at using composition, color palettes, have strong fundamentals, etc... AI will be just another tool in their belt, and if they are able to integrate it with their own sensibilities and existing tools, there is little reason to think they won't be able to come up with art that it at least as compelling as that created with "old" tools, especially as now it is increasingly possible to exert a level of control on what is being generated.
Tools available to digital artists have evolved from having to paint pixel by pixel in the 80s to advanced layer and filter editing in photoshop (not to mention all the advanced tools available for 3D), this is "just" another evolution.
And yes, regardless of that, the market will be flooded by AI-generated slop, as the barriers of entry have lowered significantly; but the market was oversaturated already, and low-effort and asset flip games were a large part of daily releases.
Users still reward appealing, high-effort games, and they will likely keep doing so; the top of the iceberg will remain the same, and the ignored, forgotten bottom, augmented by the slop releases, will just get 10 times bigger.
For the vast majority of paying customers or social media appreciators, that low-effort slop is sufficient. It's cheap, fast, and gets better with every passing month. So if your overriding goal is to scale to win in that marketplace, then you can only scale by giving up on quality and artistry. It's a race to the bottom.
I think the only way to win is to push back on the notion that you need to work on superhuman scale in the first place. You can differentiate yourself from AI by asserting you're human and that there's inherent value in human art. You'll find some customers willing to pay extra for that, just like some hire a woodworker instead of buying at Ikea. But it's going to be a tough market for artisans because fewer and fewer people are forced to buy the fruits of your intellectual labor.
In software engineering specifically, we gleefully decided that speed and cost are the only thing that matters and we celebrate "hey Claude, make me X" projects the same as we celebrate human ingenuity (case in point: HN front page). So for SWEs, even that "I'm a human" route may be unavailable.
And yet all the things (in particular the technology things) just keep getting better and better?
1. What is quality, exactly? An average person on Facebook prefers AI-generated images to real photos or human art. Is their preference a signal of quality, or is this actually optimizing for orthogonal metrics - agreeability, engagement, etc?
2. Do increases in quality always translate to "everyone winning"? For example, is it a net win if a marketing flyer for your local grocery store has 10% higher "quality" if it means that your next-door neighbor who used to design these is no longer employed? Even if you disregard the feelings of the neighbor, is it good for you? You stand to lose more than you're gaining (e.g., reduction in property values if they can no longer afford upkeep).
I don't want to paint AI as a net negative, but these dynamics are pretty complex. There's plenty of situations where AI is not upleveling quality, or where quality is comparatively unimportant.
firstly, great post and you're spot on. On the art side, it was already that way before AI art, just that the smallest of customers didn't know how to access it.
Coding is just as much like woodworking as art and design are. The core of the matter is intent, or what people call intentionality in the architecture.
What I tell clients is: You want your code to be consistent and maintanable, so someone fully understands the edge cases. Or you want the design to be consistent across the company. You could easily hire someone to do one art piece that was 90% on point, and then haphazardly hire someone else to do one that was 90% okay based on that... and very quickly the overall structure will decohere.
So, I'm not talking about someone selling socks on Etsy, but if you've already invested a few million in branding and/or code architecture, that is an asset you own and control. Do you really want to inject potential AI slop into that in a process that's going to degrade it further in each subsequent step, just to save a few bucks?
I also like how people are becoming more aware of the difference... this thread is enlightening[0]... but I believe that what a few people are conscious of, 90% of people are subconsciously aware of, and knowing how to manipulate subconscious associations with imagery has always been the true art and magic of graphic design. Design in particular is widely misunderstood, even by people who call themselves designers. It has almost nothing to do with making something look subjectively decent (the bare minimum), and everything to do with knowing more references than your audience knows they know. So when AI becomes a recognizable visual trope, we've won.
>> it's going to be a tough market for artisans because fewer and fewer people are forced to buy the fruits of your intellectual labor.
Once everyone has a WordPress site, who needs a web designer? It turns out a lot of people. And I've begun getting random queries from people who have vibe-coded apps asking me to "fix" them. When everyone has a bike, people dream of owning a car. When everyone has a car, people dream of owning a plane. What makes them tick isn't the velocity, it's the cachet.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/1wwyqiw/the_made_...
I've arrived at the conclusion, that we can probably do without software developers rather than graphic designers. The slopocalypse is oozing into the real-world, where more and more businesses advertise their services with AI-generated art, if we want to call it even art at all. It's either overloaded and nonsensical advertisements, horrendous and lovecraftian depictions of food, or corporate designs that just scream that everything the business does is just cheap and low-quality. My bet is on graphic designers having a small renaissance, because obviously AI-generated art will become a signal for cheap, lazy, and low-quality business practices.
I've tried creating AI songs myself with Suno and Minimax, the melody is usually pretty decent but the lyrics tended to be distractingly boring and cringe. I think there is a significant factor of style and taste there that makes is so that given what I imagine are the same tools, that artist is able to create things that I much prefer to my own
Out of curiosity do you think I'm AI? XD
all for the following. 1. give a shit. 2. build a system and codify it 3. review iterate and recreate 4. be creative
I think AI is being used in the most superficial ways at this time. I haven't studied how other technological breakouts went in history, but there must be some evidence of people using new tools, sharing it and people being easily recognizing it, to being against it, to it being something that is used on tandem rather than for full effect. The best example I can think of at this moment is Auto-tune.
Cher releases her song with it. It's relatively popular becuase it's new and futuristic, and yet high quality. The technical wasn't yet understood by the average listener, and we didn't have an over saturation of artists who, can't sing, using it.
I hate AI being trained on stolen artwork. I hate AI being used to accelerate terrible ideas, and instead of testing those ideas in an isolated environment, the consumer is now the tester. AI is used in the wrong way currently because of this.
Indie game devs should take advantage, outside of visuals and marketing assets. Game dev takes a lot of skills to pull off. Audio design, ux, graphic design, coding, documentation, UI design, marketing, etc. There will often be an area the creator is weakest in, even if they've been exposed to it. Which is a growing problem, less hiring for video games for example. But I believe the biggest value to projects, is having increased complexity not less.
Everyone's making slop because it's new and lets us be lazy on the tasks that take our time.
I had fun taking time before on tasks that were tedious, like cutting out the background of an image in Photoshop. And because of that I feel that I've paid my dues in a way, to allow me to use that background-remover app.
TLDR: Add more complicated and complexity with AI, not as a shortcut to make slop.
Maybe you could use tech to scale bottlenecks of commercial photographers doing advertising or wedding shoots, but we’re talking about art.