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>but it seems like an artist could come and touch up those elements. I don't think you can have artists or programmers 'touch up' a generated model post-facto

>but it seems like an artist could come and touch up those elements. I don't think you can have artists or programmers 'touch up' a generated model post-facto without making compromises on the valuable bit of the project. Programmers will always be needed to understand the program inside and out, so it can be tweaked and controlled. Artists will always be needed to define the piece from top to bottom, so it can be controlled. Either that or lots of hair being ripped out trying to control why the top lip on the 3d model keeps moving up and down when technically there's no muscle in your top lip, and it makes the one scene your big dramatic moment look janky as hell so you have to spend nights trying to figure out why the ML program made that, and it turns out nobody knows except the guy who made it and he's off in the bahamas helping take care of his sick wife so you have to scour the tech support community for hours... Or that perfect line you drew across the face of a landscape painting is now pushed off to one side from running it through an art-style-transfer ML program and that destabilizes all the hidden geometry you were relying on to make the piece feel alive and now you have to know why the program did that, if you want to change it. >Surely a similar level of thing could be done for programs (eventually)? Yeah I think so. It's coming quite rapidly. Two minute papers is a scary youtube channel. Any generative painting, cg model or computer program is going to fill the "kinda good enough" category and change the job of the trained professional to be controlling all the assumptions built into the generative program. You will make a super-powered tool, which is awesome, but alas human knowledge/skill/brains remains different to computers.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
It's very hard to do high-quality generative art/music/poetry/anything without a complete model of human cultural associations, perceptions, and metaphorical frameworks for conceptualisation. As you say, most generative work is empty because it's just form. Human creators manipulate form to communicate content. There's a message, and art is judged as much on the sophistication of the message as on the form it's carried in. Form without content can be an interesting technical experiment, but it's culturally massless and kind of boring. Not to mention wrong in a destabilising way - like someone speaking random syllables that make occasional sense, but don't form a coherent message. So the most successful generative work cheats by automating processes of cultural reference - like style transfer - or by adding levels of formal complexity that would be very difficult to handle by hand, but can at least produce something that seems a little original and surprising. The less successful work doesn't even get that far. Automated software generation is going to have similar problems. You have to parse intent, and then balance it against practicality. Getting that right is so hard humans really struggle with it, so I can't see machines being better at it any time soon.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Aha! You perfectly expressed why I'm turned off by much of modern art - it's form, but no content (though sometimes the lack of content is the content, in a meta way, but it still makes for boring art).
- ScottBurson 7y ago
  > Form without content can be an interesting technical experiment, but it's culturally massless and kind of boring. Not to mention wrong in a destabilising way - like someone speaking random syllables that make occasional sense, but don't form a coherent message. Couldn't read that without being reminded of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol As the composer says, "I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything." If you haven't heard it, pull it up on YouTube — it's quite an experience.
- Izkata 7y ago
  ...actually, there is one part of programming which already fits that description perfectly: Tuning some badly-performing SQL. Seriously, look at the EXPLAIN of a complicated postgres query - hash joins, index scans, bitmap heap scans, materializing intermediate tables, and so on - it does the described conversion of high-level SQL to some really complicated code, and someone with in-depth knowledge can later use the plan to tweak the database or query to improve performance.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

It's very hard to do high-quality generative art/music/poetry/anything without a complete model of human cultural associations, perceptions, and metaphorical frameworks for conceptualisation. As you say, most generative work is empty because it's just form. Human creators manipulate form to communicate content. There's a message, and art is judged as much on the sophistication of the message as on the form it's carried in. Form without content can be an interesting technical experiment, but it's culturally massless and kind of boring. Not to mention wrong in a destabilising way - like someone speaking random syllables that make occasional sense, but don't form a coherent message. So the most successful generative work cheats by automating processes of cultural reference - like style transfer - or by adding levels of formal complexity that would be very difficult to handle by hand, but can at least produce something that seems a little original and surprising. The less successful work doesn't even get that far. Automated software generation is going to have similar problems. You have to parse intent, and then balance it against practicality. Getting that right is so hard humans really struggle with it, so I can't see machines being better at it any time soon.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Aha! You perfectly expressed why I'm turned off by much of modern art - it's form, but no content (though sometimes the lack of content is the content, in a meta way, but it still makes for boring art).
ScottBurson 7y ago
> Form without content can be an interesting technical experiment, but it's culturally massless and kind of boring. Not to mention wrong in a destabilising way - like someone speaking random syllables that make occasional sense, but don't form a coherent message. Couldn't read that without being reminded of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol As the composer says, "I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything." If you haven't heard it, pull it up on YouTube — it's quite an experience.
Izkata 7y ago
...actually, there is one part of programming which already fits that description perfectly: Tuning some badly-performing SQL. Seriously, look at the EXPLAIN of a complicated postgres query - hash joins, index scans, bitmap heap scans, materializing intermediate tables, and so on - it does the described conversion of high-level SQL to some really complicated code, and someone with in-depth knowledge can later use the plan to tweak the database or query to improve performance.