6 ms·

Yes, sure. But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression. Broad

Yes, sure. But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression. Broad strokes are broad strokes. I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock is placed with intent. I already think modern cartoons are fairly sterile and soulless versus their hand drawn or hybrid counterparts. It isn't even elitism, they just don't hold my attention or interest me artistically, stylistically, or in terms of content. If you choose to express yourself in broad strokes, that's fine, whatever floats your boat. I'll continue to chase things that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them. Generic and formulaic is generic and formulaic all day long. It's also why I don't like most modern anime, it's sterile visually and isn't why I enjoyed the medium.

autokad 4y ago
I'm not arguing artists are going to go away, just that story telling is going to become a lot easier. it also doesn't mean the content produced is necessarily painted with 'broad strokes' and absolutely doesn't mean its soulless. It means the barriers to entry for producing stories just came down a whole lot - akin to the printing press did for books.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  But is the person using the tool an artist? I think this is an important question. If I give detailed instructions to a human ghost writer about a story I want them to write, I don't think anyone would say that I wrote the story. It was written by the ghost writer. If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. If you are in the camp that you don't care whether or not art was made by a human, this isn't even a little problem. If, however, you are in the camp that cares a lot about that, then this is a very, very serious problem. Either way, this means that this isn't "just a tool" like a printing press. It's something completely different, and more than a tool.
  - alimov 4y ago
    > If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. Tell that to music producers and digital artists. They don’t know what detailed instructions are run by the cpu of the device they use, and yet it is still art and they are still artists.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      But that's entirely different. A digital artist is directly engaging in art. The computer is, in that case, just a tool like a paintbrush. The artist is still the one making all the creative decisions. To go back to my ghost writer analogy, the reason that nobody would say I was the author is because I wasn't the one who made the creative decisions. I just described what I wanted to another person who made the creative decisions. Therefore, the other person is the author, not me.
  - erksa 4y ago
    Yes, the artist that chooses to use AI-tools to generate art-work are in fact artist. For those who are afraid of AI being content generators that puts artist out of work will most likely be disappointed. However the technical gatekeeping some artist do goes away, and it makes room for more people being able to express them self creatively. Art is about the why. We as humans will always ask that question, and we will produce answers, no matter the tools. We've gone through multiple iterations of technology questioning if you are really an "artist" for using it, but the new creations and the new generation of artist puts that to shame in my opinion. Digital pixels are not paint brushes. So if you do not move your mouse/brush to generate a stroke? What does it matter? AI-tools speeds up the creative process which for some will let them go places we currently are having a hard time to imagine.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > Digital pixels are not paint brushes. So if you do not move your mouse/brush to generate a stroke? What does it matter? If you are literally explaining every stroke, then it doesn't. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about describing something in pretty general terms and allowing a computer to make the creative decisions (what "brush strokes" to make).
anonylizard 4y ago
Really? For a writer, if you write out a plot, you can get the AI to actually simulate the character's responses and dialogue (even voiced by AI!). There, you've LITERALLY brought a character to life, each character is driven by a different persona simulated by a different AI, the quality of stories that will create, will annihilate what came before. You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the writer. No need to describe scenery, no need to describe character appearances. Feed those descriptions into txt2img, and you get portraits that would have cost $1000/pic from top tier artists. Generic and formulaicness, comes from having TOO MANY PEOPLE. Too many people involved in production, means the creator must dilute intent, appeal to wider audiences, and limit risks, to ensure costs are reclaimed. Once AI gets going, you'll see indie creators making full anime series, and releasing them on youtube. Because for an individual creator, even ad + patreon revenue alone would be able to sustain a comfortable existence, with no dependency on corporate or teams. I thought people who love art, would be exhilarated by AI. I realized, the majority of artists don't love art. They love drawing, but not art. They love socializing with artists, but not art. They love receiving attention and income from their art, but not art. That's all fair and fine. But there will be people, who just want to create the best possible art, no matter the method, no matter the reward, and with AI, this latter group will outcompete the first, hard.
- akiselev 4y ago
  > You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the writer. There's something really funny about using an algorithm that predicts the next most likely token to generate unpredictable adventures.
  - pharrington 4y ago
    >algorithm that predicts the next most likely token to generate unpredictable adventures but enough about the human nervous system
  - LASR 4y ago
jutrewag 4y ago
Procedural generation is miles away from what these LLMs are doing. It’s not just coming up with a random maze/map for a fetch mission. Right now, it can generate a novel quest, with all of its characters, come up with a unique set of mission goals and theoretically generate those assets and characters (atleast in 2D). Turns out, all this self-expression or whatever is cheap.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Not in this context of self-expression. Neither are intentional, both are broad strokes. Technologically? Yes, you're right, very different. But in output? It's still generative.
  - jutrewag 4y ago
    “Intentional” is a weasel word in this context. It means very little in terms of the end result. Humans making art is generative as well even all the way back to cave paintings which were interpretations of animals in nature.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      No, it isn't. Do you really think Alfred Hitchcock would leave his film up to others, let alone a machine? No. It wasn't his vision, thus it wasn't his self-expressive intent. Read about auteur theory. That's not what generative art is, mate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art
moffkalast 4y ago
> I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock is placed with intent. The popularity of Minecraft and other procedural games would imply that there is still a large number of people who value exploring the unknown generated content, even if it means it's not curated. Yes the quality won't be as good, but you do get quantity instead. And the quality will improve.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Yup, I ran a Minecraft server for about 8 years, I loved a bunch of procedurally generated games. I've worked on games in the past and present that use procedural generation. Furthermore, the most interesting part of Minecraft was what people built, not what world the seed generated, IME. Usually we'd WorldEdit vast swathes of it away to have flat areas to build and have fun, or we'd WE with brushes and materials to hand create terrain because the procedural generation was so-so. My point still remains that there's a very different experience in something intentional and exact. One feels very human. The quality isn't the issue, the broad strokes without intent are. This is like preferring impressionism over a Dutch master. Audiences for both. I'm not invalidating any of them, I'm just saying that for me, I prefer something more human and different.
  - syntheweave 4y ago
    For a long time I wondered where popular misconceptions about facts(usually historical) came from. Then I read about the history of the Encyclopedia Britannica and its checkered editorial history and realized I had found the cause: we relied a lot on truth-making authorities in the past, and they wrote in their biases. So when we speak of intentional creation, we are in some ways looking a mode of truth reminiscent of Britannica: the world as someone experienced and described it, biases and all. Neither a sensory truth like "it feels cold today", nor an emergent collective belief like our rules of language. What makes the LLM chatbot interesting is that it resembles a lens into collective belief; it starts with one bias, but you can tell it, "now explain it the way this other type of person would," and it will oblige you with its best in-character approximation, changing facts and details as well as aesthetics. It is capable of deep and radical changes to its output with minimal changes in prompting. That's something that you could access in a limited sense with traditional PCG, but almost entirely in terms of mathematics operating on premade assets - fractals and chaos functions and so forth. Here you have a "fractal encyclopedia", working over an enormous reference library. It can, in fact, attempt to place every brush stroke "in the style of a Dutch master" if recursively prompted to do so, although in any existing implementation, you will run into technical limits with its dataset and working context. But if we look over towards diffusion model image generation, we know that that general idea does work - it's always a little less exact than the original human, but it can get us far past the uncanny valley. And that's valuable because all the human creative stuff is built on references, too: original ideas emerge in one context, then get transferred to another. So there's a sense of, yes, you can definitely build a "make game" button here, and it'll be an approximation of a hypothetical human character that built the thing, but you can easily turn that output into a reference for something else that injects more bias and humanity into it or adds more structural rules to rigorously shape it. Often that's the actual path of creativity: make a longer pipeline of refinement with more layers to it, and you end up with an increased sense of transformative elements and intentional structure.
lannisterstark 4y ago
>I'll continue to chase things that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them. For someone with that POV you sure are peddling the "Everything is soulless, stop enjoying things" perspective.
Ferret7446 4y ago
> But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression. What makes them great is that people enjoy them. Whether they were created with "Intent, attention to detail and self-expression" or monkeys banging on typewriters is irrelevant and indistinguishable.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  People enjoy them because it resonates with them because it's intentful self-expression with an attention to detail. There's a reason that generative art is very uncanny valley.

autokad 4y ago

I'm not arguing artists are going to go away, just that story telling is going to become a lot easier. it also doesn't mean the content produced is necessarily painted with 'broad strokes' and absolutely doesn't mean its soulless. It means the barriers to entry for producing stories just came down a whole lot - akin to the printing press did for books.

JohnFen 4y ago
But is the person using the tool an artist? I think this is an important question. If I give detailed instructions to a human ghost writer about a story I want them to write, I don't think anyone would say that I wrote the story. It was written by the ghost writer. If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. If you are in the camp that you don't care whether or not art was made by a human, this isn't even a little problem. If, however, you are in the camp that cares a lot about that, then this is a very, very serious problem. Either way, this means that this isn't "just a tool" like a printing press. It's something completely different, and more than a tool.
- alimov 4y ago
  > If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. Tell that to music producers and digital artists. They don’t know what detailed instructions are run by the cpu of the device they use, and yet it is still art and they are still artists.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    But that's entirely different. A digital artist is directly engaging in art. The computer is, in that case, just a tool like a paintbrush. The artist is still the one making all the creative decisions. To go back to my ghost writer analogy, the reason that nobody would say I was the author is because I wasn't the one who made the creative decisions. I just described what I wanted to another person who made the creative decisions. Therefore, the other person is the author, not me.
- erksa 4y ago
  Yes, the artist that chooses to use AI-tools to generate art-work are in fact artist. For those who are afraid of AI being content generators that puts artist out of work will most likely be disappointed. However the technical gatekeeping some artist do goes away, and it makes room for more people being able to express them self creatively. Art is about the why. We as humans will always ask that question, and we will produce answers, no matter the tools. We've gone through multiple iterations of technology questioning if you are really an "artist" for using it, but the new creations and the new generation of artist puts that to shame in my opinion. Digital pixels are not paint brushes. So if you do not move your mouse/brush to generate a stroke? What does it matter? AI-tools speeds up the creative process which for some will let them go places we currently are having a hard time to imagine.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > Digital pixels are not paint brushes. So if you do not move your mouse/brush to generate a stroke? What does it matter? If you are literally explaining every stroke, then it doesn't. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about describing something in pretty general terms and allowing a computer to make the creative decisions (what "brush strokes" to make).

anonylizard 4y ago

Really? For a writer, if you write out a plot, you can get the AI to actually simulate the character's responses and dialogue (even voiced by AI!). There, you've LITERALLY brought a character to life, each character is driven by a different persona simulated by a different AI, the quality of stories that will create, will annihilate what came before. You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the writer. No need to describe scenery, no need to describe character appearances. Feed those descriptions into txt2img, and you get portraits that would have cost $1000/pic from top tier artists. Generic and formulaicness, comes from having TOO MANY PEOPLE. Too many people involved in production, means the creator must dilute intent, appeal to wider audiences, and limit risks, to ensure costs are reclaimed. Once AI gets going, you'll see indie creators making full anime series, and releasing them on youtube. Because for an individual creator, even ad + patreon revenue alone would be able to sustain a comfortable existence, with no dependency on corporate or teams. I thought people who love art, would be exhilarated by AI. I realized, the majority of artists don't love art. They love drawing, but not art. They love socializing with artists, but not art. They love receiving attention and income from their art, but not art. That's all fair and fine. But there will be people, who just want to create the best possible art, no matter the method, no matter the reward, and with AI, this latter group will outcompete the first, hard.

akiselev 4y ago
> You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the writer. There's something really funny about using an algorithm that predicts the next most likely token to generate unpredictable adventures.
- pharrington 4y ago
  >algorithm that predicts the next most likely token to generate unpredictable adventures but enough about the human nervous system
- LASR 4y ago

jutrewag 4y ago

Procedural generation is miles away from what these LLMs are doing. It’s not just coming up with a random maze/map for a fetch mission. Right now, it can generate a novel quest, with all of its characters, come up with a unique set of mission goals and theoretically generate those assets and characters (atleast in 2D). Turns out, all this self-expression or whatever is cheap.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Not in this context of self-expression. Neither are intentional, both are broad strokes. Technologically? Yes, you're right, very different. But in output? It's still generative.
- jutrewag 4y ago
  “Intentional” is a weasel word in this context. It means very little in terms of the end result. Humans making art is generative as well even all the way back to cave paintings which were interpretations of animals in nature.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    No, it isn't. Do you really think Alfred Hitchcock would leave his film up to others, let alone a machine? No. It wasn't his vision, thus it wasn't his self-expressive intent. Read about auteur theory. That's not what generative art is, mate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art

moffkalast 4y ago

> I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock is placed with intent. The popularity of Minecraft and other procedural games would imply that there is still a large number of people who value exploring the unknown generated content, even if it means it's not curated. Yes the quality won't be as good, but you do get quantity instead. And the quality will improve.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Yup, I ran a Minecraft server for about 8 years, I loved a bunch of procedurally generated games. I've worked on games in the past and present that use procedural generation. Furthermore, the most interesting part of Minecraft was what people built, not what world the seed generated, IME. Usually we'd WorldEdit vast swathes of it away to have flat areas to build and have fun, or we'd WE with brushes and materials to hand create terrain because the procedural generation was so-so. My point still remains that there's a very different experience in something intentional and exact. One feels very human. The quality isn't the issue, the broad strokes without intent are. This is like preferring impressionism over a Dutch master. Audiences for both. I'm not invalidating any of them, I'm just saying that for me, I prefer something more human and different.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  For a long time I wondered where popular misconceptions about facts(usually historical) came from. Then I read about the history of the Encyclopedia Britannica and its checkered editorial history and realized I had found the cause: we relied a lot on truth-making authorities in the past, and they wrote in their biases. So when we speak of intentional creation, we are in some ways looking a mode of truth reminiscent of Britannica: the world as someone experienced and described it, biases and all. Neither a sensory truth like "it feels cold today", nor an emergent collective belief like our rules of language. What makes the LLM chatbot interesting is that it resembles a lens into collective belief; it starts with one bias, but you can tell it, "now explain it the way this other type of person would," and it will oblige you with its best in-character approximation, changing facts and details as well as aesthetics. It is capable of deep and radical changes to its output with minimal changes in prompting. That's something that you could access in a limited sense with traditional PCG, but almost entirely in terms of mathematics operating on premade assets - fractals and chaos functions and so forth. Here you have a "fractal encyclopedia", working over an enormous reference library. It can, in fact, attempt to place every brush stroke "in the style of a Dutch master" if recursively prompted to do so, although in any existing implementation, you will run into technical limits with its dataset and working context. But if we look over towards diffusion model image generation, we know that that general idea does work - it's always a little less exact than the original human, but it can get us far past the uncanny valley. And that's valuable because all the human creative stuff is built on references, too: original ideas emerge in one context, then get transferred to another. So there's a sense of, yes, you can definitely build a "make game" button here, and it'll be an approximation of a hypothetical human character that built the thing, but you can easily turn that output into a reference for something else that injects more bias and humanity into it or adds more structural rules to rigorously shape it. Often that's the actual path of creativity: make a longer pipeline of refinement with more layers to it, and you end up with an increased sense of transformative elements and intentional structure.

lannisterstark 4y ago

>I'll continue to chase things that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them. For someone with that POV you sure are peddling the "Everything is soulless, stop enjoying things" perspective.

Ferret7446 4y ago

> But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression. What makes them great is that people enjoy them. Whether they were created with "Intent, attention to detail and self-expression" or monkeys banging on typewriters is irrelevant and indistinguishable.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
People enjoy them because it resonates with them because it's intentful self-expression with an attention to detail. There's a reason that generative art is very uncanny valley.