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Generative AI is going to drive the marginal cost of building 3D interactive content to zero. Unironically this will unlock the metaverse, cringe as that may so

Generative AI is going to drive the marginal cost of building 3D interactive content to zero. Unironically this will unlock the metaverse, cringe as that may sound. I'm more bullish than ever on AR/VR.

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jsheard 2y ago
I can only speak for myself, but a Metaverse consisting of infinite procedural slop sounds about as appealing as reading infinite LLM generated books, that is, not at all. "Cost to zero" implies drinking directly from the AI firehose with no human in the loop (those cost money) and entertainment produced in that manner is still dire, even in the relatively mature field of pure text generation.
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- echelon 2y ago
  You're too old and jaded [1]. It's for kids inventing infinite worlds to role play and adventure. They're going to have a blast. [1] Not meant as an insult. Working professionals don't have time for this stuff.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Object permanence and a communications channel is enough for this. Give children (who get along with each other) a pile of sticks and leave them alone for half an hour, and there's half a chance their game will ignore the sticks. Most children wouldn't want to have their play mediated by the computer in the way you describe, because the ergonomics are so poor.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      I'm reminded of that guy who bought an AI enabled toy for his daughter and got increasingly exasperated as she kept turning it off and treating it as a normal toy. https://xcancel.com/altryne/status/1872090523420229780 https://xcancel.com/altryne/status/1872090523420229780
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        That thread has a lot of good observations in it. I was probably wrong in framing the problem as "ergonomics". > Dr. Michelle (@MichelleSaidel): I think because it takes away control from the child. Play is how children work through emotions, impulses and conflicts and well as try out new behaviors. I would think if would be super irritating to have the toy shape and control your play- like a totally dominating playmate! > Alex Volkov (Thursd/AI) (@altryne): It did feel dominating! she wanted to make it clothes, and it was like, "meanwhile, here's another thing we can do" lacking context of what she's already doing > The Short Straw (@short_straw): The real question you should ask yourself is why you felt compelled to turn it back on each time she turned it off. > Angelo Angelli JD (@AngelliAngelo): Kids are pretty decent bullshit detectors and a lot of AI is bullshit. > Foxhercules (@Foxena): […] I would like to point out again that the only things I sent this child were articulated 3d prints. beyond being able to move their arms, legs and tails, these things were made out of extruded plastic and are not exactly marvels of engineering. […] My takeaway from this is that, this is what children need. they don't need fancy with tons of bells and whistles with play on any sort of rails. And there's not a thing that AI can do to replace a Child's imagination NOR SHOULD IT.
    - jdietrich 2y ago
      The majority of American children have an active Roblox account. Those who don't are likely to play Minecraft or Fortnite. Play mediated by the computer in this way is already one of the most popular forms of play. Kids are going to go absolutely nuts for this and if you think otherwise, you really need to talk to some children.
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    > Working professionals don't have time for this stuff. Why don't working professionals have time for entertainment? And are working people not always professionals?
- MikeTheRocker 2y ago
  IMO current generation models are capable of creating significantly better than "slop" quality content. You need only look at NotebookLM output. As models continue to improve, this will only get better. Look at the rate of improvement of video generation models in the last 12-24 months. It's obvious to me we're rapidly approaching acceptable or even excellent quality on-demand generated content.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    I feel like you're conflating quality with fidelity. Video generation models have better fidelity than they did a year ago, but they are no closer to producing any kind of compelling content without a human directing them, and the latter is what you would actually need to make the "infinite entertainment machine" happen. The fidelity of a video generation model is comparable to an LLMs ability to nail spelling and grammar - it's a start, but there's more to being an author than that.
    - MikeTheRocker 2y ago
      I already feel like text models are already at sufficiently entertaining and useful quality as you define it. It's definitely possible we never get there for video or 3D modalities, but I think there are strong enough economic incentives such that big tech will dump tens of billions of dollars into achieving it.
      - jchw 2y ago
        I don't know why you think that's the case regarding text models. If that was the case, there would be articles on here that are just created by only generative AI and nobody would know the difference. It's pretty obvious that's not happening yet, not the least of which because I know what kinds of slop state-of-the-art generative models still produce when you give them open-ended prompts.
        cma 2y ago
        Ironic how this comment exemplifies the issue - broad claims about "slop" output but no specific examples or engagement with current architectures. Real discussions here usually reference benchmarks or implementation details. (from Claude)
- hex4def6 2y ago
  I think it has its place. For 'background filler' I think it makes a lot of sense; stuff which you don't need to care about, but whose absence can make something feel less real. To me, this takes the place / augments procedural generation stuff. NPC crowds in which none of the participants are needed for the plot, but in which you can have unique clothing / appearance / lines is not "needed" for a game, but can flesh it out when done thoughtfully. Recall the lambasting Cyberpunk 2077 got for its NPCs that cycled through a seemingly very limited number of appearances, to the point that you'd see clones right next to each other. This would solve that sort of problem, for example.
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- deadbabe 2y ago
  I think you’re being short sighted. Imagine feeding in your favorite TV shows to a generative AI and being able to walk around in the world and talk to characters or explore it with other people.
  - xgkickt 2y ago
    The trademark/copyright issues of making that both a reality and an income stream are as yet unsolved.
  - bschwindHN 2y ago
    That's still AI slop, in my opinion.
    - deadbabe 2y ago
      Everything will be AI slop to you. There will never be a point where AI creates something incredible and you are like wow I prefer this AI stuff over human made slop.
      - bschwindHN 2y ago
        Yes, because if someone has a tool that creates "something incredible", then everyone will be able to generate "something incredible" and then it all becomes not incredible. It's like having god-mode in a game, it all becomes boring very quickly when you can have whatever you want.
        chii 2y ago
        > everyone will be able to generate "something incredible" and then it all becomes not incredible. no, that's just your standard moving up. There is an absolute scale for which you can measure, and ai is approaching a point where it is an acceptable level. Imagine if you applied your argument to quality of life - it used to be that nobody had access to easy, cheap clean drinking water. Now everybody has access to it. Is it not an incredible achievement, rather than it not being incredible just because it is common? That quote from the movie "the incredibles", where the villain claims that if everybody is super, then nobody is, was your gist of the argument. And it is a childish one imho.
- noch 2y ago
  > a Metaverse consisting of infinite procedural slop sounds about as appealing as reading infinite LLM generated books Take a look at the ImgnAI gallery (https://app.imgnai.com/ https://app.imgnai.com/) and tell me: can you paint better and more imaginatively than that? Do you know anyone in your immediate vicinity who can? Read this satirical speech by Claude, in French https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869448275177764 https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869448275177764) and in English (https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869651329913047 https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869651329913047) and tell me: can you write fiction more entertaining or imaginative than that? Is there someone in your vicinity who can? Perhaps that's mundane, so is there someone in your vicinity who can reason about a topic in mathematics/physics as well as this: https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1881696226669916408 https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1881696226669916408 ? Probably your answer is "yes, obviously!" to all the above. My point: deep learning works and the era of slop ended ages ago except that some people are still living in the past or with some cartoon image of the state of the art. > "Cost to zero" implies drinking directly from the AI firehose with no human in the loop No. It means the marginal cost of production tends towards 0. If you can think it, then you can make it instantly and iterate a billion times to refine your idea with as much effort as it took to generate a single concept. Your fixation on "content without a human directing them" is bizarre and counterproductive. Why is "no human in the loop" a prerequisite for productivity? Your fixation on that is confounding your reasoning.
  - Philpax 2y ago
    > Take a look at the ImgnAI gallery (https://app.imgnai.com/ https://app.imgnai.com/) and tell me: can you paint better and more imaginatively than that? So while I generally agree with you, I think this was a bad example to use: a lot of these are slop, with the kind of AI sheen we've come to glaze over. I'd say less than 20% are actually artistically impressive / engaging / thought-provoking.
    - esperent 2y ago
      This is a better AI gallery (I sorted all images on the site by top from this year). https://civitai.com/images https://civitai.com/images There's still plenty of slop in there, and it would be a better gallery of if there was a way to filter out anime girls. But it's definitely higher than 20% interesting to me. The closest similar community of human made art is this: https://www.deviantart.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/ Although unfortunately they've decided to allow AI art there too so it makes comparison harder. Also, I couldn't figure out how to get the equivalent list (top/year). But I'd say I find around the same amount interesting. Most human made art is slop too.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but a large and growing proportion of the text I read every day is LLM output. If Claude and Deepseek produce slop, then it's a far higher calibre of slop than most human writers could aspire to.
  - leoedin 2y ago
    What kind of text are you reading? Do you work in LLM development? Or are you just noticing that many news sites are using LLMs more and more? I've noticed obvious LLM output on low quality news sites, but I don't tend to read them anyway. Maybe all the comments I read are from LLMs and I just don't realise?
    - jdietrich 2y ago
      Perplexity is now my default search engine. If I'm doing research, I use LLMs to summarise documents or scan through them to find relevant excerpts. If I'm doing general background reading on something, I'll ask an LLM for an explainer; likewise if I've read about one particular thing and want to understand the broader context around it. If I'm thinking through a problem, I'll bat the idea around with Claude or Deepseek, asking them to provide alternative perspectives. It's quite difficult to analogise because LLMs are so profoundly novel, but the best I can do is that it's like having an infinitely patient and extremely knowledgeable assistant. That assistant isn't omniscient or infallible, but it's extremely useful because it tends to provide the information that I want, presented in a way that's particularly relevant to me. That requires a certain amount of rapport-building - understanding the characteristics of various models, learning to ask good questions, guiding the model towards my preferences with customised system prompts - but the effort pays off handsomely.
- bufferoverflow 2y ago
  Minecraft is procedurally generated slop, yet it's insanely popular.
  - chii 2y ago
    Not all procedurally generated things are slop, and not all slop are made via procedural generation. And popularity has nothing to do with private, subjective quality evaluations of the individual (aka, what someone calls slop might be picasso to another), but with objective, public evaluations of the product via purchases.
    - delian66 2y ago
      What is your definition of slop?
      - torginus 2y ago
        I was thinking about this, and the definition I came up with for slop is 'aspirational and highly detailed content that resolves its details in an uninteresting or nonsensical way'. For example, an AI picture of a bush is not slop, because we don't expect much from a picture of a bush (not aspirational). A hand-drawn picture of a knight in armor by an enthusiastic, but not very skilled artist is not slop either - it has tons of details that resolve in an interesting way, and what it lacks in details, it allows the viewers to fill in for themselves. A 'realistic' knight generated by AI is slop - it contains no imaginative detail, and allows very little room for personal interpretation, and it's not rewarding to view. Slop doesn't need to be AI - creatively bankrupt overproduced garbage counts as slop in my mind as well.
        teamonkey 2y ago
        Put simply, AI generation automates "design by committee."
        leoedin 2y ago
        'aspirational and highly detailed content that resolves its details in an uninteresting or nonsensical way'. This is a great definition. All the AI text I read is somehow missing the "meat" you find in good writing. All the right parts are there, but the core idea that makes me interested is just missing. It's pretty much the same thing Linkedin has been full of for years. No one can bear to say anything controversial, so it's all just empty platitudes and junk.
- NBJack 2y ago
  It worked for Minecraft. It was rough at first, and needed plenty of tuning, but the terrain and environments it's capable of certainly have a wide audience. But as far as pure, unbridled generation goes, yeah; I'm sure there will be plenty of slop made in the coming decade.
  - blargey 2y ago
    The terrain generation is not the appeal of Minecraft, it’s the game system that lets people level that terrain into a canvas and then build their own stuff on top.
- torginus 2y ago
  I think the biggest issue with stable diffusion based approaches has always been poor compositional ability (putting stuff where you want), and compounding anatomical/spatial errors that gave the images an offputting vibe. All these problems are trivially solvable (solved) using traditonal 3d meshes and techniques.
  - steinhafen 2y ago
    I have tried the model, and I agree with you on the point. A product was uploaded for a test, the output catches the product quite well, but the text on the generated 3D model is unreadable.
  - grumbel 2y ago
    The issue with composition is only a problem when you rely on a pure text prompt, but has been solved for quite a while by ControlNets or img2img. What was lacking was the integration with existing art tools, but even that is getting solved, e.g. Krita[1] has a pretty nice AI plugin. 3D can be a useful intermediate when editing the 2D image, e.g. Krea has support for that[2]. But I don't think the rest of the traditional 3D pipeline is of much use here, AI image generation already produces images at a quality that traditional rendering just can't keep up with, neither in terms of speed, quality or flexibility. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPxOE9YH57E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPxOE9YH57E [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ER5qfoJXd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ER5qfoJXd0
    - torginus 2y ago
      Wow, those look impressive. But I think we are saying the same thing - stable diffusion can make pretty pics, but needs a lot of handholding context. I too have played around with ComfyUI, and while there are a LOT of techniques that allow you to manipulate the image, I have always felt like you were fighting SD. In the videos you've attached, both tools (esp) the first, look impressive, but in the first example, you can clearly see that the model regenerates the street around the chameleon, when the artist changes it for no good reason. In the second example you can see there's a bunch of AI tools under the hood, and they don't work together particularly well, with the car constantly changing as the image changes. I think while a lot of mileage can be extracted from SD as it stands (I could think of a bunch of improvements to what was demonstrated here, by applying existing techniques ) - but the fundamental issue remains, in that Stable Diffusion was made to generate whole images at once - unlike transformers, which output a single token. Not sure what's the image equivalent of a token is, but I'm sure it'd be feasible to train a model to fill holes - which'd be created by Segment Anything or something similar, and it would react better to local edits.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Screw Metaverse. Let's make a VR holodeck. Star Trek's Holodeck is actually a good case study here (especially with the recent series, Lower Decks, going as far as making two episodes that are interactive movies on a holodeck, going quite deep into how that could work in practice both in terms of producing and experiencing them). One observation derived here is that infinite procedural content at your fingertip doesn't necessarily kill all meaning, if you bring the meaning with you. The two major use cases[0] for the holodeck are: - Multiplayer scenarios in which you and your friends enjoy some experience in a program. The meaning is sourced from your friendship and roleplay; the program may be arbitrary output of an RNG in the global sense, but it's the same for you and your friends, so shared experience (and its importance as a social object) in your group is retained. - Single-player simulations that are highly specific. The meaning here comes from whatever is the reason you're simulating that particular experience, and it's connection to the real world. Like idk., a flight simulator of a random space fighter flying over random world shooting at random shit would quickly get boring, but if I can get the simulator to give me a highly accurate cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet, flying over real terrain and shooting at realistic enemies in realistic (even if fictional) storyline - now that would be deeply meaningful to me, because 1) F/A-18 Hornet is a real plane that I would otherwise never experience flying, and 2) I have a crush on this particular fighter because F/A-18 Hornet 3.0 is one of the first videogames I ever played in my life as a kid. Now, to make Metaverse less like bullshit and more like Star Trek, we'd need to make sure the world generation is actually available to the users. No asset stores, no app marketplace bullshit. We live in a multimodal LLM era - we already have all the components to do it like Star Trek did it: "Computer, create a medieval fantasy village, in style of England around year 1400, set next to a forest, with tall mountains visible in the distance", then walk around that world and tweak the defaults from there. -- [0] - Ignoring the third use case that's occasionally implied on the show, and that's really obvious given it's the same one the Internet is for - and I'm not talking about cat pictures.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > I'm not talking about cat pictures Caitian pictures, on the other hand… I think they were more than implying what T'Ana got up to with Shaxs.
taejavu 2y ago
Jeez I'd love to know what Apple's R&D debt on Vision Pro is, based on current sales to date. I really really hope they continue to push for a headset that's within reach of average people but the hole must be so deep at this point I wouldn't be surprised if they cut their losses.
- EncomLab 2y ago
  As Carmack pointed out the problem with AR/VR right now - it's not the hardware, it's the software. Until the "visicalc" must have killer app shows up to move the hardware, there is little incentive for general users to make the investment.
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  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    > As Carmack pointed out the problem with AR/VR right now - it's not the hardware, it's the software. The third option is peoples' expectation for AR/VR itself: it could be a highly niche and expensive industry and unlikely to grow to the general population.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
Maybe eventually. Based on this quality I don't see this happening any time in the near future.
slt2021 2y ago
[flagged]
Deutschland314 2y ago
AR/VR doesn't has a 3D model issue. It has a 'why would I strap on a headset for stuff I can do without' I will not starting meeting friends just because of the meta verse. I have everything I need already. And even video calls with Whatsapp is alweird as f.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
AR needs a bragging app.. something like the dharma/content you create in virt growing out of your footsteps in real - and why visible on cellphone, feeling more native in with AR-googles

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jsheard 2y ago

I can only speak for myself, but a Metaverse consisting of infinite procedural slop sounds about as appealing as reading infinite LLM generated books, that is, not at all. "Cost to zero" implies drinking directly from the AI firehose with no human in the loop (those cost money) and entertainment produced in that manner is still dire, even in the relatively mature field of pure text generation.

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echelon 2y ago
You're too old and jaded [1]. It's for kids inventing infinite worlds to role play and adventure. They're going to have a blast. [1] Not meant as an insult. Working professionals don't have time for this stuff.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Object permanence and a communications channel is enough for this. Give children (who get along with each other) a pile of sticks and leave them alone for half an hour, and there's half a chance their game will ignore the sticks. Most children wouldn't want to have their play mediated by the computer in the way you describe, because the ergonomics are so poor.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    I'm reminded of that guy who bought an AI enabled toy for his daughter and got increasingly exasperated as she kept turning it off and treating it as a normal toy. https://xcancel.com/altryne/status/1872090523420229780 https://xcancel.com/altryne/status/1872090523420229780
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      That thread has a lot of good observations in it. I was probably wrong in framing the problem as "ergonomics". > Dr. Michelle (@MichelleSaidel): I think because it takes away control from the child. Play is how children work through emotions, impulses and conflicts and well as try out new behaviors. I would think if would be super irritating to have the toy shape and control your play- like a totally dominating playmate! > Alex Volkov (Thursd/AI) (@altryne): It did feel dominating! she wanted to make it clothes, and it was like, "meanwhile, here's another thing we can do" lacking context of what she's already doing > The Short Straw (@short_straw): The real question you should ask yourself is why you felt compelled to turn it back on each time she turned it off. > Angelo Angelli JD (@AngelliAngelo): Kids are pretty decent bullshit detectors and a lot of AI is bullshit. > Foxhercules (@Foxena): […] I would like to point out again that the only things I sent this child were articulated 3d prints. beyond being able to move their arms, legs and tails, these things were made out of extruded plastic and are not exactly marvels of engineering. […] My takeaway from this is that, this is what children need. they don't need fancy with tons of bells and whistles with play on any sort of rails. And there's not a thing that AI can do to replace a Child's imagination NOR SHOULD IT.
  - jdietrich 2y ago
    The majority of American children have an active Roblox account. Those who don't are likely to play Minecraft or Fortnite. Play mediated by the computer in this way is already one of the most popular forms of play. Kids are going to go absolutely nuts for this and if you think otherwise, you really need to talk to some children.
- Mashimo 2y ago
  > Working professionals don't have time for this stuff. Why don't working professionals have time for entertainment? And are working people not always professionals?
MikeTheRocker 2y ago
IMO current generation models are capable of creating significantly better than "slop" quality content. You need only look at NotebookLM output. As models continue to improve, this will only get better. Look at the rate of improvement of video generation models in the last 12-24 months. It's obvious to me we're rapidly approaching acceptable or even excellent quality on-demand generated content.
- jsheard 2y ago
  I feel like you're conflating quality with fidelity. Video generation models have better fidelity than they did a year ago, but they are no closer to producing any kind of compelling content without a human directing them, and the latter is what you would actually need to make the "infinite entertainment machine" happen. The fidelity of a video generation model is comparable to an LLMs ability to nail spelling and grammar - it's a start, but there's more to being an author than that.
  - MikeTheRocker 2y ago
    I already feel like text models are already at sufficiently entertaining and useful quality as you define it. It's definitely possible we never get there for video or 3D modalities, but I think there are strong enough economic incentives such that big tech will dump tens of billions of dollars into achieving it.
    - jchw 2y ago
      I don't know why you think that's the case regarding text models. If that was the case, there would be articles on here that are just created by only generative AI and nobody would know the difference. It's pretty obvious that's not happening yet, not the least of which because I know what kinds of slop state-of-the-art generative models still produce when you give them open-ended prompts.
      - cma 2y ago
        Ironic how this comment exemplifies the issue - broad claims about "slop" output but no specific examples or engagement with current architectures. Real discussions here usually reference benchmarks or implementation details. (from Claude)
hex4def6 2y ago
I think it has its place. For 'background filler' I think it makes a lot of sense; stuff which you don't need to care about, but whose absence can make something feel less real. To me, this takes the place / augments procedural generation stuff. NPC crowds in which none of the participants are needed for the plot, but in which you can have unique clothing / appearance / lines is not "needed" for a game, but can flesh it out when done thoughtfully. Recall the lambasting Cyberpunk 2077 got for its NPCs that cycled through a seemingly very limited number of appearances, to the point that you'd see clones right next to each other. This would solve that sort of problem, for example.
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deadbabe 2y ago
I think you’re being short sighted. Imagine feeding in your favorite TV shows to a generative AI and being able to walk around in the world and talk to characters or explore it with other people.
- xgkickt 2y ago
  The trademark/copyright issues of making that both a reality and an income stream are as yet unsolved.
- bschwindHN 2y ago
  That's still AI slop, in my opinion.
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Everything will be AI slop to you. There will never be a point where AI creates something incredible and you are like wow I prefer this AI stuff over human made slop.
    - bschwindHN 2y ago
      Yes, because if someone has a tool that creates "something incredible", then everyone will be able to generate "something incredible" and then it all becomes not incredible. It's like having god-mode in a game, it all becomes boring very quickly when you can have whatever you want.
      - chii 2y ago
        > everyone will be able to generate "something incredible" and then it all becomes not incredible. no, that's just your standard moving up. There is an absolute scale for which you can measure, and ai is approaching a point where it is an acceptable level. Imagine if you applied your argument to quality of life - it used to be that nobody had access to easy, cheap clean drinking water. Now everybody has access to it. Is it not an incredible achievement, rather than it not being incredible just because it is common? That quote from the movie "the incredibles", where the villain claims that if everybody is super, then nobody is, was your gist of the argument. And it is a childish one imho.
noch 2y ago
> a Metaverse consisting of infinite procedural slop sounds about as appealing as reading infinite LLM generated books Take a look at the ImgnAI gallery (https://app.imgnai.com/ https://app.imgnai.com/) and tell me: can you paint better and more imaginatively than that? Do you know anyone in your immediate vicinity who can? Read this satirical speech by Claude, in French https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869448275177764 https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869448275177764) and in English (https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869651329913047 https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869651329913047) and tell me: can you write fiction more entertaining or imaginative than that? Is there someone in your vicinity who can? Perhaps that's mundane, so is there someone in your vicinity who can reason about a topic in mathematics/physics as well as this: https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1881696226669916408 https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1881696226669916408 ? Probably your answer is "yes, obviously!" to all the above. My point: deep learning works and the era of slop ended ages ago except that some people are still living in the past or with some cartoon image of the state of the art. > "Cost to zero" implies drinking directly from the AI firehose with no human in the loop No. It means the marginal cost of production tends towards 0. If you can think it, then you can make it instantly and iterate a billion times to refine your idea with as much effort as it took to generate a single concept. Your fixation on "content without a human directing them" is bizarre and counterproductive. Why is "no human in the loop" a prerequisite for productivity? Your fixation on that is confounding your reasoning.
- Philpax 2y ago
  > Take a look at the ImgnAI gallery (https://app.imgnai.com/ https://app.imgnai.com/) and tell me: can you paint better and more imaginatively than that? So while I generally agree with you, I think this was a bad example to use: a lot of these are slop, with the kind of AI sheen we've come to glaze over. I'd say less than 20% are actually artistically impressive / engaging / thought-provoking.
  - esperent 2y ago
    This is a better AI gallery (I sorted all images on the site by top from this year). https://civitai.com/images https://civitai.com/images There's still plenty of slop in there, and it would be a better gallery of if there was a way to filter out anime girls. But it's definitely higher than 20% interesting to me. The closest similar community of human made art is this: https://www.deviantart.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/ Although unfortunately they've decided to allow AI art there too so it makes comparison harder. Also, I couldn't figure out how to get the equivalent list (top/year). But I'd say I find around the same amount interesting. Most human made art is slop too.
jdietrich 2y ago
I can only speak for myself, but a large and growing proportion of the text I read every day is LLM output. If Claude and Deepseek produce slop, then it's a far higher calibre of slop than most human writers could aspire to.
- leoedin 2y ago
  What kind of text are you reading? Do you work in LLM development? Or are you just noticing that many news sites are using LLMs more and more? I've noticed obvious LLM output on low quality news sites, but I don't tend to read them anyway. Maybe all the comments I read are from LLMs and I just don't realise?
  - jdietrich 2y ago
    Perplexity is now my default search engine. If I'm doing research, I use LLMs to summarise documents or scan through them to find relevant excerpts. If I'm doing general background reading on something, I'll ask an LLM for an explainer; likewise if I've read about one particular thing and want to understand the broader context around it. If I'm thinking through a problem, I'll bat the idea around with Claude or Deepseek, asking them to provide alternative perspectives. It's quite difficult to analogise because LLMs are so profoundly novel, but the best I can do is that it's like having an infinitely patient and extremely knowledgeable assistant. That assistant isn't omniscient or infallible, but it's extremely useful because it tends to provide the information that I want, presented in a way that's particularly relevant to me. That requires a certain amount of rapport-building - understanding the characteristics of various models, learning to ask good questions, guiding the model towards my preferences with customised system prompts - but the effort pays off handsomely.
bufferoverflow 2y ago
Minecraft is procedurally generated slop, yet it's insanely popular.
- chii 2y ago
  Not all procedurally generated things are slop, and not all slop are made via procedural generation. And popularity has nothing to do with private, subjective quality evaluations of the individual (aka, what someone calls slop might be picasso to another), but with objective, public evaluations of the product via purchases.
  - delian66 2y ago
    What is your definition of slop?
    - torginus 2y ago
      I was thinking about this, and the definition I came up with for slop is 'aspirational and highly detailed content that resolves its details in an uninteresting or nonsensical way'. For example, an AI picture of a bush is not slop, because we don't expect much from a picture of a bush (not aspirational). A hand-drawn picture of a knight in armor by an enthusiastic, but not very skilled artist is not slop either - it has tons of details that resolve in an interesting way, and what it lacks in details, it allows the viewers to fill in for themselves. A 'realistic' knight generated by AI is slop - it contains no imaginative detail, and allows very little room for personal interpretation, and it's not rewarding to view. Slop doesn't need to be AI - creatively bankrupt overproduced garbage counts as slop in my mind as well.
      - teamonkey 2y ago
        Put simply, AI generation automates "design by committee."
      - leoedin 2y ago
        'aspirational and highly detailed content that resolves its details in an uninteresting or nonsensical way'. This is a great definition. All the AI text I read is somehow missing the "meat" you find in good writing. All the right parts are there, but the core idea that makes me interested is just missing. It's pretty much the same thing Linkedin has been full of for years. No one can bear to say anything controversial, so it's all just empty platitudes and junk.
NBJack 2y ago
It worked for Minecraft. It was rough at first, and needed plenty of tuning, but the terrain and environments it's capable of certainly have a wide audience. But as far as pure, unbridled generation goes, yeah; I'm sure there will be plenty of slop made in the coming decade.
- blargey 2y ago
  The terrain generation is not the appeal of Minecraft, it’s the game system that lets people level that terrain into a canvas and then build their own stuff on top.
torginus 2y ago
I think the biggest issue with stable diffusion based approaches has always been poor compositional ability (putting stuff where you want), and compounding anatomical/spatial errors that gave the images an offputting vibe. All these problems are trivially solvable (solved) using traditonal 3d meshes and techniques.
- steinhafen 2y ago
  I have tried the model, and I agree with you on the point. A product was uploaded for a test, the output catches the product quite well, but the text on the generated 3D model is unreadable.
- grumbel 2y ago
  The issue with composition is only a problem when you rely on a pure text prompt, but has been solved for quite a while by ControlNets or img2img. What was lacking was the integration with existing art tools, but even that is getting solved, e.g. Krita[1] has a pretty nice AI plugin. 3D can be a useful intermediate when editing the 2D image, e.g. Krea has support for that[2]. But I don't think the rest of the traditional 3D pipeline is of much use here, AI image generation already produces images at a quality that traditional rendering just can't keep up with, neither in terms of speed, quality or flexibility. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPxOE9YH57E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPxOE9YH57E [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ER5qfoJXd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ER5qfoJXd0
  - torginus 2y ago
    Wow, those look impressive. But I think we are saying the same thing - stable diffusion can make pretty pics, but needs a lot of handholding context. I too have played around with ComfyUI, and while there are a LOT of techniques that allow you to manipulate the image, I have always felt like you were fighting SD. In the videos you've attached, both tools (esp) the first, look impressive, but in the first example, you can clearly see that the model regenerates the street around the chameleon, when the artist changes it for no good reason. In the second example you can see there's a bunch of AI tools under the hood, and they don't work together particularly well, with the car constantly changing as the image changes. I think while a lot of mileage can be extracted from SD as it stands (I could think of a bunch of improvements to what was demonstrated here, by applying existing techniques ) - but the fundamental issue remains, in that Stable Diffusion was made to generate whole images at once - unlike transformers, which output a single token. Not sure what's the image equivalent of a token is, but I'm sure it'd be feasible to train a model to fill holes - which'd be created by Segment Anything or something similar, and it would react better to local edits.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Screw Metaverse. Let's make a VR holodeck. Star Trek's Holodeck is actually a good case study here (especially with the recent series, Lower Decks, going as far as making two episodes that are interactive movies on a holodeck, going quite deep into how that could work in practice both in terms of producing and experiencing them). One observation derived here is that infinite procedural content at your fingertip doesn't necessarily kill all meaning, if you bring the meaning with you. The two major use cases[0] for the holodeck are: - Multiplayer scenarios in which you and your friends enjoy some experience in a program. The meaning is sourced from your friendship and roleplay; the program may be arbitrary output of an RNG in the global sense, but it's the same for you and your friends, so shared experience (and its importance as a social object) in your group is retained. - Single-player simulations that are highly specific. The meaning here comes from whatever is the reason you're simulating that particular experience, and it's connection to the real world. Like idk., a flight simulator of a random space fighter flying over random world shooting at random shit would quickly get boring, but if I can get the simulator to give me a highly accurate cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet, flying over real terrain and shooting at realistic enemies in realistic (even if fictional) storyline - now that would be deeply meaningful to me, because 1) F/A-18 Hornet is a real plane that I would otherwise never experience flying, and 2) I have a crush on this particular fighter because F/A-18 Hornet 3.0 is one of the first videogames I ever played in my life as a kid. Now, to make Metaverse less like bullshit and more like Star Trek, we'd need to make sure the world generation is actually available to the users. No asset stores, no app marketplace bullshit. We live in a multimodal LLM era - we already have all the components to do it like Star Trek did it: "Computer, create a medieval fantasy village, in style of England around year 1400, set next to a forest, with tall mountains visible in the distance", then walk around that world and tweak the defaults from there. -- [0] - Ignoring the third use case that's occasionally implied on the show, and that's really obvious given it's the same one the Internet is for - and I'm not talking about cat pictures.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > I'm not talking about cat pictures Caitian pictures, on the other hand… I think they were more than implying what T'Ana got up to with Shaxs.

taejavu 2y ago

Jeez I'd love to know what Apple's R&D debt on Vision Pro is, based on current sales to date. I really really hope they continue to push for a headset that's within reach of average people but the hole must be so deep at this point I wouldn't be surprised if they cut their losses.

EncomLab 2y ago
As Carmack pointed out the problem with AR/VR right now - it's not the hardware, it's the software. Until the "visicalc" must have killer app shows up to move the hardware, there is little incentive for general users to make the investment.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  > As Carmack pointed out the problem with AR/VR right now - it's not the hardware, it's the software. The third option is peoples' expectation for AR/VR itself: it could be a highly niche and expensive industry and unlikely to grow to the general population.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

Maybe eventually. Based on this quality I don't see this happening any time in the near future.

slt2021 2y ago

[flagged]

Deutschland314 2y ago

AR/VR doesn't has a 3D model issue. It has a 'why would I strap on a headset for stuff I can do without' I will not starting meeting friends just because of the meta verse. I have everything I need already. And even video calls with Whatsapp is alweird as f.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

AR needs a bragging app.. something like the dharma/content you create in virt growing out of your footsteps in real - and why visible on cellphone, feeling more native in with AR-googles