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I remember a time when using computer was not well seen when creating art. Wasn't it even Tron who didn't qualify for the special effects oscar because they "u

I remember a time when using computer was not well seen when creating art. Wasn't it even Tron who didn't qualify for the special effects oscar because they "used computers"? It's interesting that it's no longer "computer bad", now it's "AI bad".

prodigycorp 11mo ago
I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated content is or not. Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling. In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?
- galleywest200 11mo ago
  Part of watching films and animations was that seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself. When all they did was enter a prompt that takes some of the magic away. If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models) Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved. [EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality. Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap. Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
    - ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago
      > Alien in 1979 I think this might be your nostalgia. The thing looks different in different scenes, and there's a scene that feels like it's a guy inside from the way it moves. So I disagree that Alien is peak special effects. (still peak over things. Peak ambience for sure)
      - phantasmish 11mo ago
        I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional. Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
      - latexr 11mo ago
        There’s an argument to be made that by watching higher image quality versions, you’re losing on the experience. I.e. the blurriness helped the effect. Their nostalgia and your (presumably) more recent viewing are then two different watching experiences. https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=11m15s https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=11m15s
    - TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
      This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.) But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all. The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good. And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative. Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
  - neom 11mo ago
    That's very romantic. The golden age of both cinema and animation was an assembly line, often an exploitative one. Most frames were the by product of industrial labor, done by people with little autonomy, low wages, no creative input... the human element was already highly concentrated among a very small elite, and, the majority of the labor pool was treated as mechanical/replaceable input. "seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself." Sure, but, it's not reeeaaally “a human did it.” It is more “a small number of visible artists did it.”
    - seinecle 11mo ago
      I would be interested in a book telling the history of cinema and animation that you describe
      - neom 11mo ago
        https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Untold-Animation-Simpson/dp/0813124077 https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Untold-Animation-Simpson... and https://archive.org/details/hollywoodcartoon00barr https://archive.org/details/hollywoodcartoon00barr
    - maplethorpe 11mo ago
      But nevertheless, a human did still do it. How gruelling and exploitative the process was, or how many humans it took, is beside the point. The fact that the image existed meant that there was an attainable skill that a person could learn in order to do that same thing, and that was inspiring. Since the days of cave paintings, that experience has been available to all humans. In the year 2025, it died, and I will never experience it again.
  - prodigycorp 11mo ago
    Good film making is good film making. I am a creative. I incorporate AI into videos that I make subtly and with a huge amount of care. I know I put more time and care into my craft than most others. Nobody knows what involved AI and what didn’t. At the end of the day, if you care about your work, it shows.
  - mikkupikku 11mo ago
    I get it, but it also doesn't matter. I liked anime when it was drawn by hand because I liked looking at all the things people could draw. But it doesn't matter what I like; virtually all anime is now rendered from 3d computer models, particularly any sort of machinery or whenever the camera rotates or transforms in space showing off the 3d structure of things. That stuff used to be drawn by hand but now nobody does that. It's not coming back.
- thesuitonym 11mo ago
  I can almost see your point, but there are two big problems: 1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close. And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?
  - em-bee 11mo ago
    what if you write the story yourself, and use AI only to visualize it?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - jsheard 11mo ago
      What does a visualization being to the table over a book, if it's executed in the most generic way possible? The decisions made when adapting one medium to another are what does or doesn't make it worthwhile. Unless your goal is purely to capture people who don't and won't read, as cheaply and cynically as possible.
      - em-bee 11mo ago
        there is a big difference between sending the story to the AI and saying "visualize this" vs carefully describing exactly how the visualization should look like and effectively only using the AI to render your vision.
        Planktonne 11mo ago
        Is there a big difference? There might be in process, but I've yet to be impressed by one in results.
        em-bee 11mo ago
        well the question is rather, what is the difference of AI use vs say a 3D modelling application? assuming you have the 3D assets already designed. you then take a model, and instruct the application that this model is to move from point A to point B, using a pathfinding algorithm while avoiding obstacles. once done, render the result in a video. now do the same with AI. is the human contribution really that much different?
- foxyv 11mo ago
  I think the objections with AI will change based on the quality of the AI generated work. What people don't want is to wade through a million gallons of poorly generated slop to see one good movie. They also don't want to have to deal with thousands of zero effort AI videos just to find one good video generated by a human being. If the actual result of AI is an unlimited supply of adequate media personalized to our tastes, I don't foresee there being any objection. Right now, it's honestly just shovelware on a scale that hasn't been seen before. No one likes shovelware except maybe toddlers.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  >I care about good, tight story telling. Agreed, wake me when that happens. If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out >In the case of this ad.. it’s okay? I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers. The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.
neom 11mo ago
I lived through the end of the beginning of computer becoming a primary tool for art, both in building DeviantART and also I was in the second cohort of the first ever digital imaging and technology program in Canada. It was super interesting, during college was the release of the Canon 300D, things moved really quickly after, my graduating year the pro film makers associations introduced a ban on digital work within the associations "club activities" (that lasted about 16 months) - it was funny tho you would see people judging professional salons (contests) zooming in to 30000% looking for signs of digital editing - I was ~20 and it was all very amusing to me, like why did all these old people hate digital art do much? We persisted, bunch of us graduated and started a studio, one day Canon called us, I was one of the first people in the world to use a Canon 5D Mk2 months before it was released, my ads ended up on TV, we won three technical emmy awards, made lots of money, had a great time etc. All the people I know who rode the wave had fantastic careers and worked on interesting stuff, made money etc.(and btw, the last ones standing after all was said and done in the "fuck digital camp"? curmudgeons!) fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists, I am a business/technology person who happens to be decent at story telling and naturally not awful at picture making - I would have gotten crushed by what the technologies enabled as the abstractions and programatic features opened up film making to people who didn't want to or couldn't naturally grasp the physics/controls. I'm grateful past me was able to think about this clearly because it lead me to meeting Ben and Moisey and joining them to go on and build DigitalOcean, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
- Matticus_Rex 11mo ago
  Thanks for sharing this!
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  >fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists I'm not sure if that bet really paid off. I feel like the number or both "skilled artist" and "skilled storyteller" didn't really move. It just feels higher because the barrier to entry and validation is "how well can I market myself on social media?" Not "can I get into/create my own studio?" or any other metric a craftsman would use. I don't necessarily callel this a bad thing, and I'd even argue that it only magnified existing issues instead of creating new new ones. but it has obvious down sides. Deviant art played a part in that, so kudos. Or perhaps, you've doomed us all? Hard to say, I always had a strange relationship with DeviantArt.
wat10000 11mo ago
It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out. I may be wrong, but I get the sense that computer art was welcomed by people actually working in the field (did professionals criticize the computer graphics in Star Wars or Wrath of Khan?) and it was mostly the lay public that saw it as somehow not real. The opposite seems to be true for AI "art."
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago
  > It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out. People at the time also said using a computer was fundamentally different from putting in a ton of work into building physical models. A lot of tech adoption is motivated by economics, so the argument that "before it was more work, now it's less work" will almost always apply regardless of the specifics. I don't think it's a useful thing to focus on. It's almost a moral argument: I deserve it because I suffered for it, but he did it easy so he doesn't deserve it. In fact, I would even go further. I would say it's part of the definition of technology. What is technology? Technology is a thing or an idea, created or discovered, that makes work easier and/or cheaper.
  - wat10000 11mo ago
    I agree that it's not useful if we're looking at practical stuff. It doesn't matter to me if my table was built with ten hours of human work, or ten seconds. But for creative work? I think it matters a lot. You used the phrase "creating art." I don't think it counts as "creating" if there's no work going into it. Typing some words into a prompt box and getting a video out is not "creating," any more than doing an image search and printing out an image of a painting is creating a painting. Printers are extremely useful devices, but they don't create art.
  - agumonkey 11mo ago
    but there are subtle signs that the old ways made art different people do more practical effects, they also miss the era of physical set filming[0], i personally am bored seeing the latest gpu able to create gazillions of whatever because i got the memo, gpu can do everything.. i get more magic seeing what people did with very few don't get fooled by the "people reject evolution every time" [0] technology can distort the focus onto the tool out of the art, films before had to arbitrate between various tricks to get a scene to work, now apparently people don't. they film bits and postprocess everything later, the tech allows infinite changes, but the cake has no taste
philistine 11mo ago
It's urban myth. Tron was not disqualified because they used computers, it wasn't nominated because it looked terrible.
- tshaddox 11mo ago
  Writer and director Steven Lisberger made that claim in interviews, so I wouldn't quite call it an urban myth. As far as I know, any film can be submitted for Academy Award consideration in any category, then an executive committee determines the eligibility of each submission and chooses up to 20 films to move onto the nomination process. I don't think this committee publishes anything about its decision-making process, so presumably Lisberger is just guessing based on his impression of industry sentiment at the time.
- homarp 11mo ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20190105145419/https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tron-s-20th-Anniversary-Director-discusses-3236009.php#page-2 https://web.archive.org/web/20190105145419/https://www.sfgat... has the director saying it though. Lisberger recounts. "We did all those effects in about seven months, which included inventing the techniques." "Tron," however, wasn't nominated for a special-effects Oscar. "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers," he scoffs.
fireflash38 11mo ago
CGI is still bad tbh. Look at all the boring stuff produced for Marvel.
class3shock 11mo ago
You are framing it as "this technological advancement is being thought of as bad because we always think of new technological advancements as bad". AI is bad because of all the ways in which it is objectively bad.
marcosdumay 11mo ago
You cold find plenty of people complaining about CGI up to earlier this year. Computers are bad, unless used by exactly the necessary measure to add to the story. Then they are great. But most movies don't do that, and you can see the actors not reacting to the scenes they are in because they have no idea what's actually happening. The same will probably happen to AI, with also most people overdoing it and making bad stuff. Forever.
make3 11mo ago
AI is threatening to remove humans from the whole equation except the very top. AI is an existential threat (not in the Terminator sense). Especially for art, I'm an AI researcher myself (in bio for health), but I think that ppl are completely understandable for wanting to help artists make a living and want to consume something that someone cared about

prodigycorp 11mo ago

I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated content is or not. Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling. In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?

galleywest200 11mo ago
Part of watching films and animations was that seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself. When all they did was enter a prompt that takes some of the magic away. If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models) Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved. [EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality. Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap. Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago
    > Alien in 1979 I think this might be your nostalgia. The thing looks different in different scenes, and there's a scene that feels like it's a guy inside from the way it moves. So I disagree that Alien is peak special effects. (still peak over things. Peak ambience for sure)
    - phantasmish 11mo ago
      I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional. Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
    - latexr 11mo ago
      There’s an argument to be made that by watching higher image quality versions, you’re losing on the experience. I.e. the blurriness helped the effect. Their nostalgia and your (presumably) more recent viewing are then two different watching experiences. https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=11m15s https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=11m15s
  - TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
    This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.) But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all. The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good. And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative. Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
- neom 11mo ago
  That's very romantic. The golden age of both cinema and animation was an assembly line, often an exploitative one. Most frames were the by product of industrial labor, done by people with little autonomy, low wages, no creative input... the human element was already highly concentrated among a very small elite, and, the majority of the labor pool was treated as mechanical/replaceable input. "seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself." Sure, but, it's not reeeaaally “a human did it.” It is more “a small number of visible artists did it.”
  - seinecle 11mo ago
    I would be interested in a book telling the history of cinema and animation that you describe
    - neom 11mo ago
      https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Untold-Animation-Simpson/dp/0813124077 https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Untold-Animation-Simpson... and https://archive.org/details/hollywoodcartoon00barr https://archive.org/details/hollywoodcartoon00barr
  - maplethorpe 11mo ago
    But nevertheless, a human did still do it. How gruelling and exploitative the process was, or how many humans it took, is beside the point. The fact that the image existed meant that there was an attainable skill that a person could learn in order to do that same thing, and that was inspiring. Since the days of cave paintings, that experience has been available to all humans. In the year 2025, it died, and I will never experience it again.
- prodigycorp 11mo ago
  Good film making is good film making. I am a creative. I incorporate AI into videos that I make subtly and with a huge amount of care. I know I put more time and care into my craft than most others. Nobody knows what involved AI and what didn’t. At the end of the day, if you care about your work, it shows.
- mikkupikku 11mo ago
  I get it, but it also doesn't matter. I liked anime when it was drawn by hand because I liked looking at all the things people could draw. But it doesn't matter what I like; virtually all anime is now rendered from 3d computer models, particularly any sort of machinery or whenever the camera rotates or transforms in space showing off the 3d structure of things. That stuff used to be drawn by hand but now nobody does that. It's not coming back.
thesuitonym 11mo ago
I can almost see your point, but there are two big problems: 1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close. And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?
- em-bee 11mo ago
  what if you write the story yourself, and use AI only to visualize it?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jsheard 11mo ago
    What does a visualization being to the table over a book, if it's executed in the most generic way possible? The decisions made when adapting one medium to another are what does or doesn't make it worthwhile. Unless your goal is purely to capture people who don't and won't read, as cheaply and cynically as possible.
    - em-bee 11mo ago
      there is a big difference between sending the story to the AI and saying "visualize this" vs carefully describing exactly how the visualization should look like and effectively only using the AI to render your vision.
      - Planktonne 11mo ago
        Is there a big difference? There might be in process, but I've yet to be impressed by one in results.
        em-bee 11mo ago
        well the question is rather, what is the difference of AI use vs say a 3D modelling application? assuming you have the 3D assets already designed. you then take a model, and instruct the application that this model is to move from point A to point B, using a pathfinding algorithm while avoiding obstacles. once done, render the result in a video. now do the same with AI. is the human contribution really that much different?
foxyv 11mo ago
I think the objections with AI will change based on the quality of the AI generated work. What people don't want is to wade through a million gallons of poorly generated slop to see one good movie. They also don't want to have to deal with thousands of zero effort AI videos just to find one good video generated by a human being. If the actual result of AI is an unlimited supply of adequate media personalized to our tastes, I don't foresee there being any objection. Right now, it's honestly just shovelware on a scale that hasn't been seen before. No one likes shovelware except maybe toddlers.
johnnyanmac 11mo ago
>I care about good, tight story telling. Agreed, wake me when that happens. If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out >In the case of this ad.. it’s okay? I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers. The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.

neom 11mo ago

I lived through the end of the beginning of computer becoming a primary tool for art, both in building DeviantART and also I was in the second cohort of the first ever digital imaging and technology program in Canada. It was super interesting, during college was the release of the Canon 300D, things moved really quickly after, my graduating year the pro film makers associations introduced a ban on digital work within the associations "club activities" (that lasted about 16 months) - it was funny tho you would see people judging professional salons (contests) zooming in to 30000% looking for signs of digital editing - I was ~20 and it was all very amusing to me, like why did all these old people hate digital art do much? We persisted, bunch of us graduated and started a studio, one day Canon called us, I was one of the first people in the world to use a Canon 5D Mk2 months before it was released, my ads ended up on TV, we won three technical emmy awards, made lots of money, had a great time etc. All the people I know who rode the wave had fantastic careers and worked on interesting stuff, made money etc.(and btw, the last ones standing after all was said and done in the "fuck digital camp"? curmudgeons!) fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists, I am a business/technology person who happens to be decent at story telling and naturally not awful at picture making - I would have gotten crushed by what the technologies enabled as the abstractions and programatic features opened up film making to people who didn't want to or couldn't naturally grasp the physics/controls. I'm grateful past me was able to think about this clearly because it lead me to meeting Ben and Moisey and joining them to go on and build DigitalOcean, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

Matticus_Rex 11mo ago
Thanks for sharing this!
johnnyanmac 11mo ago
>fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists I'm not sure if that bet really paid off. I feel like the number or both "skilled artist" and "skilled storyteller" didn't really move. It just feels higher because the barrier to entry and validation is "how well can I market myself on social media?" Not "can I get into/create my own studio?" or any other metric a craftsman would use. I don't necessarily callel this a bad thing, and I'd even argue that it only magnified existing issues instead of creating new new ones. but it has obvious down sides. Deviant art played a part in that, so kudos. Or perhaps, you've doomed us all? Hard to say, I always had a strange relationship with DeviantArt.

wat10000 11mo ago

It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out. I may be wrong, but I get the sense that computer art was welcomed by people actually working in the field (did professionals criticize the computer graphics in Star Wars or Wrath of Khan?) and it was mostly the lay public that saw it as somehow not real. The opposite seems to be true for AI "art."

ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago
> It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out. People at the time also said using a computer was fundamentally different from putting in a ton of work into building physical models. A lot of tech adoption is motivated by economics, so the argument that "before it was more work, now it's less work" will almost always apply regardless of the specifics. I don't think it's a useful thing to focus on. It's almost a moral argument: I deserve it because I suffered for it, but he did it easy so he doesn't deserve it. In fact, I would even go further. I would say it's part of the definition of technology. What is technology? Technology is a thing or an idea, created or discovered, that makes work easier and/or cheaper.
- wat10000 11mo ago
  I agree that it's not useful if we're looking at practical stuff. It doesn't matter to me if my table was built with ten hours of human work, or ten seconds. But for creative work? I think it matters a lot. You used the phrase "creating art." I don't think it counts as "creating" if there's no work going into it. Typing some words into a prompt box and getting a video out is not "creating," any more than doing an image search and printing out an image of a painting is creating a painting. Printers are extremely useful devices, but they don't create art.
- agumonkey 11mo ago
  but there are subtle signs that the old ways made art different people do more practical effects, they also miss the era of physical set filming[0], i personally am bored seeing the latest gpu able to create gazillions of whatever because i got the memo, gpu can do everything.. i get more magic seeing what people did with very few don't get fooled by the "people reject evolution every time" [0] technology can distort the focus onto the tool out of the art, films before had to arbitrate between various tricks to get a scene to work, now apparently people don't. they film bits and postprocess everything later, the tech allows infinite changes, but the cake has no taste

philistine 11mo ago

It's urban myth. Tron was not disqualified because they used computers, it wasn't nominated because it looked terrible.

tshaddox 11mo ago
Writer and director Steven Lisberger made that claim in interviews, so I wouldn't quite call it an urban myth. As far as I know, any film can be submitted for Academy Award consideration in any category, then an executive committee determines the eligibility of each submission and chooses up to 20 films to move onto the nomination process. I don't think this committee publishes anything about its decision-making process, so presumably Lisberger is just guessing based on his impression of industry sentiment at the time.
homarp 11mo ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20190105145419/https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tron-s-20th-Anniversary-Director-discusses-3236009.php#page-2 https://web.archive.org/web/20190105145419/https://www.sfgat... has the director saying it though. Lisberger recounts. "We did all those effects in about seven months, which included inventing the techniques." "Tron," however, wasn't nominated for a special-effects Oscar. "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers," he scoffs.

fireflash38 11mo ago

CGI is still bad tbh. Look at all the boring stuff produced for Marvel.

class3shock 11mo ago

You are framing it as "this technological advancement is being thought of as bad because we always think of new technological advancements as bad". AI is bad because of all the ways in which it is objectively bad.

marcosdumay 11mo ago

You cold find plenty of people complaining about CGI up to earlier this year. Computers are bad, unless used by exactly the necessary measure to add to the story. Then they are great. But most movies don't do that, and you can see the actors not reacting to the scenes they are in because they have no idea what's actually happening. The same will probably happen to AI, with also most people overdoing it and making bad stuff. Forever.

make3 11mo ago

AI is threatening to remove humans from the whole equation except the very top. AI is an existential threat (not in the Terminator sense). Especially for art, I'm an AI researcher myself (in bio for health), but I think that ppl are completely understandable for wanting to help artists make a living and want to consume something that someone cared about