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There are two things here, firstly, Without AI, you can have heavily designed environments or you can have procedurally generated, people manage to make both
by Lerc 5mo ago
There are two things here, firstly, Without AI, you can have heavily designed environments or you can have procedurally generated, people manage to make both work. Both can also fail because of reasons specific to the approach. Careless procedural generation can produce a poor variety or nonsensical outputs. Careless specific placement can violate any rules that a game has established creating an incoherent experience.
Making a world internally consistent by explicit placement gets harder as you increase in scale. When internal consistency is a factor impacting quality, there is a scale at which generated content eventually becomes the higher quality solution.
Secondly, when generating content with AI, the same rules around carelessness apply. There are certainly generative AI tools out there that offer few options when it comes to composing what you want, that is not a necessary part of AI, some of it is because people are wanting rudimentary interfaces, some of it is that the generators are sufficiently new that the control mechanisms are limited because they are focused upon doing something at all before doing it highly controlled, in some ways the problem is that things are new enough that it can be hard to describe what is desirable controllability, making the generator to see what people would like it to be able to do is, I think, a reasonable path to follow prior to creating the control that people want. Part of it is also that there _are_ tools that give a high level of control over what is generated but far fewer people get to see them. There are ways to control styles, object placement, camera motions, scene compositions, etc. The more specialised you get, the smaller the subset of people who need that specific control.
I think AI can make things possible for people who could not have done so without them, but it's still going to take care to make something special.
- bredren 5mo agoThis intentionality in the application of AI is very confusing for folks because at first glance it seems like it should just work. It seems to, even. Whereas if you hand a router to someone with a flush trim but in it and ask them to clean up the edge of a table they will take one look at it and nope away from that dangerous spinning thing. If they have the mind to give it a shot and despite a quality tool and bit they bite into the table and ruin the line (or something much worse) no one will be surprised—-they have no experience or recognition of what expertise is in woodworking. But with AI, it is much more hazy what expertise is. The methodology for quality results is changing each week and the articulation in personal tooling involved makes it challenging to adopt another “expert”’s workflows.
- afzalive 5mo agoJust like with mass-produced materials vs hand-crafted stuff, you're gonna have a lot of crap quality and rare, expensive good quality stuff.
- DrewADesign 5mo agoAnd most people can’t just spin up a furniture factory at their whim and call themselves a designer. AI gives everybody with the slightest gumption a fully-functional, “initially plausible crap” factory at their fingertips, so everybody with actual skills gets lost in a sea of useless garbage.
- Schiendelman 5mo agoDiscovery is always the problem to solve - discovering the good products is hard.
- DrewADesign 5mo agoAnd when there’s an ocean of bullshit, it’s a lot harder, which makes the incentive to do good things nearly zero. Scale is very important, here.
- derangedHorse 5mo agoLuckily the same AI tools that are generating the content can be used to build better tailored discriminators for it as well. If I can define what it is I dislike about an essay, video, etc., and give it to an LLM, it can tell me whether a piece I present to it is worthwhile to consume according to my standards. This even applies to things the LLM can't generate things for that meet the same standard for its programmed/prompted discrimination.
- DrewADesign 5mo agoYeah works out great for HR departments and job hunters. Assuming that the LLM search will be meaningfully better at cutting through bullshit than the generating model was at avoiding creating it is, charitably, dubious. Assuming that it won’t be every bit as gamable as Google results is as or more dubious.