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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Technology
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One of the things I've noticed from testing these generators is that they look very good when someone is showing off cherry-picked photos or you are going in with little to no expectation of what you'll get. The more you have a specific image in mind or the more you want certain details the worse it gets. And you quickly realize that when you generate things from similar prompts over and over the model gives you the same results but slightly adjusted.
Obviously art generators look bad for artists right now, but I think once the new toy factor wears off people will realize they aren't as good as they seem. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors involved and once you've seen a good amount of AI photos it gets easier and easier to pick them out of a lineup. They're closer to advanced stock photo generators, in terms of what you can actually get from them. Companies' race to the bottom means that this is going to have effects on artist jobs, but I think the next "revolution" in art is going to be having human art as a selling point the same way stuff like fully orchestrated music or hand-crafted things are.
I wish more people realised this. It's much harder to create very specific images with the current image generation tools than most people seem to think, which is creating an inaccurate view of the technology in the public eye.
The generator will create something inspired by the prompt it is given, but it can be very hard to make it match the output the prompt writer imagines when writing the prompt. There are various tools that can refine and narrow the generator's output, to try and control things like posing, composition, style etc and to redraw details. But even then it's often pot luck as to the output. The generated images aren't necessarily bad, just not what was wanted.
I think the comparison to stock photo images is apt, current image generators are great for creating themed but somewhat generic images. The tools are going to continue to advance, and they are useful in for some applications already. But they are still a long way off from truly replacing human artistry.
Getting good results usually requires a prompt that looks like the title of a generic product in Amazon: just an endless stream of keywords.
The examples from simple prompts are cherry-picked.
Nah that Guardians of the Galaxy art is exactly what I'm talking about. It makes basic mistakes even a child could point out and looks more long a knockoff. And refining it is just rolling the dice to get a better result, whereas an artist you can actually give feedback they can understand.
The game assets look a little better, but if you look carefully you'll notice that they don't tile correctly. It's 90% there but the last 10% is the hardest part and it's important especially for large projects and not just single static images. Not too mention they look generic as fuck, you're not going to get the next Hollow Knight or Darkest Dungeon with an amazing original style from AI, you're only going to get existing styles mashed together. The more specific the vision for the artstyle the harder it will be to generate it.
Also the idea of a Tiktok feed of AI generated content is exactly why I hate AI art. Sure, go ahead and use it to help existing artists generate cheap assets that would otherwise be random brush strokes. But replacing them? The idea that AI generated slop will have anything close to the quality and meaning of even cheap art is ridiculous. Why would anyone want that when they could have actual art made by real people, more of which exists today than anyone could go through in their entire life?