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My timeline oozes doom about how AIs will take our artist jobs. Listen, it'll disrupt parts of the creative industry for sure. But here's a few things a good artist can do and no AI will ever, in our lifetimes, do. A thread🧵-->
ORIGINAL WORLDBUILDING.
AI results are impressive yet extremely derivative. The worlds it shows to us are familiar, processed and refried. In this aspect, nothing I've seen on Midjourney comes remotely close to stuff like @_8bitwizard and his Ceramic world.
AI results are impressive yet extremely derivative. The worlds it shows to us are familiar, processed and refried. In this aspect, nothing I've seen on Midjourney comes remotely close to stuff like @_8bitwizard and his Ceramic world.
TARGETED FUNCTIONALITY.
AI can't iterate alongside a team to create a complex object that needs to work within precise technical parameters *and yet* be beautiful. Will an AI be able to replicate @VitalyBulgarov's work on Alita? No it won't.
AI can't iterate alongside a team to create a complex object that needs to work within precise technical parameters *and yet* be beautiful. Will an AI be able to replicate @VitalyBulgarov's work on Alita? No it won't.
TASTEFUL STYLIZATION.
Elegance in the choices you *don't* make. The AI will almost always resort to raw power - it's a visual monomaniac. But it lacks subtlety and restraint, something on display in these delicate, classy Dragon Age illustrations by Bioware's Doe.
Elegance in the choices you *don't* make. The AI will almost always resort to raw power - it's a visual monomaniac. But it lacks subtlety and restraint, something on display in these delicate, classy Dragon Age illustrations by Bioware's Doe.
DRAW WITH A FEELING.
Sorry but AIs can't draw even mediocre comics for shit. Look at @danielwarrenart's raw expression and linework, for example. I know in my heart that whatever he's doing, no AI will be able to replicate in a million years.
Sorry but AIs can't draw even mediocre comics for shit. Look at @danielwarrenart's raw expression and linework, for example. I know in my heart that whatever he's doing, no AI will be able to replicate in a million years.
CAPTURE A MOMENT.
A big part of an artist's job in film/games is to understand a story. With humans. Who share moments. And then pour that understanding of context and emotion into a single moment. Look at @chenalii's work and tell me what AI will catch up to this and when.
A big part of an artist's job in film/games is to understand a story. With humans. Who share moments. And then pour that understanding of context and emotion into a single moment. Look at @chenalii's work and tell me what AI will catch up to this and when.
The day an AI can do some of the above, it'll probably mean that engineers will have solved the Artificial General Intelligence problem and created a Strong AI.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI
And then we'll have a very different set of issues to worry about.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI
And then we'll have a very different set of issues to worry about.
So yeah. This is a moment of, as @pascalblanche put it, reflect on our own art and what makes it unique.
I'm not saying AI won't make a dent in our industry. It 100% will. But certain skills artists have today are simply very far from its reach... for the foreseeable future.
I'm not saying AI won't make a dent in our industry. It 100% will. But certain skills artists have today are simply very far from its reach... for the foreseeable future.
Oh, and this is not about wanting to bury my head in the sand. Feel free to bookmark this thread and prove me wrong as AI evolves in the next years/decades. Thank you for reading.
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Michael Nielsen @michael_nielsen
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May 28, 2022
Enjoyed this thoughtful thread. (I expect many of my AI-oriented followers will find it easy to critique specific pieces. But I think it's much more interesting to try to understand and develop and riff on the key insights in there, of which there are many.)