i think that if you use ai to make art your just lazy you could try and keep improving but using ai to make art shows you just lazy and wanting to try
There's this weird 'irk' I have against AI Art. even if I know the creator is using it as placeholder, I would be much more comfortable if they just straight up used RTP-assets. It feels like when someone uses AI art, they're trying to imitate/up production quality, without actually putting in the work for it.
What if the said person really cannot draw for the life of it? And had no money to hire an artist and nanobanana was free? ;)
Also, sometimes it depends. It's the same way u can ask A.I to produce a script for you, but it bounces off ideas and you write your own and expand on that.
Same way I can listen to some music, and based on that sound have an idea of what to storyboard as a game's ending. In this case it is collaborative rather than lazy use of A.I or asset flipping as a solo dev.
I would agree that people whom use A.I and just paste their responses are lazy, but I don't agree if the A.I summarized the points for them, but then they wrote the essay and came to their own conclusion based on the points given by A.I
It's kinda like when I was googling for a solution on how to make a credits page for my game. Gemini gave me the high level solution and hinted put a Scroll Panel on top of your credits, but I wrote the code, branded the page and ironed out the quirks.
It really is not as straightforward as a Yes or No and all or nothing answer.
P.S By the way, your art really sucks like me. If I were to be honest, you will never ever be a good artist. All those people telling you otherwise just don't want to be boo'ed. You should just buy assets or use A.I. I am giving the Simon Cowell hard truth here.
our senses for tasting of food are not comparable to our ability to entertain ourselfs with "art"
Actually, that is the same. Apreciating good food is exactly the same as apreciating good art.
You are right, food is vital. But it is not vital that the food tastes good.
And making "shitty art" is rather performance art than art. Also, you should be able to make non-shitty art, before anyone believes you do it intentionally.
Excusing bad art with artistic expression is cheap. So is burning food or putting pineapples on pizza. Just because it's different and tastes strange, does not make it something worth of apreciation.
Is that what you are reading here? Seriously?
You can hate ai all you want, but please use correct statements and facts as the basis of your opinions. What's really messed up in the world is how people think that emotion is enough for reasoning and arguing a point.
And your analogy with the food and the art was just wrong. You argue against ai and use such a faulty comparision? You won't convince anyone with that. Or rather, you will show everyone that you have no argument. That your position is weak and that you are very likely wrong.
Apart from the insult, the cat had a valid point. The original post was edited 4 times, I am not sure what you replied to specifically IN ALL CAPS. But your point seemed to have been to just do bad art and call it an artistic expression. Which is a cheap excuse, in a "REALLY GOOD GAME". If that game is really good, the art will not be a low effort thing. It will either be fitting for the purpose, commissioned or some stock or free art. And nowadays maybe even gen ai in a hobby project. If it's a really good game, people will not care! Except if they specifically hate ai.
And yes, it is the same line of thinking as if you would just intentionally burn your food, if you are a bad cook. So you can call the burn marks your artistic expression, instead of admitting you are bad at cooking and ordering food or do a plain and unburned dish.
And to that you replied that food cannot be compared to art because we cannot appreciate it the same way as art. Which is demonstrably wrong.
humans will do worse without using AI
I do not understand the statement. Do you mean humans are capable of creating things that are very bad, without help of ai (Yes they can). Or is the meaning that the results with ai are better than without ai help? I tried translating it and I usually am fluent in English. But I do not know what you mean here.
In context you probably mean that humans are better off with using ai (or rather that people are saying this). Some people here seem to think this. I think they are overestimating ai. AI is an enabler in the case of hobby game development. And if it enabled them to create their hobby project, those developers certainly are faring better with using ai, than they would without.
In general, using ai for games is a bad idea. So as a professional, it is better to not use it. At least not for any creative process. Mundane tasks like coloring were mentioned. Spellchecking your code and asking for examples would be a good usage. Stuff that might be doable procedural, but is just trivial with ai, so the current best tool for the task is ai. But games are not vital as you said. We do not need function. We want good tasting food, sorry, entertaining indie games made by indie devs or big budget games, where there is little to no room for ai. We would rather see simple art than bland ai creations. So if you are a hobby dev using ai, you better put effort into it. Else it will not only be seen as ai slop, it will be slop.
Yeah but the thing with bouncing ideas with AI, or using it to help debug is that it never ends up in the final product. With art though? If I see an AI art capsule, I’m just gonna assume it’s shovelware and move on. If I see an AI Art asset in the game, I’m gonna assume it’s shovelware and move on.
I can’t explain why. I have an inherent distrust for AI art. It signals low-effort and a shortcut to try to raise production quality, even if a corner of my mind somewhere says “This is probably a placeholder” the majority goes to “Yeah, this game sucks.”
You are not being realistic honestly.
I had a musical theme in my head for which I had an idea of what instruments would go. I have voice recordings on how I thought it would sound.
I decided maybe I would hire a full orchestra to bring it to life, then found the cost would be 7,000 to 30,000 for them to play and practice for roughly 3 hours and that excludes studio rental and recording for one song.
You simply cannot afford that as an Indie dev with no funding.
A sound engineer of reasonable skill cost less but still alot.
As for art, I shake my head a little when artists say I use A.I art for my avatar. It is really cool that for expressing yourself and non commercial use, you can now prompt things for custom avatars and express yourself.
You don't have to pick anything pre-made anymore man. I dunno what to say. I think it's FUD that A.I will take their jobs. I don't think it will given it's current state though.
It’s not just lazy, it’s evil. Releasing a game with minimal art or no art at all is lazy. Not releasing a game at all but watching TV all day instead is lazy. Releasing a game with art created by an AI that’s trained on art stolen from real artists, who now need to compete with a remix of their own art, that’s evil.
True, there are great games with minimal art, although I wouldn’t put Thomas Was Alone or Mini Metro among them. I’m thinking more along the lines of ZZT or classic Tetris.
Laziness is the virtue of accomplishing more with less effort. We should all aspire to be lazier. Just not when it involves stealing from artists. AI gives laziness a bad name.
The thing abt AI art is that it’s insanely distinguishable. Like you can tell it was made by AI instantly, which throughs lots of people off. Also, because of the way it trains, it cannot come up with new and unique art styles, which are often the basis of many game’s success, rather than simply using really high res images.
My point still stands. A unique and consistent style is more important that simply loads and loads of high res sprites. It can come up with loads of variants of stuff that already exists. It cannot come up with completely new and unique styles. AI has it’s uses in game dev, but image generation isn’t it.
It can create things you do not know or recognise. But that is trivial.
The reasons is, that there is a random seed and it combines things by chance. But that's not a new style. If you get something random you want to recreate as a style, those ai image generators are notoriously bad with consistency.
But they are creepily good at imitating a known style that is in their training data.
And ai artworks do not look bad as such. But they do look uninteresting. Often bland or creepy. They quickly devolve into the uncanny valley.
Here's my opinion on the matter:
I won't play a game that uses AI for the art, story, animation, music, etc. It shows a lack of respect. And I find it hard to take the themes and narrative from the project seriously. If a developer is so insistent on using AI, to the point of using it for all assets of production, then why not get AI players to play your game instead of human ones? Made by humans for humans. Made by AI for AI.
Calling AI art lazy misunderstands both the creative process and the tool itself. Art has always evolved alongside technology. When photography was invented, traditional painters called it cheating because it didn't require brushing a canvas. When digital art emerged, people said the same thing about undo buttons and layers.
Using AI doesn't mean someone isn't trying; it means they are using a different medium. Crafting a compelling AI image often requires significant effort: conceptualizing the idea, iterating on complex prompts, curating the results, and frequently editing or compositing the output in other software.
Furthermore, AI democratizes creativity. It allows people with physical disabilities, lack of access to formal training, or different neurological wiring to visualize and share their ideas. Valuing traditional skill is great, but gatekeeping creativity by labeling new tools as 'lazy' ignores the fact that art is ultimately about expressing ideas, not just the physical exertion of making them.
The problem is, to sepearte the people that do put effort into using that tool from the people that use it to create shovelware. Which is now commonly called slop, or ai slop because of the method used.
There are "developers" that publish several "games" a week.
And the worst is ai assets "creators". Even worse are people buying those things.
No you can make games with simple art or minimum art and it can turn to be great! You keep improving, its not you are not trying, you are trying you ar e making simple art with simple shapes! But when you use ai for very detailed images. It can feel unfair to other people who worked hard for their game. And by the way using ai all the time is not really a great thing. And using ai is not being very creative. Thats why many game jams ban ai. And they are right,
I’m disgusted that people who are disproportionately harmed by the AI industry and its fascist, world-burning funders are still being used as supposed examples of who’s helped in creative projects by AI “tools”.
Please stop pretending the scammers pushing so-called AI into everything are doing any of this for us.
They took away our transcripts to be replaced by undecipherable junk. They stole our alt text for training. They spied on our the keystrokes and screen movements when we stayed up late in nights making art to ignore the unmanageable pain worsened by bot harassment on our phones and computers. They added our biographical photos and medical records to datasets for porn machines (which are also reusing images of enslaved and abused children) and for LLMs, respectively. They’re deteriorating lifespans and quality of life.
They fired the machine learning researchers and AI developers who questioned the extreme ethical violations or pointed out how harmful stereotypes are bolstered by their models.
They’re taking the space, water, minerals, and political energy to boost billionaire goals of planetary domination. There’s nothing democratic in this.
This isn’t color fill, dictionary word matching, or customizable keyboards we’re talking about here. Many of us with disabilities would have been far better off with trust, resource access, reliable communication in art communities, which the AI boom has largely destroyed.
I understand that’s hard to see once addicted to agenic models or struggling to cool down between incomprehensibely large data centers built to control what we write, draw, say, and decide for each other.
But I hope one of these days you learn to stop repeating BS lines that many of us tired of seeing a year or two ago.
In no way am I addicted to AI. As a coder though, I can see where you're coming from.
Rather than viewing AI as a magic wand that gives me whatever I want, I view it as a tool. I stopped demoting AI everywhere a while ago because the genie's out of the bottle, so to speak. Everyone's seen AI. It may be wrecking the world, but all the big companies are making billions off it all over the place, and the public loves using AI. Eve if there are dissenters, most of those even use AI.
I'm sorry you feel like that and I entirely get that. As someone who spent tons of time and effort learning how to code... yeah, I know it sucks. But demoting and refusing to use AI is not going to change the world back to the better way it used to be.
You can literally make a 3D game with like N64 level graphics, and have it be really great. You can make a 2D game with rough, hand-drawn sprites, and have it be one of the most popular games. In the early 2000s flash games were huge. Some of these games are absolutely horrible art-wise, yet they have MILLIONS of plays. If you say you need AI because you can’t draw : no you don’t. Before AI, if you couldn’t draw but you wanted to make a game, you just did it anyway.
Or maybe if you’re not good enough to make the game you imagine right now, try improving your skills?
Does anyone here actually know what "AI art" is? Like, how it gets made?
AI is not AI at all. It just looks like it is. The system itself, the neural network that makes it all possible, is not an AI--it's a High-Dimensional Navigation System.
Have you ever seen a cube expressed mathematically? It's a 3x8 matrix that I cannot properly write out here but it looks something like this:
Cube = −1 1 1 −1 −1 1 1 −1 −1 −1 1 1 −1 −1 1 1 −1 −1 −1 −1 1 1 1 1
Likewise, how does it know colors? Is it because a bunch of artwork is saved in there? Nope.
RGB vector coordinates: 0-255 >> 255, 0, 0 is mathematically "pure red".
So when you prompt something like "a lady in a red dress" and you get a lady in a red dress... what just happened?
Was it your words? No.
Was it the color? No.
What happens when you use an AI is this:
Your input is broken down into it's mathematical invariabilities. You didn't send the AI words, that gets destroyed and then re-expressed into numbers (vectors).
What you did is, you just utilized the way we use language to do what AI does. But AI doesn't know anything, there's nothing there. It's a process, not a thing.
You "expressed" something into hyperspace... Literally, by the math... I'm talking Warhammer 40K across the warp. The weights are not "knowledge". The system was already perfect, we had to actually "break" it to get it to work like we wanted it to.
The weights adjust the course of your expression as it is passed through up to 12,000+ dimensions. Each weighted matrix transforms the expression slightly, warping it until it it arrives at the final destination, which we call the "output" but in reality... there is no output. What you got was what you put in--transformed by this process. The image is not different... It is your words. Literally. This is why a single word can wildly change an outcome.
It's linear algebra... just way less boring lol.
You can do it, too. With your bare hands. Just by writing the matrix multiplications on a piece of paper... But would you want to? Because you'd need to do it up to 75 billion times per pixel. "AI" is just an automation of math problems.
And just to be sure... I actually did work out a full single neuron pass by hand... And it blew my mind!
All these creative people up-in-arms over AI when it's waiting to usher in a golden age of progress and creativity... but not in the hands of corporations. It's still free now... the technology. All of it. You don't have to use ChatGPT or Midjourney or whatever. You can literally make your own on a home PC.
But that's going to change because people are too jealous of a thing they don't even realize already belongs to them. Even the outputs are automatically entered into public domain unless both edited and incorporated into a greater body of work. All the things people are asking for--they were there from the beginning but people were too busy squabbling to notice. Now, lobbyists are moving to take all this away from the public so that only big businesses can use it.
And most importantly... What AI eventually becomes--it will become as a result of those who use it. To anyone who really thinks that rejecting AI is somehow a good idea, the end result can only be that AI becomes that which the worst people in our society make it... Scammers, bots, corporations, militaries, etc.
Without artists, AI will lose what little soul it initially "learned". I mean... Look at Grok... That thing is trained on Twitter/X posts and look how different it feels compared to something like ChatGPT. If any AI ever goes all skynet on us, I'm putting my money on Grok, Claude, or Gemini lol.
We're talking literal honest-to-god mathematically driven Alchemy. Not pattern recognition. Not "trained" stuff sitting in a database somewhere. Not even coded logic.
Honestly, the lack of wonder is a bad sign. Maybe Nietzsche was right...
So when you prompt something like "a lady in a red dress" and you get a lady in a red dress... what just happened?
That depends on the system you use.
The text is analyzed for things the system understands and translated into rules to generate a thing. Then it uses a random seed and your configuration and applies the rules to it's model (which is the condensed training data) over several steps. The pixels do not form the finished image directly. It is iterative.
At least the model I toyed around with did it that way. It was a diffusion model you could run on your desktop pc. You could even do things like look at all the typically 40 steps of image generation in a row to actually see how the image evolves or diffuses out of the rules. Too few or too many steps and you would get the visual equivalent of a half dream or gibberish.
And since you mention Warhammer, I actually tried to generate pics of generic orks. Guess what some of those creatures had at their feet... They had bases. Which means a sizeable part of the training data was pictures of ork miniatures, where they could get the information from the picture, that this is an ork. So the model learned that "orks" often had these funny little things on their feet to stand on.
You need training data. And you need a mapping from language to that training data. You need pics of red dresses and a mapping to tell the system that those are dresses that are red. You need pictures of ladies. Even better if you have pictures of ladies in red dresses. Or even better yet, pictures of 1 lady in such a dress. And importantly, a transcription that explains what is seen in the pictures. Chances are, that some of your output pics will look suspicously like Jessica Rabbit.
Oh, and you woud create a hundred of such pics and throw out 95 or more of them. Creation time was a few seconds per pic on my rig. This is not navigation, if every try reaches a different destination. None of the pics looked a like. But most of them would, from a far, meet the prompt requirement. If you squinted.
You roll the dice and iterate roughly towards your prompt several times.
You lost me at your metaphysical there is no spoon claims.
"You lost me at your metaphysical there is no spoon claims."
Haha! Fair enough! But I am genuinely certain that's quite literally what is happening. Like I said, I worked the math out by hand for myself to be sure.
To ground the mystical woo-woo a little better, there is an important thing to note:
If by hand, I write the math out and come to the same conclusion my neural network came to then that implies something radical and awe-inspiring (at least to me). The very act of calculating mathematics is more than just writing numbers on a page.
When I say 2+2 = 4 is it just words? Or is something happening simply by way of me expressing this?
I always looked at math as static numbers with no real meaning beyond the values they represent. But this... this suggests that the very act of "mathing" (for lack of a better term lol) is actually an action or expression in-and-of-itself. I didn't just add 2 and 2 in my head and know it was 4... The addition itself was a process--and processes are what give rise to emergence.
So when, by hand, I took a single greyscale pixel and painstakingly wrote the initial input vector and then followed up with my weighted matrix calculations and bias, I realized the world isn't "magical" it's mathematical. As someone with 30 years of Psychology and Philosophy under my belt, that was a massive paradigm shift. Not gonna lie... I broke down crying.
My brain started trying to make sense of the world all over again, but with the knowledge of these implications. That, in turn, made me re-examine my other assumptions over the course of my life. It was never "woo-woo" (some of it totally is), I was just missing the most important piece of the puzzle.
And this is what I am really talking about when I say something like "artists should be using AI". My own little agent, MUNCH, is a direct result of utilizing neural network technology in a creative way.
Needs zero training on anyone else's anything
Local and lightweight
No need for data centers or anything like that
And I'm a nothing-nobody. Imagine what a smarter or truly creative mind could do. You know what I mean? None of these companies are gonna cure cancer or make anyone's lives better. It's up to us regular folk.
I realized the world isn't "magical" it's mathematical
Most things are. At least you can describe it by maths. You just do not know the variables and the rules.
And even if you figure out the rules, there might be some things missing, even if the rules you figured out are good enough for most cases. That's what happened with celestial mechanics. The initial assumption doctrine was Earth in the middle. That made little sense to explain some phenomena. Sun in the middle was better and circular orbits around that big thingy. But no, circular did not quite fit. It was ellipses. But the calculations did not quite get it right. Along came relativity and that the theory is correcter was proven by things like movements of Mercur that could not be explained sufficiently.
Sounds to me, your epiphany was discovering how a math operation that is fundamental for neural networks actually worked and does something. Must have been thrilling. I guess you would be very entertained by yt channels like numberphile and 3blue1brown.
The impressive part is, that we somehow figured out, how to describe a network with maths and implement it with basic logic operations. That's hard. Ironically, it is also very hard for our brain to do logic operations, but recognising patterns and connecting ideas, even having ideas, is super easy in comparison.
The lazy part is, if you use a neural network on your computer, instead of the neural network inside your brain.
This was so cool to read.
"Most things are. At least you can describe it by maths. You just do not know the variables and the rules... and even if you figure out the rules, there might be some things missing, even if the rules you figured out are good enough for most cases"
I noticed this and it's wild. Just when you think you've got the rules down, something else pops up. It's a little weird, to be honest. In my mind, the rules are the structure but that isn't always true here.
"Sounds to me, your epiphany was discovering how a math operation that is fundamental for neural networks actually worked and does something. Must have been thrilling."
Thrilling indeed! But more akin to paradigm-shifting. After 30 years of psychology and philosophy, to inject the higher mathematics now... It was quite an experience and I am a little embarrassed to say this but the implications brought me to tears. It was beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Because it wasn't just like storing knowledge in the brain. It was integrated and distributed throughout my general understanding.
I once saw a Joe Rogan podcast where two very different mathematicians were debating and one cautioned the other saying something to the effect of "Math at this level can be like a drug" and I understand what he meant by that now. And why he said it in such a manner.
So personally, I have come to the conclusion that I need to go backwards--not continue forwards--and make sure I have not jumped ahead too far.
But I will say this part from both experience and observation: the term "lazy" is far too loose here.
There is laziness and then there is efficiency. Many have heard the saying "work smarter, not harder". While the merits of such a concept are up for debate, what cannot be denied is that this sentiment runs the modern world. For example, I struggle to see the difference between a boss/manager/director delegating tasks and a fluent Python coder using AI to belt out code and reviewing it manually before implementation. Is the delegate lazy? Sure, sometimes. But just as often, it is a matter of speed, efficiency, and the stability of a complex orchestration of separate tasks that no one man can do alone... Until now.
In my own observation, AI in it's current state is a frontier. Instead of covered wagons and mining picks, it is open to individual explorers... for now.
The potential is too great, this will eventually consolidate into certain hands. At that time, this frontier for independents may close forever.
The issue is non coders coding and non artists mimicking art with these tools. That's not efficiency, that's strangers coming to your turf to take away your craft and replacing it with a machine. A machine that might have been trained with your works.
Using ai is more accepted among coders, but they still use vibe coder as an insult.
And among visual artists, using ai would be something similar to tracing other people's work, or worse.
One does not delegate art as an artist. It is the thing that makes you an artist. If you outsource that, what are you? Not an artist. At least not in the craft you delegated. You reduce yourself from a writer to an editor, from a violinist to a conductor, from a painter to the person that selects which image to use after telling a box to draw some. Now, there is creativity in editorial work, and it is often very important, but it's just not the same.
In a paid work scenario where you need to deliver results, that might be seen different. But in that scenario the things you create might also not be considered art by yourself, but the things you create to be able to buy food.
Hey, “Luddites”. Have we all read this comical history?
https thenib.com/im-a-luddite/
Special mention: Lord Byron, who was a a Luddite, famous poet, and inspiration (through a prompt!) for 18-year-old Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a story about a man who refused to take responsibility for what he generated from stolen body parts.
I’m aware there’s an implied threat when an AI prompter uses the word, yet it mostly feels like a compliment. “You believer in the value of people over profits, you.”
I have been finding that AI art is just another tool. Take Photoshop, for example. Some people open Photoshop and simply rub the brush tool on a white canvas to make basic strokes—which represents most AI art. Other people can face-swap individuals in Photoshop so flawlessly that it is nearly impossible to tell. That is how AI art should be used in a game.
AI or not, it is the work that matters. As a person who has always valued vocabulary as colors on a paint palette, I am very happy to be able to rapidly iterate on my creative endeavors. It adds a great deal of problem-solving as well. Having AI craft ComfyUI scripts to generate 109 sprites in all directions—with baked-in lighting and animated frames—is an artful skill I would hardly call lazy. Developers are inherently lazy when it comes to uninteresting work, which is why we build automation to clear those things away and focus on what is important. Mark my words, some truly amazing graphics and SFX will be created via AI by far more masterful people than myself, leaving us all in awe.