pouët.net

I can recommend this talk for those who have nothing else to do. It lasts for about an hour: link. It's not that much dry technical stuff about neural networks and stuff like that though.

I do, or at least try to. And what you're describing is why I feel cheated of something when it comes to AI images.

Part of the enjoyment, as I've said earlier, is the process, the technique. Not just for myself, but seeing it in other people's work as well. Like studying the brush strokes in a painting, I zoom in, and out, and in, and scrutinize the details, enjoying the surprises each image holds. How was some minute detail achieved? Was a single colour sacrificed for a handful of pixels, just to make them pop? And check out that specific dither that provides both texture and ramping at the same time!

With downsampled AI images, that whole experience disappears. The human hand, the technical skill, the hours of grind, the scene grit. The soul, if you will. I'm being robbed of the actual experience of the image, no matter how good it looks (which it very often doesn't).

I know for a fact that coders do the same: How the fuck was that one effect accomplished? What clever "cheats" were used, can another cycle be shaved off, can a few more bytes be squeezed out? Why deprive yourself (and others) of that enjoyment?

So what if the scroll stutters and the circle isn't round, at least the code was written by an LLM: the unavoidable future of 7 MHz 1980:s home computing. Type the prompt, press the button, the demo is done. Thank fuck it only took a few minutes, now we can go back to drinking beer and watching the classics from 1991.

If what The Sarge and grip wrote doesn’t move you, you’re possibly an AI.

There will always be people who enjoy the same things you do.

Just because some other people choose to play with other toys somehow deprives you of their unmade handcrafted pixel art, and even robs you of some enjoyment, while you can still enjoy original real pixel art? Don't want to mention the e word again, but... please tell me i misunderstand something here. :)

I do pixel art! And also interesting stories about Dikkie Dik... Don't take yourself so seriously folks :)

I think these AI graphics generators could be a way for a group of ~4 demosceners to make something bigger. For example at some point I wanted ~10 cloud pictures for a fading collage and I just downloaded some from the internet or used photos from my phone. I could ask the graphician to draw 10 handcrafted pictures of clouds, but it would take a lot of time and maybe finally the effect doesn't even work.

I think for such uses where the alternative is to download a bunch of stock photos then AI is acceptable.

You don't want to use Rembrandt to draw doorhandle_texture.png

I think for a lot of (Amiga?) demos 75% of the graphics are made by the coder throwing some shit together. Is it ok to use AI for that 75% of shit just to drive the effects?

yeah, just ask some other van rijn to AI that shit :P

I do take it serious. Because it's a big part of my life. And as Grip says, I don't want to be robbed of the experience of enjoying others art.
I also take it serious because this affects us all. It's not just about the pixel scene. This is all art there is. The human touch will disappear Im afraid.
Why? Because there will be no new talent filling the pool of artists (or musicians, or coders) because kids looks at Midjourney and think why on earth should I spend 20-30 years learning this craft and only be half decent, and give up. The drug instant gratification is so strong no-one will take the hard route when the all you can eat smörgåsbord is next to you.

In the end, there will only be AI art left. And trust me, you DO NOT want that.

Pretty sure that human-made art will not disappear entirely, especially the type with a capital A.

I consider this whole discussion mostly theoretical, because people will keep doing whatever the hell they want to do regardless of it. Some people are going to use GAI to make images, some people are going to enjoy watching them, and some will thumb them down to oblivion.

I discuss this because I think it's interesting. However, I'm neither interested in nor somehow in a position to force anyone into a particular way of making demos or images.

Nevertheless, yes, watching demos and partaking in the creative process gives me great enjoyment. And yes, increasing use of AI images lessens that enjoyment for me. I'm trying to explain why, because just saying that something sucks without reasoning about it feels like a dick move.

People express their opinions about demos all the time - it is, after all, why we're voting in compos. If doing so makes me entitled, then so be it. The question you quoted wasn't rhetorical, it was asked in the hope of understanding how other people reason.

@rloaderro:
I was refering to something vaguely similar when appealing to graphicians to abstain from undisclosed use of AI, uncredited copies and straight wirejobs, as a part of a wide initiative. We got some pushback in style of “you want to hinder us by telling us what to use and what not to use”. This pushback was misled on so many levels. No need to say the initiative did’t tell anyone what to use or not, it just pleaded for honesty about processes. Anyway, back to the point, I saw the initiative as something quite the opposite to hindrance, a means for graphicians to free themselves. You can draw and paint and play and have fun! So, next time a coder comes and tells you: “We’re gonna use this pic from the internet, you’ll pixel it over”, you will say: “No. We’re gonna use my original graphics.”

Wasted opportunity for writing a diamond-square cloud generator ;-)

There are certainly gray areas here and I know for a fact that I've personally enjoyed and thumbed up productions where AI has been used to create some graphics. I've also probably enjoyed and thumbed up some that have fooled me.

In a pure coder porn demo, I maybe don't care as much. But hand crafted graphics tend to often lift the experience: a great rotozoomer is still great with a scanned photo, but it's going to look so much better with a properly pixeled image.

The discussion of hand crafted vs. machine generated and downsampled goes beyond AI. I see a lot of images in Amiga demos that have been drawn by a human hand in, say, Photoshop, and then poorly converted and post-processed. And as I said above, I realize this practise isn't going away either, but it still lessens the enjoyment for me in comparison to a crisp, vivid image pixeled from the ground up.

If this actually happened to you, i can understand some of your frustration. But i'd be willing to bet it's a rare thing, and a rather uncommon type of coder.

soon: artisan demos made with care by real humans

AI tools are like a big potluck dinner - everyone brings something to the table. It's tempting to just say, "Thanks, AI," but what about all the pioneering scientists at Bell Labs who intented the transistor, or the math/physics buffs who invented stuff like ReLU functions and gradient descent techniques?

Honestly, giving AI all the credit for a demo is like saying your grandma's secret recipe is all about the oven she used.

On our demo J a lot of the images were grainy photos that Cheetah painstakingly pixeled over by hand using self made palettes. It was his own idea though!! That was a mammoth effort and the demo looks so much better because of it! Not sure if he ever wants to repeat that without getting paid though :D

As long as there are human beings, there will be human art.

To those who think human art will disappear in the future … I don’t think so. Maybe the amount of people who make living put of it will decrease, but REAL art made by humans will be more valuable than ever before. And there will always be people enjoying the craft. Because creativity is something that lives inside a big part of humanity and this hunger must be stilled.

If there was a tool to create perfect demos only using text promts I think most of us won‘t use it, because the process of doing is what we enjoy, to achieve something, to create something.

yeah of course gaspode, and there still are incentives to teach younglings to learn a craft (if they have caring parents); but also, the fact that some of us are willing to fight against some things is what keeps the bad people away.

Is this Artisan Craft Demoscene or not?

They exist. Called "ca65", "vasm", "vbcc" etc.pp. :)

Point being that you can never specifiy what you want precisely enough, unless telling every single step, which is as good as typing it in all yourself (minus boilerplate).

And whenever AI will be smart enough to really think out of the box and be general, we might or might not have other problems to solve.

bullcrap talk

Care to elaborate, preferrably in a somewhat more civil way?