Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 9871536" data-attributes="member: 725">I think that from an illustrator perspective generative AI is not iterative enough (Sketches => final design), but generative AI was not made for illustrators, as there are too few to matter from an earnings perspective, and to stubborn to get a big adoption. As the AI generative market matures that will change. Meanwhile they targeted everyone, those that didn't have an Illustrator's background and training. A far larger market, that tend to be far less critical, and more adoptive if they can do fun stuff themselves. Just like a Kia isn't designed with Max Verstappen in mind...Different generative AI and LLM solutions have different capabilities. With ChatGPT I can toss in an image and it will work with that, reproducing that in another style, etc. But with Midjourney I can't do that (yet?), I can use collections of existing images to define a style and can work with other images generated by Midjourney. But something like Midjourney is very focused on relatively quick 'upgrades' to their models, they've had 10 versions in 4 years, It seems this has slowed down somewhat to about 1 model per year. I suspect that eventually they'll hit a development wall or they hit a threshold where it's 'good enough', just like most things related to Tech. I expect then to capability no longer be focused on depth, but in breadth, we we could see workflows that are aimed at more traditional illustration workflows. Already quite a few folks hack together flows for specific solutions to go around generative AI limits. Glibatree for example does some interesting things already...As someone already mentioned, the current cost for 'AI' is heavily subsidized by investors, that won't go on forever. But meanwhile models get better, more efficient, hardware gets better and sometimes more efficient. On a local machine that's taking up less then a liter of space, <10W while typing this and ~70W while inferring, which is less then the old 100W light bulbs. I can run relatively large LLMs (Mac Mini M4 Pro 20c GPU, 64GB memory) on there, for example the 70b DS model gave me similar results to the half a year earlier ChatGPT 3.5. The next generation of Apple silicon (M5) is already out and significantly better then the previous generation (which was already very good). The question is will the investor money be cut off before hardware and software meet at the 'good enough' threshold? That is imho a guess for everyone, not much better then reading tea leaves.Already companies are running into 'AI' issues, regarding security, compliance, costs, skills, etc. I'm already pretty annoyed with Apple support where every time the 'AI' agent asks what you're calling for does not recognize their own product, I have to go through the same loop a couple of times before I finally get a human on the line that, most often, can help me. I'm currently very happy with my Apple ecosystem, so I'll life with the annoying Apple AI. But I've left services before due to their support not being up to my expectations, and moved to companies that asked significantly more for their services, but their support exceeded my expectations (ISPs). Similar things will happen with other 'AI' products eventually.I also see that if you want quality results out of xyz (even generative AI or LLM), you need someone with the right skills, and if my experience in IT is any indication, those will be pretty rare and thus expensive. Expensive AI + expensive people = very expensive! Suddenly it becomes more interesting to hire cheaper people that might take a bit longer to complete a job, but are overal cheaper. Another issue many companies are now forgetting is that they're replacing 'junior' positions with 'AI' and only retaining 'senior' positions to oversee the work/results. The thing they forget is that to become a 'senior' you need to start somewhere as a 'junior', and when no one has 'juniors' anymore because they are replaced with 'AI', suddenly when the 'seniors' dry up due to retirement or death, you have a HUGE problem. Just like with all the previous automation waves, some companies will collapse and the how the work market works will be rewritten.That said, I'm already of the opinion that many of the illustrators in mainstream media are not that different from the generative AI illustrations. Heck, some of the generative AI output I think is better then what some of the D&D WotC illustrators produce (bland). Others like for example Paul Bonner produce very unique pieces which I love.As for kickstarters and concept art, that's mostly an illustrators perspective, not a consumers perspective. Don't get me wrong, I've got quite a few books with artwork for computer games and tabletop games, but not everyone is obsessed with that. Let me give the example from 13+ years ago, Planetary Annihilation on Kickstarter: They had an awesome (human made) 'gameplay visualization' video that absolutely sold the concept of the game, but in the end it was NOT representative of the game, the 'gameplay visualization' was still more awesome! As a consumer I was still disappointed... Would I have cared if they made an intro movie that was equally divergent from the end product, not really. At best I would have given the generative AI the blame of not being what was shown initially. And imho that is the problem with any concept art. Not representative of the end product.</blockquote>

Verification