Comment by boca_honey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boca_honey | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Gemini / Antigravity to make a virtual pet for my kids using Love2D / lua. I never coded in my life and have no intention of learning (but I've been learning a lot about game systems and logic, which has been fun). The game is coming along very well and it looks very pretty (I'm a professional illustrator) and if I decide to publish it, no one will care the code is made in AI. It's very high effort, to be honest. You'd had to look into the code to know AI made it.

I now get why so many people are making AI art. I see their "work" as an illustrator and it is absolute slop, but I can see now how it might be fun and even liberating for people who don't make a living with it. So I now think twice before calling AI art "slop". Sure, it may be slop, but it's making a lot of people happy and probably opening up new carreer paths for people.

And yes, I've been affected financially because of this... but I get it.

Your point also touches on the idea that new things are being created that might well never have. Like your virtual pet. You might have been commissioned to illustrate such a thing but most likely not, and it wouldn’t have been “yours.” It reminds me of when desktop publishing, MIDI sequencers, or PowerPoint took off and people produced all sorts of things that were largely not of high artisanal quality but it was new stuff, people got personal value from it (as it was harder to spread stuff around pre-Internet) and the tools eventually matured into what all the pros now use anyway.

That said, I concede the critics have many valid points and concerns and it’s going to be interesting to see how we navigate this flood of “stuff” at a scale never seen before. (I suspect it’ll end up like YouTube and video. Ultra long tail. Most stuff never seeing more than a few eyeballs and a smaller group getting the lion’s share of attention, as with most things. Did YouTube change TV and video production more generally? Yes! But it also didn’t destroy it..)

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