AI From an Artist's Perspective
I asked DQ Artist Fredrik Skarstedt about AI and whether his views had evolved over the last year, and this was his response:
I have experimented with AI tools quite a bit, and I am still of two minds about it. I find it amazing to not have to rely on search engines anymore to find answers to questions like "how do I write an unreal script that triggers an animation when a player steps on an object" or "explain the changes in the 2025 tax code to me in bullet points". Those are phenomenal uses for AI. We have also started working on using AI at work (pathology) and I think there's a bright future for it there. There needs to be humans involved every step of the way, but the ability for a computer to point out "hey... these cells look like cancer... a doctor should look at this" is fantastic. I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it without having humans look at things, but it will ease the workload of doctors everywhere when it starts to emerge (pretty soon).
I have tried using generative art tools for my game development and it's frustrating. In pretty much all instances they just can't make the thing I need and instead create something that's either plain wrong or something that is kind of close to it, but doesn't work for me. I think AI is a neat tool to generate ideas, but it's irritating and frustrating for real asset creation. So I do it myself? I don't know. It's not going anywhere and I try to keep an eye out for interesting tools, but so far nothing art related... well... one tool that I use a lot is the sharpness tools for raw photographs that Adobe introduced lately. It's marvelous. Is it AI? Who knows. All I know is that it works.
There's also the whole copyright thing. If I generate a building in an AI 3D generative tool. How do I know that it's not just something that the AI just scraped off the internet? Am I using someone's textures and mesh without them getting paid for it? It feels icky and wrong.
I don't think artists will go anywhere anytime soon. I think depending on what you are working on, AI and LLM are tools that can be used to generate background things, but there's nothing out there, right now, that beats the eye of an artist.
Tomorrow: your email, which was quite passionate (and relatively evenly divided).
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