Oh wow this is great, I threw a few of these tricks at it and never really felt like I nailed it... Might have to revisit after playing around with this more
What do you estimate the cost would be to have each tile hand drawn by an artist?
I don't think there are enough artists in the world to achieve this in a reasonable amount of time (1-5 years) and you're probably looking at a $10M cost?
Part of me wonders if you put a kickstarter together if you could raise the funds to have it hand drawn but no way the very artists you hire wouldn't be tempted to use AI themselves.
I'd say that deciding where a transient should go" is creative, manually aligning 15 other tracks over and over again is not (not to mention having to do it in both the DAW and melodyne)...
I agree that "push button get image" AI generation is at best a bit cheap, at worst deeply boring. Art is resistance in a medium - but at what point is that resistance just masochism?
George Perec took this idea to the max when he wrote an entire novel without the letter "E" - in French! And then someone had the audacity to translate it to English (e excluded)! Would I ever want to do that? Hell no, but I'm very glad to live in a world where someone else is crazy enough to.
I've spent my 10,000 hours making "real" art and don't really feel the need to justify myself - but to all of the young people out there who are afraid to play with something new because some grumps on hacker news might get upset:
It doesn't matter what you make or how you make it. What matters is why you make it and what you have to say.
> It doesn't matter what you make or how you make it. What matters is why you make it and what you have to say.
I want to add one point: That you make/ ship something at all.
When the first image generating models came out my head was spinning with ideas for different images I'd want to generate, maybe to print out and hang on the wall. After an initial phase of playing around the excitement faded, even though the models are more than good enough with a bit of fiddling. My walls are still pretty bare.
Turns out even reducing the cost of generating an image to zero does not make me in particular churn out ideas. I suspect this is true for most applications of AI for most people.
Related? Unrelated? Places like redbubble.com will let you print your design on t-shirts, dresses, mugs, pillow covers, bathroom curtains, bedspreads, shower curtains, stickers, posters, phone cases, and 50+ other things. And, cheap! You can order a single print t-shirt for ~$20
When I first saw all the items I was like "yea, I'm going to cover my house in custom stuff'. But other then a few personal t-shirts I haven't done anything.
To be clear, as I said in another reply downthread, I think this particular project is creative, although creative in a fundamentally different way that does not replace existing creative expression. I also don't object to people doing "push button get image" for entertainment (although I do object to it being spammed all over the internet in spaces meant for human art and drowning out people who put effort into what they create, because 10,000 images can be generated in the time it takes to draw a single one). But "push button get image" is not making things yourself. I would give you credit for creating this because you put effort into fine-tuning a model and a bespoke pipeline to make this work at scale, but this project is exceptional and non-representative among generative AI usage, and "push button get image" does not have enough human decision-making involved for the human to really have any claim to have made the thing that gets generated. That is not creativity, and it is not capable of replacing existing expressions of creativity, which you've asserted multiple times in the article and thread. By all means push button and get image for as long as it entertains you, but don't pretend it is something it isn't.
To me, this project is the point. AI makes "push button get image" is now a thing just like photography made "push button get image" a thing. People complained then that photography was not art. But then eventually we mostly found the art of photography. I think the same will happen for AI stuff. When everyone can do it you need to do something else/more
Author here, and to reiterate another reply - all of the critique of "pixel art" is completely fair. Aesthetically and philosophically, what AI does for "pixel art" is very off. And once you see the AI you can't really unsee it.
But I didn't want to call it a "SimCity" map, though that's really the vibe/inspiration I wanted to capture, because that implies a lot of other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even though I figured it might get a lot of (valid) pushback...
In general, labels and genres are really hard - "techno" to a deep head in Berlin is very different than "techno" to my cousins. This issue has always been fraught, because context and meaning and technique are all tangled up in these labels which are so important to some but so easily ignored by others. And those questions are even harder in the age of AI where the machine just gobbles up everything.
But regardless, it was a fun project! And to me at least it's better to just make cool ambitious things in good faith and understand that art by definition is meaningful and therefore makes people feel things from love to anger to disgust to fascination.
just FYI, there are some very obvious inaccuracies (stitching artefacts?) in this map, especially noticeable e.g. on Roosevelt Island around Roosevelt Bridge, or naround Pier 17 next to Brooklyn Bridge
There's a strange error where half the Broadway Junction subway station just... disappears. And seems to be replaced with some generically hallucinated city blocks? But that's the thing with AI, the quality control at scale is tough. I'm just happy this seems to be about 99.9+% accurate.
More like Sim City 3000 methinks. Sim City is more pixel artsy / lower resolution, while 3000 have enough resolution to feel more like an illustration rather than a videogame.
Yeah this is all completely fair and I agree with all of it. Aesthetically and philosophically, what AI does for "pixel art" is very off. And once you see the "AI" you can't really unsee it.
But I didn't want to call it a "SimCity" map, though that's really the vibe/inspiration I wanted to capture, because that implies other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even though I knew it'd get a lot of (valid) pushback...
As with all things art, labels are really difficult and the context / meaning / technique is at once completely tied to genre but also completely irrelevant. Think about the label "techno" - the label is deeply meaningful and subtle to some and almost meaningless to others
Yup back of the napkin is probably about there - also spent a fair bit on the oxen.ai fine-tuning service (worth every penny)... paint ain't free, so to speak
