I agree with a lot of what you say below. JUST keep politics out of it. The reference to "(now very woke and highly irrelevant) Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" stated, obviously as an insult, isn't needed to get your point across. We see too much of this infantile conduct from our Congress elected officials.

Regarding the A.I. stuff, while I share the bulk of your views, I also appreciate A.I. for certain uses. Here's why:
1. Once upon a time. I imagined myself a photographer. So I have loads of old time film pictures transferred to digital storage. Lately, I have explored using some as background images for book cover designs. I like the A.I. feature that allows me to insert my photo and lets me modify the image in ways i see fit.

2. Same thing when I use CC4 & Headshot to create a character, then use A.I. to get a more realistic appearance of the result.

That's the limit of my use for it. Otherwise, again, I agree with you.









Omen HP17t ck00 -- Windows 11 -- 32GB RAM -- Two 1TB Crucial M.2 NVME Drives -- nVidia Geoforce RTX 3070 -- 11th Generation i9 -- LG 32" QUHD Monitor

"This subject has gotten so tiresome that I no longer participates in the “Debates” except to ask one question.
-AutoDidact


Thank you for proving my point. LMAO!
Have a day.




"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

I can see those points.   Yes, at some point, AI will truly become much more mainstream, as the progression of the other art forms you mentioned.
I think, honestly, my biggest fear, which has been the subject of much science-fiction, but I also consider it a valid concern.....how far are people willing to just give themselves over to AI?
But that sci-fi convention notwithstanding, yes, you make some great, well-reasoned points.




"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My Sci- Fi Graphic Novel on Amazon: https://a.co/d/9k3cwoY

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

Just a brief comment (I'm in the middle of something) to clear up a misunderstanding: AI is NOT a search engine, there's more to it that than that.

Just as photography didn't kill painting, I don't see the end of everything with AI. Here in the US, where ART has been replaced by INDUSTRY ("music" industry, "movie" industry), you can expect automation to be taking over.

In the end, since an industry requires consumers to survive, we will see what happens. Is AI-generated art accepted or not? 

---

Caution: The following may be unsuitable for those with uncontrollably short-attention spans.

AI has its good points and its bad points.

Good points:  Excellent (and improving) pre-visualization tool for character/set concepts to be later rendered with actual artistic techniques.  It's also a good way for people who play table top RPG's to quickly provide an idea of what their in-game characters look like. Or for someone who is writing a novel, and want a quick way to simply present an idea of how certain characters/places may look.   In some aspects, as another poster mentioned, using AI voices to give voice to multiple characters can be quite the boon when the animator may not be able to afford (or simply have at their call) multiple voice actors to fulfill those roles.  However, just like ramen noodles, one can tell when the noodles are truly cooked/boiled, or when they've simply been heated in the microwave...such is the nature of AI voices.  However, it might be that animator's only recourse, and if the story is good enough, the flaws can be easily forgiven and overlooked.

Bad points: What happens to the skills of those who've honed them their entire lives in creating art through traditional means?  Photography, drawing, painting on canvases , sculpting  (even digital canvases like GIMP, PhotoShop, etc), modeling 3D meshes with computer programs like Blender, etc.

The typical arrogant a**hat answer is: "Catch up with the times, or get left in the dust."    This is the answer usually employed by talentless hacks who use AI as a toy, with no regard of ethics or due-respect for the work of millions of actual artists that came before to make their so-called art.  Standing on the shoulders of giants with claw-boots on.  What? You actually thought those images you typed a few words in to generate were just pulled out of empty-cyberspace by an algorithm?  It has to come from somewhere....just like all that money that the current regime pours into Ukraine, illegal aliens, DEI/ESG crap....It doesn't come from a vacuum.  it comes from the tax payer, just as those images you think you're "creating" comes from already existing, myriad real-world art.


  The height of irony is when you go to a place like DeviantArt, which has now become a freaking haven for AI imagery, (and increasingly at the expense and sacrifice of actual artists) is that some members will actually hide their prompts so that no one else can match what they've come up with.   Those prompts are nothing more than search terms.   The artificial intelligence involved searches millions upon millions of images posted on the internet (many of them under a thing known as copyright) to come up with what it determines are the best possible results for a generated image.  Not an image created by individual effort.  A generated image culled from search results.  I tend to think of such folk as art-squatters.

That said, I'm not gonna lie when I say that I do wish there was an AI method of creating hairstyles from photos that are then assembled from hair cards.   Not the resultant, sloppy topology meshes like in Headshot/Headshot 2. (No disrespect intended, Devs, the auto mode is a great previsualization tool for hair).   They're great  for background characters, and those hair molds do serve as a placeholder  basis from which to apply hair cards on a character in Blender, Maya, what have you.   Right now, the easiest way to create hair in the form of hair cards is to buy one of the expensive add ons for Blender, a free program. (Addons like Hair Tool, or Hair Brush).  Or to use Blender's "Hair (Curves) System" (looking to replace their particle hair system) which is still more focused on hair curves then actually creating hair cards, which does users of iClone/Character Creator no good. Another creative option is to use the free anime character creator, VRoid.  The only issue with VRoid is that you have to export into their native format, then get the add on to import VRM files into Blender.  A minor issue to be sure, but still, VRoid used to export hair as .obj.   Don't know what changed when they went from Beta to full release, or why, but, again, it is a small issue if you have the right addon for Blender.  (Thankfully, that's free, just like the CC3 add on.)

Now, we can look back over history, and see how new technologies have evolved art over the years. PhotoShop, which was created by members of Lucasfilm/ILM, which many felt was going to take away from the artistry and skill of photographers, both professional and amateur, who used their own filters to create effects for their photos.  Hell, further back  in 1982, the movie TRON was snubbed by the (now very woke and highly irrelevant) Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, because AMPAS felt that using computers to generate visual effects in a film was cheating.   They had no idea of the actual work that went behind creating many of the effects in the film before their computers were even utilized.  Today, computer effects are still a time consuming process, and involve the work of tens to hundreds of people on a single film project.  But, at least they are creating within the computer.  Building, sculpting, texturing, topologizing, retopologizing, rigging, animating, etc. (Many would say, and perhaps rightfully so, that computers replaced the artistic techniques of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation, or the practical model effects used in sci-fi/fantasy films of the 50's through the early 80's)  AI in the form of automating techniques is a great way to speed up the process.   Yes, some aspects of artistic creation are indeed tedious.  AI does streamline those aspects.  

But if all you have to do in your entire "creative" process is type in a few words, and voila, you have a fully visually realized character or set piece (again, taken from millions of searched...and possibly copyrighted...images on the net) complete with rigging, physics, texturing/materials, etc....well... it's just kind of a soulless effort now, isn't it?




"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

This^
AI voice technology has been a boon for us solo animators who prefer to work alone

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My Sci- Fi Graphic Novel on Amazon: https://a.co/d/9k3cwoY

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

It's just how you use it. Don't blame bad examples on the tecnology.

---

the better "ai"  gets the less impressive it becomes,
its like a flight simulator in vr, the first few times you fly
there is a wow factor, and nothing but diminishing returns after a few days






.

Have you seen this thread
https://forum.reallusion.com/536858/AI-assisted-animation-going-forward

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My Sci- Fi Graphic Novel on Amazon: https://a.co/d/9k3cwoY

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb