I've been thinking about AI the last few hours because yesterday I said something on twitter to intentionally piss off people who have knee-jerk reactions against it and a load of people got really mad. Then I saw this thread in the notifications with your pfp and thought "hahahaha wouldnt it be funny if arvenski was coincidentally also talking about generative AI instead of his ongoing quest to find a farm wife". It's such a ridiculous coincidence that It'll probably take me days to fully process. Either I'm clairvoyant or the CIA has finally penetrated my tinfoil hat.
Ive used AI a bit to help with game development or just to have fun with. If you know what its limitations are, it can save hours of repetitive tasks. For instance I'm fairly good at 3D animation but it's an immensely tedious slog. I hate doing it. But a fairly obscure russian AI animation software called Cascadeur has been out since 2017 or something, and it boils the task down to stuff where human skill is actually required, and then all the bouncy physics stuff is handled by the AI. This is something like a 50x productivity increase that allows even solo developers like me to make hundreds of professional animations in a short amount of time.
I've also used AI to make face textures from a combination of drawings and photos. I can definitely do it manually but the process is tedious and requires a lot of trial and error.
I used AI to
upscale a digital drawing I started too small. Besides a few artefacts it looks exactly the way I would have painted it if I had started it at a decent resolution, saving me pretty much an entire day of work.
I also put an easter egg on my website where if you mouseover some icons for long enough they start to animate. One of them is generated from one of my drawings and a gif of Abigail Shapiro.
It looks janky (in part because my own drawing had some unsightly asymmetry) Ibut this was really amazing at the time (i.e. barely 4 years ago). The fact that it materialises an ear and the teeth out of nothing in the original image was a real shock to me. I've been following AI for ages but it had always been a novelty with no practicality outside google or facebook using it to recognise features in images.