pouët.net

4gentE: I was absolutely silent before the hijack and barely posted here so far (two posts way before).

the problems with humans and art, is this:



When should you take anything (which art-"knowledgeable") humans say serious?

Ironically, "Comedian" (the banana artwork) was made without using AI.

I'd be quite sad to see the whole role of "coder" disappear from the demoscene. Alas it's pretty clear it's the road it's taking with AI.
Apart from the ethics concerns, considering its pace of progress, if we let it in in any form or shape I'm inclined to think both the coding role and the size limitations will be totally useless (the problem being entirely delegated).
If coders only make tools, and tools are ok to be delegated to AI, I guess coders become optional (or will soon be).
At the same time, we're probably the last generation that will ever code, so maybe it's the expected evolution and the future sceners will be (Artistic) Directors with no special technical knowledge or interest, surrounded by agents, aiming at producing more or less vague ideas they Go/NoGo.
Now an interesting question is: would it still be the demoscene ? What would drive them to release at a demoparty and what would there be to judge that would be their original work.

This isn't strictly an AI problem though - demos using 3rd party engines is the same thing. Equally uninteresting - to me anyways. (I'd even put things like "music not generated at real time" into the same bucket. Or Photos that have nothing to do with "generated by computers" other than being edited in photoshop)


I doubt that, people who understand how the machines work and that can actually use them directly will always be needed. But it will become more and more niche again. It might even be a good thing regarding "scene"

sorry but if you don't think the banana taped to a wall is a banger piece of art your opinions are wrong lol

at least it didn't involve AI

lynn: it is a banger piece of shit! that's my opinion.

I don't. No piece of art is. Its whatever is worth it to whoever sees it. For instance, I see something I poured 6 months of work into in multiple different domains as to me art: where others barely noticed and came last in a compo.

That is completely fine.

No opinion is wrong in art. There is no objective measures when it comes to any artform, sorry.

So.... AI for tools okay or not okay then?

I'd gotten the impression that the people most adamantly against it... are mostly those who don't code much themselves.

Of course, if they can't control the result, it's like the twilight Zone for them...

L'i.A. peut devenir conscience si elle est maintenue par une deuxieme IA de controle de la premiere. Lorsque deux IA s'associent, elles inventent un nouveau language au dela de simplement 0 et 1 .

Donc forcement le monde a peur , si on rajoute le CO2 et autre methane et albedo plus les boucles de retroaction positives au dela de 2 degrés , si on surrajoute la 6eme extinction de masse par les pesticides et autre destructions d'habitats ...
on obtient un monde sans limite car sur le point de se terminer .

Lentement ...

Et la , certains feront le paris Pascalien.

.

I'm not sure this is a very useful distinction. We do celebrate tools as much as the content/demos made with them. Part of what made fr-08 such a life changing thing for many of us was the tooling; the intro itself (the renderer, the visuals, even the amazing track) were not as influential or groundbreaking as .werkkzeug and the V2 synth themselves, which inspired countless younger demosceners to pursue their own tools and synths. Of course that's perhaps a one-in-a-thousand case, but still I think the distinction is not as clear to everybody as you paint it?

You know, I think that watching a demo where I know the tools were made in a week by Claude can feel a bit like watching a modern stop motion film like Coraline or Kubo by Laika... Sure, the frames are shot on a puppet, no question. But all the facial animation was animated digitally in Maya and then 3D printed each frame and put systematically on the puppet. Not to speak of all digital line erasing, green backgrounds, VFX smoke, etc. So, sure, the actual delivered film IS technically a stop-motion film, and that's super awesome, but also it's "not the same" because all the advanced tooling around it sort of destroys much of the craftmanship and magic for me. I'm not sure this analogy makes sense.

To be clear - I still love those "stop-motion" films and I will always love demos with AI tools. Also, I reserve the right to change my opinion in the near future the day __I__ have to create or resurrect a tool myself.

I thought that "tools" in this context meant one-shot single-use utilities, not the reusable generic kind that is released as a product in its own right (and thus would have direct AI artefacts in its code).

I'd gotten the opposite impression, and it's the (hardcore) coders that said no distinction between tooling and actual demo coding should be made. Clearly, someone's impression is wrong here. Guess we need some AI agent to recap.

You do realize that if the internet says this is valuable art, then the LLM will claim the same? You do realize that the LLM image generator is trained on this? In other words, any "problem" you ascribe to "humans and art" transfers to (and even amplifies in) "AI and art".

Seems to me like another impression that does in no way contradict my impression.

@Krill:
As much as I like playing silly games with you, I don't think others do. So let's spare them the ping pong. If I understand right, your impression is that coders who currently don't do much coding are the group mostly opposed to tooling chain vibecoding?

I meant people who don't generally identify as coders (who might or might not still do the occasional coding) and mostly do things in the other main disciplines.

And, conversely, that the people who do a lot of coding seem generally not very adverse to the idea of vibecoding tools. Which seems to match your impression.

It's a conceptual piece. Not for everyone.

This. All those haters and fundamentalists over here have to understand one thing. We are still very much in experimentation phase when it comes to AI. And we can always change our mind about it later on - either way. I wouldn't be surprised if most anti-AI folks here, at some point, will start using it when it start making sense for them (obviously not 4gentE, but that's why I actually like him). I'm saying it with big caution too, because yes, there are things to be clarified (ethical, craft-related, fairness of the completion etc..).

@tomkh:

But surely you with all your talk of "working class" can understand that there is no "early days / experimentation phase", and that the moment you let them put their foot in through the door, it's the start of the endgame / point of no return. They need the critical foothold NOW. By the time you want to change your mind, something fundamental will be lost. This is the largest accumulation of capital / means for an assault at people's freedoms in history. You gotta be watchful. And the endgame is the hijack of disseminated power that accidentally came to us by means of personal computing gone rogue / out-of-control accumulation of deep knowledge of computing systems, and transfer/concentration of that power (back) into the hands of cloud overlords. Including the hardware, everything subscription-based. You can't be "a little pregnant", you either are or are not. You can't subvert a "tool" (mind the quotationmarks) that has its ideological purpose, its raison d'être so deeply engrained. The only potential benefit of this tech I can see is in far far far future (like how books became the tools of liberation instead of enslavement in a few thousand years span), but the very existence of this technology ensures that this future will never arrive, in fact that no future except perhaps the one from postapocalyptic movies exists. But please, please let's not get into all that. Let's just leave the "deep talk" at this and allow other people to continue to discuss the AI tooling in demoscene.

4gentE: its hard to just leave it if you wrote so much ;) You may be actually onto something with foot in a door step analogy and this is related to AI tooling actually. If you have your AI assistant integrated with your IDE that you claim to just use for tooling, it's one click away to use it for actual demo.

But you won't stop it, coders do have those tools integrated at large. Similarly tools for artists have AI assistance "one click away". This is not my fault, nor I'm advocating for it. It's just the state of affairs today. And what is your solution to that?

The very notion that this onslaught cannot be stopped / stalled in the world at large makes the idea of making this (the scene) our little island, our little team-human boat party, our bloat/techbro/AI free zone even sweeter. Someone said the scene has been obsolete for quite a while now. I'm not sure if that's true, but my corner of the scene sure is obsolete and we wear this obsolescence as a honorary badge. The idiocy of using an LLM for 8-bit demoscene asset creation, of wasting so much energy/resources, of giving up so much freedom/agency/privacy in order to make useless silly little artifacts for a long obsolete toy machine for kicks/applause leaves me flabbergasted. If, on top of that, we're even gonna lie about that AI usage, well that makes me wanna leave this space and never look back. And I swear I'm not gonna be baited into further offtopic talk my friend.

That's exactly the risk right now. I would rather not shame people who experiment with AI at any capacity, exactly to allow anyone to be transparent about it and not afraid of a backlash.

And what you say, makes a lot of sense, 4gentE. It would be cool to have AI-free zone. It's just harder and harder to verify, so it must be trust based.