we produced a connection card game in a couple of months end-to-end using AI. text is a true mixture of our ideas and GPT's 'ideas'. we gave GPT the vibe we wanted, let it generate tons of new stuff, then we heavily curated and remixed it.

art is created and curated by various AI tools. it does not rely on any particular artist's style. we bootstrapped the game using our own money, and this was only possible because we were able to produce our own visual assets.

AI is a tool in our kit just like figma and photoshop. people consistently have fun with the game in our playtest, and we're bringing our first print run to the world soon.

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It was not used purely to cut costs.

- Everything Everywhere All At Once (Runway AI): https://variety.com/2023/artisans/news/artificial-intelligen...

Two massively popular films recently that used generative AI.

This is key. The unethical part is not the use of AI (which is neutral), but corpos taking billions in profits from creators using creators' own copyrighted works. BigAI currently feels entitled to simply take these works for their own use, without permission or licensing.

This isn't hard stuff. Adobe Firefly is an example of an ethical, safe AI-powered art product that has been trained on owned stock images, licensed content, and public domain content.

For many people Adobe Firefly is almost as ethical as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, as the authors of the images were not let to decide.

Summer Island by Steve Coulson [1] is a short comic book made by an art director who can't draw well. He used the AI to its strengths.

[1] https://ianetica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Summer-Islan...

I created the basic design in InkScape, then used SD and several ControlNet adapters to render photorealistic images from the design until one was deemed perfect. My friend loved the result, and since I can only do some sort of glorified programmer art, I wouldn't have been able to deliver a high quality image like that without using SD.

Well you eliminate a lot of examples with that criteria.

Peter Gabriel used it extensively in some recent music videos. The artists behind it also leaned into the glitchy style but are probably using some pre trained stuff to keep style.[1]

A writer/creative named Austin McConnell used AI art to make a 50 minute anime short to help market a book he wrote using AI [2]. Not sure how he kept consistency but this video got some flak and he has another video addressing his techniques.

Corridor crew did a second video which is a lot better but still a lot of work. [3]

I think a lot of projects using it are still kind of in the spec stage and are usually using a combination of loras, clip, generating multiple angles, and aggressive use of img2img and controlnets. And a few companies (Scenario [4] etc) are working on consistency. I think you won't see a ton of big projects using it yet because the tech is still early days and the early versions were really a bear to work with. A lot of people on YouTube are using it like theyd use stock art (YouTube thumbnails, backgrounds, ads, or story boards for writing focused/story YouTubes).

There is still a stigma so a lot of people using it aren't announcing their use broadly, so I've found I usually have to stumble on their projects. Also, a lot of major companies aren't using it for that reason. I know Wizards of the Coast has had some arguments about that recently. Also consistency is still a problem as you mention which limits it's use in bigger projects.

Video games I think will be the first place we'll see it widely accepted. As people have been using AI generation techniques for background tools for like 20 years, see speedtree.

[0] https://youtu.be/7NK_JOkuSVY?si=GsENyRZTVPslNl6q and https://youtu.be/iKBCVZqqooY?si=4bTelG8AjUCduAwj

[1] https://youtu.be/px76Jn4CUcc?si=Ebpy7NtxbbefdJOR and https://youtu.be/6chvzqAVCnI?si=Q9dEnD72U0ytqBtT

[2] https://youtu.be/kJCkHae1dgE?si=4rhbk69q7KL-R3C9 and the discussion of techniques and controversy https://youtu.be/iRSg6gjOOWA?si=O8H5G2Y3IbZx0hzI

[3] https://youtu.be/tWZOEFvczzA?si=XhzrGg3Lct0QFsi9

[4] https://twitter.com/araminta_k/status/1744842633900347621

It's ad-supported, low budget (cause small market). There's a new story every day, I don't think the site could afford to hire an illustrator (which would also cause friction in publishing).

There's just one picture in every story, but they usually look nice, and my daughter never forgets to ask to see it, seems to be a highlight for her. I think it's a great use case for generative AI.

I don't think many people use the tile option in Midjourney, but it's fun because it's not easy to make tiling images, and the result is generally aesthetic and not representational so the AI aspects are fine.

I have a friend who is using Midjourney to illustrate some instructional material she's writing. It's a little like stock photography, though without AI she wouldn't have used stock photography, and the art itself is more like graphical design. She keeps it fairly abstract but has artists and themes she uses consistently (lots of Ezra Jack Keats). She's probably creating dozens of images to get one usable one. But both of us enjoy the process, there's something a bit meditative to making Midjourney images sometime... a quirk of their Discord interface too, I suppose. Dall-E is much more instructable, but doesn't have any feeling of flow.

I've toyed recently with the idea of creating a massive number of pre-built avatar images for NPCs: https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/111740198056655468 – for my use case the most consistency I need is to change the age of characters, which works well with a fixed seed and no other pose changes. I'd probably use Stable Diffusion because Midjourney isn't scriptable and Dall-E is too expensive and lacks controls for aspect ratio and seeds. Obviously lots of people do live character image creation, but the cost and operational complexity kind of annoys me.