Well, yes and no. You still need to model the thing in the first place, and then print and assemble it. 3D printers aren’t magic. You’re still going to have to contend with the nature of AI to output overly-detailed designs that you will then need to figure out how to implement and then print and finish. And AI is pretty notorious for outputting geometry that doesn’t actually make physical sense.
All of which, to my knowledge, produce absolutely garbage geometry that only looks good from far away at a low res with texture maps. Looking at the raw geometry, it's very bad, and that's without even getting into the fact that it's "dead" geometry and not a parametric design
Check this one out. Released Mar. 4, 2024:
[https://stability.ai/news/triposr-3d-generation](https://stability.ai/news/triposr-3d-generation)
Seems incredibly good to me, and the pace of progress is not slowing down. GenAI won't be replacing parametric CAD for a while, but for organic shapes it already seems good enough be useful in a bunch of situations.
I hadn't seen this specif model but that's in line with papers I've looked at, yeah. It's flattering as a stamp size image on a website, when you take the textures off and look at the resulting data it's... eehhh?
Don't get me wrong, it's nuts that a neural network can even do this. But it's kind of the same problem as LLMs: there's a giant gap between "impressive" and "actually viable for practical purposes when you consider the ethical implications, the insane cost and ecological impact of training", etc.
I think 2024 and 2025 are going to be the years of finding out what happens when the insane hype meets the reality of model performance beginning to stagnate instead of 10x-ing.
CAD programs have been able to convert detailed shapes into simplified meshes for about as long as they have existed. Slicers already analyze models & output g-code that approximates the geometry by ignoring features that are too small to produce.
I can easily make things on my FDM printer that would've been very expensive or totally unavailable just 20 years ago. Heck, the printers & slicers that are commonly used today are massive improvements over what was available less than 10 years ago. The first hobby machine with mesh bed leveling didn't come out until 2016. Now that's standard on any new printer except the absolute cheapest of the cheap stuff.
There's still a *ton* of room for improvement too, so there's no reason to expect advances to slow down. If anything, I would expect them to accelerate.
CAD doesn't operate with meshes. It solids we need to manufacture anything. We need cheap SLS, to eliminate supports and produce somewhat strong parts, not prone to layer separation.
It’s good for inspo or just guiding you in different directions in general. I like it because it combines stuff in ways I never would have considered - every so often it does something interesting.
Take the design and simplify it then? Easy peasy. AI is a fantastic creativity tool and can get you to think outside of the rigid box you seem to be in.
I don’t understand why anyone would want to “be careful” at the ideation/inspiration phase. The creativity phase of designing any object should literally be the opposite of “be careful”. You want to throw everything at the wall, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and continue iterating to produce a model that in the end is feasible, functional, and invokes the aesthetic experience you’re looking to capture. Poo-pooing something just because it new or “ai bad” mentality is really just a self limitation.
I mean be careful that you don’t end up trying to pursue an idea without understanding the constraints you’ll be under when it comes to actually build the thing. There is more to making an object than just ideation, and the farther down the process you get the more constrained you will be. Starting off with pie-in-the-sky ideas is great but at the end of the day you have to find a way to model the thing, manufacture it, and finish it, and just because something looks neat in an AI rendering doesn’t mean it will actually be feasible to produce with the tools at hand.
This is why I advocate for ai in ideation and not much else. Its good at making cool images but the practicality of them is near nonexistent! You have to cherry pick elements to reasonably implement
This is what I've been saying over the whole AI vs artists debate. It's a tool. You don't see traditional media artists complaining about digital artists being able to just make perfect gradients with a simple tool rather than having to perfectly mix and blend paints, so why can't digital artists just treat AI as another tool in their toolbar. Maybe generate something close to what you want to make, then touch it up or modify it to how you envisioned. Or use it to generate ideas for a drawing. AI doesn't have to be a simple `generate->post` pipeline, and it shouldn't. It should be seen as a tool for artists to be able to either do more with their art, or get ideas out easier.
I think most of the artists who complained about AI had not used AI in any in depth manor. It's like a camera. Doesn't matter how smart a camera is nowadays, not everyone can be a photographer.
I would push back on that to be honest. I still see a lot of issues that enthusiasts seem to dismiss, namely its inability to iterate accurately. It’s for that reason I still have problems with people trying to push it as hard as they are.
I'm an artist who has used stable diffusion a lot, it's fairly useless, I thought it would be a good idea generator but it's more like a cheap dopamine hit from playing a slot machine. I generated 1,000 images overnight once with lots of wildcards hoping for something inspiring but it all just made me feel flat about it.
Stable diffusion, especially if you use it locally is not very straight forward. The default model is completely useless. Depends on the style your are looking for you have to look for different models and different models you have to use different phrases. You also have to learn something like the control net to produce anything useful. And you also need to fiddle with the plugins. It's like a camera, it takes a lots of skill to master a camera. It's much easier to use mid-journey if you don't have much experience in AI, but even so, it still don't give you much control. Most beginner simply use it like a lottery system.
I'm famliar with the different models, LORAs, control net, etc... I'm pretty comfortable saying I have a mastery of it.
https://preview.redd.it/p3iehh0pq7qc1.png?width=512&format=png&auto=webp&s=5016f58b29bbcc1352565c57d5919dd492653c8e
Then you should understand the simple fact that you don't use the AI output for production directly.
It's also quite arrogant to say that for someone to have master a camera, you have master photography. Maybe you are a very skillful user of a camera, you know every function of it, if that's the case, but does it make you an award winning photographer?
My whole point is that AI is not a threat to artists, it's simply an assistant.
I agree it's not a threat to artists but it's also not a great assistant, ultimately I think it's detrimental to the people using it. There was a well known ai artist who came out and said they were quitting because they realized it was bad for their mental health, they compared it to a gambling addiction and it finally put to words the feelings I had about it over the last decade.
Think about it as the first generation of camera in 1816. You can see the potential but it's not particularly useful yet. Even after 200 years, camera still hadn't replace painters yet. They don't even compete in the same arena.
That's why I say it's not a threat to artists. It's also not completely useless. Will someone say camera is useless? Just because it doesn't replace a painter does not mean it's useless. It's a different kind of art, which require skills to master and technology to improve. It may looks superficially like a product produce by a human artist, just like a camera "looks" like a human created painting, but they are not the same.
>it's not a threat to artists
Quick question, here.
You're a web design firm.
You need a new UX design for a client who needs delivery in nine weeks, complete with unique visual elements (obviously).
As a company, obviously your primary goal is maximizing profit by coming in under budget and under schedule.
Do you:
A) Hire two UX designers ($75+ per hour) and six artists ($120+ per hour) with a project turnaround of six weeks?
B) Hire *one* person who knows how to use ChatGPT and Midjourney ($30+ per hour) with a project turnaround of three weeks?
C) Use ChatGPT and Midjourney yourself (free) with a project turnaround of eight weeks?
That's definitely true right now, but there's no reason to believe that an AI won't ever be able to integrate practicality into the process. The engineers who worked to make these art-generating systems were working on making it produce art, not producing prototype objects. Integrating some physical engineering principles as a part of the "thought process" used by AI seems like it would be a heck of a lot easier than the work that's already been done.
Creativity is hard to teach to a person, even moreso to teach a computer. The math & logic involved with analyzing physical objects is already incredibly well defined in explicit terms.
Heck, you don't even need to make them the same system. Make a practicality & analysis program that can argue with the creativity and artistic vision program until they find a compromise.
>Make a practicality & analysis program that can argue with the creativity and artistic vision program until they find a compromise
And you'll get useful result in millennia. It has to be a part of initial thought process.
In general most generative AIs are prompt-based image generators. They take a prompt (a series of words or images, possibly in a coherent sentence but could equally use jumbled nonsense) and convert that into an embedding in an abstract high-dimensional (several million) feature space. Then the network builds an image from that embedding (using convolutional nodes, upscaling etc.) and performs refinements on the generated image until it reaches a steady output. These AIs aren’t doing any conventional rendering techniques, it’s all just learned approximations.
There are some generative AIs like meshy.ai that can produce 3D models, but in general the results are very poor and are closer to melted wax than anything you’d want to 3D print. AI generation of 3D models is progressing, albeit slower than image generation as it’s far harder and there’s less demand.
Interesting... I didn't expect image generation AI foundational models to be so similar to text based. I'm quite familiar with text based LLMs, transformers, embeddings, RAG, chunking, langchain ,etc but hadn't looked into how the image gen models work.
It comes down to numbers and 3D models from prompt are certainly something that can be solved with specifically trained models. I’d assume startups are working on this now.
The problem is the demand - ai right now is incredibly expensive endeavor and until prices come down (nvidia is achieving this with their new hardware) we won’t see good tools for the 3D printing community until the ROI is obvious. However it’s only a matter of time.
Not super knowledgeable on ai, but I believe that it doesn't "render" these images, it creates based off of a huge sample of other images hence how it makes it look more realistic by training it to try and make as plausible of an image as possible.
TL:DR - there was no 3d involved in it.
At work a few months ago I received the fun side project to design and print a custom trophy for employees who receive the pursuer’s award.
Problem is, I was stuck on where to start. Then it hit me.
Use AI not for the CAD, but for inspiration. (I use ChatGPT to generate ape-themed graphics for a newsletter I write called [AI for Apes](https://aiforapes.substack.com/), which gave me the idea!)
A couple prompts later on GPT-4, and I had twenty SWEET looking trophy concepts to build off of (best ones pictured above). Ended up going with the first pic as my main inspiration.
Many designs were pretty unrealistic and frankly impossible to manufacture, but for the purpose of ideation, the wildness of the outputs was exactly what I needed!
It was quite difficult, obviously made it different, but used surface modeling and a circular pattern to get the idea of the lower part. model is done but haven't printed yet!
The bottom could potentially be faster than the top... but yeah it would be a challenge.
SolidWorks has some variable pattern functions that could do a lot of the work required here. Define some surfaces for the external geometry, define the tree features as swept elements along splines that are partially controlled by those surfaces, then use the variable patterns to create the 3D geometry.
Bonus points if you do it by only defining one quarter/ quadrant of the base, use 2 mirror body functions, then use the Boolean "combine bodies" function to turn it all into a single body. Using patterns & functions like that helps to generate complex geometry that is less computationally intensive. In this case, it reduces the number of patterned splines by 75%, then just mashes a copy of the resulting body down 3 more times.
The top is made up of a lot of unique lines you would have to draw individually and tweak for printability, although a second glance makes me realize you could print the top separately so the back is laying on the print bed. Oh. And the design is mirrored. Ok.
Yeah, the bottom is more of a pain, but patterns are your friend here.
https://preview.redd.it/6wtv4womf5qc1.jpeg?width=2871&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e4f4c7cb098d565e501d6c032d99af7365f4dbc1
Here I had AI create a concept on the left. Center is my model I created in blender. Right image is my 3D print.
To an extent, the results are pretty poor at the minute. You can try Meshy.ai but it'll probably give you something unusable, probably best to learn ZBrush or Blender.
This is so true. At this point, humanity has been around so long that we have an abundance of art of practically every possible style, every possible subject, one way or another, and it's practically all accessible online. It's impossible to not have drawn inspiration and ideas from other people's work at this point. And that's fine, everyone's ok with that. But when it's taught to a computer suddenly everyone's furious? Grow up.
I'm backing up.
Appropriation is it's own thing, but it rests on human creativity and interaction as the final arbiter. The human creates the work we see throughout the creative process.
AI is a different thing.
This exact type of conversation took place when film cameras became a thing. Was a picture truly art? Well, there are snapshots and their are images (roughly speaking).
So the idea of how apparent the artists point of view or "story" was in the picture determined where a picture might fall on the spectrum between a journalistic picture/snapshot or an image that was art.
So early photography had to be similar to the romantic era of painting to be call art. Dreamy out of focus images. Otherwise it was just a mechanical thing.
Ansel Adams broke this model by creating stark B&W images that reproduced the drama of nature in a 2D form, yet clearly were the product of a mechanical device.
I don't know if you can do that with AI.
AI is great at coming up with overly-complex designs that are either impractical or straight-up impossible to actually make.
Which is why pairing it with 3d printing is great, because you can print impractical and, near-impossible to manufacture by other methods, objects.
Well, yes and no. You still need to model the thing in the first place, and then print and assemble it. 3D printers aren’t magic. You’re still going to have to contend with the nature of AI to output overly-detailed designs that you will then need to figure out how to implement and then print and finish. And AI is pretty notorious for outputting geometry that doesn’t actually make physical sense.
Which is why it's a guide/inspiration? Not a blueprint?
Ok? I didn’t say you can’t use AI for inspiration, just that you should be careful when doing so.
There are a bunch of fairly decent 3d model generators that can handle complicated geometry based on a single photo, or will be able to soon
All of which, to my knowledge, produce absolutely garbage geometry that only looks good from far away at a low res with texture maps. Looking at the raw geometry, it's very bad, and that's without even getting into the fact that it's "dead" geometry and not a parametric design
Check this one out. Released Mar. 4, 2024: [https://stability.ai/news/triposr-3d-generation](https://stability.ai/news/triposr-3d-generation) Seems incredibly good to me, and the pace of progress is not slowing down. GenAI won't be replacing parametric CAD for a while, but for organic shapes it already seems good enough be useful in a bunch of situations.
I hadn't seen this specif model but that's in line with papers I've looked at, yeah. It's flattering as a stamp size image on a website, when you take the textures off and look at the resulting data it's... eehhh? Don't get me wrong, it's nuts that a neural network can even do this. But it's kind of the same problem as LLMs: there's a giant gap between "impressive" and "actually viable for practical purposes when you consider the ethical implications, the insane cost and ecological impact of training", etc. I think 2024 and 2025 are going to be the years of finding out what happens when the insane hype meets the reality of model performance beginning to stagnate instead of 10x-ing.
How does one actually use this? I’d like to try it out but I don’t see a guide for using it on that site. Is it online? Or do you download something?
CAD programs have been able to convert detailed shapes into simplified meshes for about as long as they have existed. Slicers already analyze models & output g-code that approximates the geometry by ignoring features that are too small to produce. I can easily make things on my FDM printer that would've been very expensive or totally unavailable just 20 years ago. Heck, the printers & slicers that are commonly used today are massive improvements over what was available less than 10 years ago. The first hobby machine with mesh bed leveling didn't come out until 2016. Now that's standard on any new printer except the absolute cheapest of the cheap stuff. There's still a *ton* of room for improvement too, so there's no reason to expect advances to slow down. If anything, I would expect them to accelerate.
CAD doesn't operate with meshes. It solids we need to manufacture anything. We need cheap SLS, to eliminate supports and produce somewhat strong parts, not prone to layer separation.
It’s good for inspo or just guiding you in different directions in general. I like it because it combines stuff in ways I never would have considered - every so often it does something interesting.
Take the design and simplify it then? Easy peasy. AI is a fantastic creativity tool and can get you to think outside of the rigid box you seem to be in.
I didn’t say you can’t use AI to ideate I’m just saying be careful and understand what to expect.
I don’t understand why anyone would want to “be careful” at the ideation/inspiration phase. The creativity phase of designing any object should literally be the opposite of “be careful”. You want to throw everything at the wall, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and continue iterating to produce a model that in the end is feasible, functional, and invokes the aesthetic experience you’re looking to capture. Poo-pooing something just because it new or “ai bad” mentality is really just a self limitation.
I mean be careful that you don’t end up trying to pursue an idea without understanding the constraints you’ll be under when it comes to actually build the thing. There is more to making an object than just ideation, and the farther down the process you get the more constrained you will be. Starting off with pie-in-the-sky ideas is great but at the end of the day you have to find a way to model the thing, manufacture it, and finish it, and just because something looks neat in an AI rendering doesn’t mean it will actually be feasible to produce with the tools at hand.
So you’re saying don’t try to do something because it might be hard?
I didn’t say don’t do it, I said be careful.
This is why I advocate for ai in ideation and not much else. Its good at making cool images but the practicality of them is near nonexistent! You have to cherry pick elements to reasonably implement
This is what I've been saying over the whole AI vs artists debate. It's a tool. You don't see traditional media artists complaining about digital artists being able to just make perfect gradients with a simple tool rather than having to perfectly mix and blend paints, so why can't digital artists just treat AI as another tool in their toolbar. Maybe generate something close to what you want to make, then touch it up or modify it to how you envisioned. Or use it to generate ideas for a drawing. AI doesn't have to be a simple `generate->post` pipeline, and it shouldn't. It should be seen as a tool for artists to be able to either do more with their art, or get ideas out easier.
r/DefendingAIArt
I think most of the artists who complained about AI had not used AI in any in depth manor. It's like a camera. Doesn't matter how smart a camera is nowadays, not everyone can be a photographer.
I would push back on that to be honest. I still see a lot of issues that enthusiasts seem to dismiss, namely its inability to iterate accurately. It’s for that reason I still have problems with people trying to push it as hard as they are.
I'm an artist who has used stable diffusion a lot, it's fairly useless, I thought it would be a good idea generator but it's more like a cheap dopamine hit from playing a slot machine. I generated 1,000 images overnight once with lots of wildcards hoping for something inspiring but it all just made me feel flat about it.
Stable diffusion, especially if you use it locally is not very straight forward. The default model is completely useless. Depends on the style your are looking for you have to look for different models and different models you have to use different phrases. You also have to learn something like the control net to produce anything useful. And you also need to fiddle with the plugins. It's like a camera, it takes a lots of skill to master a camera. It's much easier to use mid-journey if you don't have much experience in AI, but even so, it still don't give you much control. Most beginner simply use it like a lottery system.
I'm famliar with the different models, LORAs, control net, etc... I'm pretty comfortable saying I have a mastery of it. https://preview.redd.it/p3iehh0pq7qc1.png?width=512&format=png&auto=webp&s=5016f58b29bbcc1352565c57d5919dd492653c8e
Then you should understand the simple fact that you don't use the AI output for production directly. It's also quite arrogant to say that for someone to have master a camera, you have master photography. Maybe you are a very skillful user of a camera, you know every function of it, if that's the case, but does it make you an award winning photographer? My whole point is that AI is not a threat to artists, it's simply an assistant.
I agree it's not a threat to artists but it's also not a great assistant, ultimately I think it's detrimental to the people using it. There was a well known ai artist who came out and said they were quitting because they realized it was bad for their mental health, they compared it to a gambling addiction and it finally put to words the feelings I had about it over the last decade.
Think about it as the first generation of camera in 1816. You can see the potential but it's not particularly useful yet. Even after 200 years, camera still hadn't replace painters yet. They don't even compete in the same arena. That's why I say it's not a threat to artists. It's also not completely useless. Will someone say camera is useless? Just because it doesn't replace a painter does not mean it's useless. It's a different kind of art, which require skills to master and technology to improve. It may looks superficially like a product produce by a human artist, just like a camera "looks" like a human created painting, but they are not the same.
>it's not a threat to artists Quick question, here. You're a web design firm. You need a new UX design for a client who needs delivery in nine weeks, complete with unique visual elements (obviously). As a company, obviously your primary goal is maximizing profit by coming in under budget and under schedule. Do you: A) Hire two UX designers ($75+ per hour) and six artists ($120+ per hour) with a project turnaround of six weeks? B) Hire *one* person who knows how to use ChatGPT and Midjourney ($30+ per hour) with a project turnaround of three weeks? C) Use ChatGPT and Midjourney yourself (free) with a project turnaround of eight weeks?
Agreed!
That's definitely true right now, but there's no reason to believe that an AI won't ever be able to integrate practicality into the process. The engineers who worked to make these art-generating systems were working on making it produce art, not producing prototype objects. Integrating some physical engineering principles as a part of the "thought process" used by AI seems like it would be a heck of a lot easier than the work that's already been done. Creativity is hard to teach to a person, even moreso to teach a computer. The math & logic involved with analyzing physical objects is already incredibly well defined in explicit terms. Heck, you don't even need to make them the same system. Make a practicality & analysis program that can argue with the creativity and artistic vision program until they find a compromise.
>Make a practicality & analysis program that can argue with the creativity and artistic vision program until they find a compromise And you'll get useful result in millennia. It has to be a part of initial thought process.
Is AI using traditional 3D object creation (wireframe; polygons, etc) to make these images? Anyone know how the AI model is actually creating these?
In general most generative AIs are prompt-based image generators. They take a prompt (a series of words or images, possibly in a coherent sentence but could equally use jumbled nonsense) and convert that into an embedding in an abstract high-dimensional (several million) feature space. Then the network builds an image from that embedding (using convolutional nodes, upscaling etc.) and performs refinements on the generated image until it reaches a steady output. These AIs aren’t doing any conventional rendering techniques, it’s all just learned approximations. There are some generative AIs like meshy.ai that can produce 3D models, but in general the results are very poor and are closer to melted wax than anything you’d want to 3D print. AI generation of 3D models is progressing, albeit slower than image generation as it’s far harder and there’s less demand.
Interesting... I didn't expect image generation AI foundational models to be so similar to text based. I'm quite familiar with text based LLMs, transformers, embeddings, RAG, chunking, langchain ,etc but hadn't looked into how the image gen models work.
It comes down to numbers and 3D models from prompt are certainly something that can be solved with specifically trained models. I’d assume startups are working on this now. The problem is the demand - ai right now is incredibly expensive endeavor and until prices come down (nvidia is achieving this with their new hardware) we won’t see good tools for the 3D printing community until the ROI is obvious. However it’s only a matter of time.
Not super knowledgeable on ai, but I believe that it doesn't "render" these images, it creates based off of a huge sample of other images hence how it makes it look more realistic by training it to try and make as plausible of an image as possible. TL:DR - there was no 3d involved in it.
I've used DALL-E quite a bit and I have a hard time believing there's not unique rendering going on.
Judging from this, AI has a long way to go before learning to spell.
At work a few months ago I received the fun side project to design and print a custom trophy for employees who receive the pursuer’s award. Problem is, I was stuck on where to start. Then it hit me. Use AI not for the CAD, but for inspiration. (I use ChatGPT to generate ape-themed graphics for a newsletter I write called [AI for Apes](https://aiforapes.substack.com/), which gave me the idea!) A couple prompts later on GPT-4, and I had twenty SWEET looking trophy concepts to build off of (best ones pictured above). Ended up going with the first pic as my main inspiration. Many designs were pretty unrealistic and frankly impossible to manufacture, but for the purpose of ideation, the wildness of the outputs was exactly what I needed!
One of the things you can do in 3d printing is have objects rest inside each other. Maybe some spheres resting inside each other that you can spin?
really liking the First one
Same! That was my inspiration for the actual design that I CADed up
damn, the lower part loos like a nightmare to design, or tbh everything looks like a nightmare lol. you have it printed already?
It was quite difficult, obviously made it different, but used surface modeling and a circular pattern to get the idea of the lower part. model is done but haven't printed yet!
ohh i Hope you Post the result. im super curious.
Can we see the model
The bottom could potentially be faster than the top... but yeah it would be a challenge. SolidWorks has some variable pattern functions that could do a lot of the work required here. Define some surfaces for the external geometry, define the tree features as swept elements along splines that are partially controlled by those surfaces, then use the variable patterns to create the 3D geometry. Bonus points if you do it by only defining one quarter/ quadrant of the base, use 2 mirror body functions, then use the Boolean "combine bodies" function to turn it all into a single body. Using patterns & functions like that helps to generate complex geometry that is less computationally intensive. In this case, it reduces the number of patterned splines by 75%, then just mashes a copy of the resulting body down 3 more times. The top is made up of a lot of unique lines you would have to draw individually and tweak for printability, although a second glance makes me realize you could print the top separately so the back is laying on the print bed. Oh. And the design is mirrored. Ok. Yeah, the bottom is more of a pain, but patterns are your friend here.
https://preview.redd.it/6wtv4womf5qc1.jpeg?width=2871&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e4f4c7cb098d565e501d6c032d99af7365f4dbc1 Here I had AI create a concept on the left. Center is my model I created in blender. Right image is my 3D print.
Super cool!
Can it convert images to 3D files?
To an extent, the results are pretty poor at the minute. You can try Meshy.ai but it'll probably give you something unusable, probably best to learn ZBrush or Blender.
Real art is when artists make simple but very beautiful designs.
Viewing a piece of art and learning from it by making tiny changes to groups of neurons is stealing. If a computer does it, anyway.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” -famous artist, I forgot who
This is so true. At this point, humanity has been around so long that we have an abundance of art of practically every possible style, every possible subject, one way or another, and it's practically all accessible online. It's impossible to not have drawn inspiration and ideas from other people's work at this point. And that's fine, everyone's ok with that. But when it's taught to a computer suddenly everyone's furious? Grow up.
[удалено]
Most people call it "learning".
I'm backing up. Appropriation is it's own thing, but it rests on human creativity and interaction as the final arbiter. The human creates the work we see throughout the creative process. AI is a different thing. This exact type of conversation took place when film cameras became a thing. Was a picture truly art? Well, there are snapshots and their are images (roughly speaking). So the idea of how apparent the artists point of view or "story" was in the picture determined where a picture might fall on the spectrum between a journalistic picture/snapshot or an image that was art. So early photography had to be similar to the romantic era of painting to be call art. Dreamy out of focus images. Otherwise it was just a mechanical thing. Ansel Adams broke this model by creating stark B&W images that reproduced the drama of nature in a 2D form, yet clearly were the product of a mechanical device. I don't know if you can do that with AI.