cannoneyed

a) couldn’t decide where to draw the edges b) I live in NJ ;)

Oh wow this is great, I threw a few of these tricks at it and never really felt like I nailed it... Might have to revisit after playing around with this more

I just couldn't justify spending dozens more hours for Staten Island...

This is so good, just ordered one!

I'd say that deciding where a transient should go" is creative, manually aligning 15 other tracks over and over again is not (not to mention having to do it in both the DAW and melodyne)...

I agree that "push button get image" AI generation is at best a bit cheap, at worst deeply boring. Art is resistance in a medium - but at what point is that resistance just masochism?

George Perec took this idea to the max when he wrote an entire novel without the letter "E" - in French! And then someone had the audacity to translate it to English (e excluded)! Would I ever want to do that? Hell no, but I'm very glad to live in a world where someone else is crazy enough to.

I've spent my 10,000 hours making "real" art and don't really feel the need to justify myself - but to all of the young people out there who are afraid to play with something new because some grumps on hacker news might get upset:

It doesn't matter what you make or how you make it. What matters is why you make it and what you have to say.

Yup, I'm a big fan. They'd be the first to admit that making true pixel art is very hard, and getting the AI to do it even somewhat consistently requires a lot of tuning and guardrails / processing.

At some point I couldn't fiddle with the style / pipeline anymore and just had to roll with "looks ok to me" - the whole point of the project wasn't to faithfully adhere to a style but to push the limits of new technology and learn a lot along the way

Author here, and to reiterate another reply - all of the critique of "pixel art" is completely fair. Aesthetically and philosophically, what AI does for "pixel art" is very off. And once you see the AI you can't really unsee it.

But I didn't want to call it a "SimCity" map, though that's really the vibe/inspiration I wanted to capture, because that implies a lot of other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even though I figured it might get a lot of (valid) pushback...

In general, labels and genres are really hard - "techno" to a deep head in Berlin is very different than "techno" to my cousins. This issue has always been fraught, because context and meaning and technique are all tangled up in these labels which are so important to some but so easily ignored by others. And those questions are even harder in the age of AI where the machine just gobbles up everything.

But regardless, it was a fun project! And to me at least it's better to just make cool ambitious things in good faith and understand that art by definition is meaningful and therefore makes people feel things from love to anger to disgust to fascination.

Hell yeah oxen.ai is awesome, made my life so much easier

Yeah this is all completely fair and I agree with all of it. Aesthetically and philosophically, what AI does for "pixel art" is very off. And once you see the "AI" you can't really unsee it.

But I didn't want to call it a "SimCity" map, though that's really the vibe/inspiration I wanted to capture, because that implies other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even though I knew it'd get a lot of (valid) pushback...

As with all things art, labels are really difficult and the context / meaning / technique is at once completely tied to genre but also completely irrelevant. Think about the label "techno" - the label is deeply meaningful and subtle to some and almost meaningless to others

simple is relative, could definitely be done, but until the models get a bit smarter and require less manual hand-holding it'd be a lot of grindy work

yeah I had to put it behind a worker to deal with the subdomain and various other subtle caching issues. All in all cloudflare is incredible, and Claude makes it actually quite easy to deal with all the ins and outs

Yeah I'll get the code out there soon - it's just very vibe-y right now, the repo is a bit of a mess since I never bothered to organize things. The secret sauce is really in the fine-tuning, can definitely get those datasets/models public on oxen.ai too

Yup back of the napkin is probably about there - also spent a fair bit on the oxen.ai fine-tuning service (worth every penny)... paint ain't free, so to speak