141–150 of 230 posts
Funny world is binary for Microsoft, US and not US
Microsofts 3D video team always put all this effort into making the uis look good and fluid but it's all just fantasy, the disconnect between what the marketing team is saying it is and what the reality of their software is jarring.
I dunno man, Teams has only given me a slight headache this morning instead of a cluster migraine.
I feel a deep sadness, a sympathy, or sense of loss for the countless artists who have toiled to produce beautiful works over the decades (centuries?), just for them to be approximated by a single click as a vector mashup in an AI generative search space. And without so much as a by your leave. I'm not saying it's logical to be against AI image generation, but definitely have a feeling that something has gone wrong h…
The current design ideas in MS products are terrible so I doubt how much AI can help that. I AM curious to see how design tools evolve to work with all this new AI tech being integrated. I wonder how long is left before pixel pushing is just for final polish and a designer's role shifts to focus on properly explaining the nuance of a problem to a chatbot. Soon we'll all be Celery Man ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
>The current design ideas in MS products are terrible so I doubt how much AI can help that. you mean - the problem with Microsoft is they have no taste?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can only assume that the same arguments and complaints were raised at every stage a new technology was introduced that lowered the cost and time to produce "content". Which of those technologies were based on billions of copyright violations? And of course this copyright still exists but is only enforced in one direction, just like on YouTube where random corporations can claim copyright on any video and hurt the…
What's the infringement? You can't copyright style, no? If artists can look at each others copyright-in-full-force works and then imitate it, why can't AI? Corporations having too much power is different from technology encroaching on previously uniquely human faculties. Of course both are phenomena that ought to be addressed by society. At which point we see that it's a political problem, and of course politics is b…
If copyright doesn't distinguish between that then copyright needs updated. It's a tool, not a person, and one that people want to use commercially so they can create the billion pieces of art to train it on themselves.
The weirdest thing about microsoft is that if they want to, they can deliver good software. VSCode and Github are amazing! And they did WSL! On the other hand, they also have Teams and Azure Devops (that’s their “enterprise github”).
There is hug momentum behind VSCode so it has large ammount of features. But software for editing text, that eats as much RAM as 3d software with complex model, is probably not amazing.
Funny world is binary for Microsoft, US and not US
Not funny. And not just Microsoft. Most US companies and the majority of US citizens too.
I feel a deep sadness, a sympathy, or sense of loss for the countless artists who have toiled to produce beautiful works over the decades (centuries?), just for them to be approximated by a single click as a vector mashup in an AI generative search space. And without so much as a by your leave. I'm not saying it's logical to be against AI image generation, but definitely have a feeling that something has gone wrong h…
I have to agree and to be honest, I was having an objective go of Mid Journey today, honestly, I think it's kind of underwhelming. I know I'm not supposed to say that but it was mixed feelings for me, kind of amazing, but also a lot of regurgitation. The model seems to have it's own style it has trouble escaping for a lot of the images requested. I mean it's amazing that image can be generated from text but honestly,…
While I agree the current state of affairs isn’t great, we have to look past today to where things are going.
As far as I can tell tools like Midjourney do enable an iterative creative process. It’s more like painting with a pinball machine than directly with brushes. You have control over the process but only very tenuously. Things can go very wrong with generation that are out of your control, but the control you do have is magical.
I used Midjourney to try and generate a character for a project. I started with a source image and a description, and through hours of refining and regeneration, I finally got a character I liked.
- Did I steal the character from someone else? No, the character as far as I can tell is a unique one that I arrived at after sifting through thousands of variations.
- Did I copy a style? Well no it really, I made a character. I can then apply any style I want to it. The style is orthogonal to my goals of character generation.
- Did I get the result through no work of my own? Well I certainly lack the skill to draw the image I landed on. The only technical skill I used was clicking a button and entering text. But that’s the best part! Anyone can do this!
The skill I was actually using was my mind’s eye in guiding the iterative prompts, choosing when to blend images, choosing the words and the seed images, etc. That’s a higher-level creative process than moving the brush in the canvas. And you know who will be best at this? Artists!
The way I see it, this is a case of the punch card writer being replaced by the compiler. The punch card writer has all the skills necessary to use the compiler to continue producing programs as they were before, but faster.
Yes, artists are threatened by this. But they shouldn’t be because they are the most qualified to leverage these tools and to wield them competently. The game used to be to start from a blank canvas and to use an iterative creative process to build a scene that you picture in your head. Nothing has changed about that except now the canvas starts filled. But it still needs to be molded and pushed toward what’s in the kind of the artist. That’s where the artistry comes in.
At first I thought this was a Figma-like tool. I wonder if Microsoft could compete in that space, or is the UI/UX community to opinionated and outspoken to stop the classic enterprise argument? "We're already paying $$$ to MS and we'll get a big discount / bundle deal for [MS alternative], we can't justify the cost for [better non-MS alternative]"
It is not a Figma alternative. Figma is a tool for designers to design. Microsoft Designer seems to be a tool for non-designers to attempt design, with the help of AI. Very different audiences, and trying out the tool, everything about the UI/UX makes that very clear, Microsoft Designer is more like a wizard for creating a initial design, while Figma is a proper tool.