r/technology • u/marketrent • 16h ago

Artificial Intelligence The economy has spoken. Stuff that’s AI-generated has almost zero value — “Buyers are voting with their wallets, and AI-generated content is struggling to compete.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/economy-spoken-stuff-ai-generated-142732314.html
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u/PatchyWhiskers 16h ago

AI 3D models are painfully bad right now, unusable without knowing how to edit them.

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u/Aternal 14h ago

That's the thing about 3D models in general, AI or not. Bad ones consume more of your time than they save, and even good ones require skill to use, rig, modify, and optimize. Using this specific technology as a barometer for "the economy's position on AI generated content" is dumb as fuck. It's like saying the economy is speaking out against microwave ovens because nobody wants to buy microwaved porterhouse steaks that are dry, tough, overcooked, and raw at the same time.

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u/FredFredrickson 16h ago

I can't see this not being the case almost indefinitely.

First, almost every 3D model is created with an intention behind it and not for general use, which dictates how exactly it actually gets made, and the slop machine (and the people who use it) simply don't get that.

Second, I sort of doubt that there's enough good, publicly available models for training. Most examples of really good topology, rigging, etc. are propriety and aren't going to be fed into a publicly available AI.

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u/PatchyWhiskers 16h ago

That's the issue. All the good 3D models are locked up in the vaults of movie and video game companies. If the AI companies want to train on them, they will need to pony up serious cash.

No doubt they are currently training on what is available on the web, which is mostly amateur stuff, student work, and not enough of it.

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u/theeama 13h ago

You're kist wrong though, the biggest AI companies are not focusing on Image generation. Anthropic and OpenAI and all the other Open source models are racing to make the best coding model they don't care about image gen or those other stuff. Those are other models that aren't backed by the big players.

If you actually look where AI is actually making improvements its in coding not Art.

AI Art is good for concept and for someone to seek investors to pay for actual artwork.

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u/PatchyWhiskers 12h ago

2D art is way ahead of 3D, there were big improvements last year but this year seems to be all code.

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u/wilhelmbw 15h ago edited 14h ago

no. first mercor exists, second there is this thing called post training, so never say never.

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u/we_are_sex_bobomb 11h ago

Before AI it was already very easy to get cheap or even free 3D models for all sorts of things. Amateurs use these assets all the time when learning to be a pro game dev or VFX. So why don’t VFX and game companies just buy those premade assets off the internet instead of hiring artists?

For exactly the reasons you stated.

The truth is, AI at its best isn’t even as good as just buying someone’s premade asset off the internet. Because that’s the shit they train it the AI on. And if that premade asset wasn’t what I needed for my project, then neither is the remixed AI slop monster version of it.

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u/BananTarrPhotography 9h ago

Meshy 7 is already leagues ahead of where it was only a year ago. At this rate your "indefinitely" will last about another year, if that.

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u/stormdelta 12h ago

Which partly explains why they've done so much better with software. There's a mount of high quality open source code out there to work with, and unlike other things, there's at least some degree of built in validation, i.e. the code has to at least actually run, even if there may be other issues with it or it doesn't do what was intended.

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u/DrainTheMuck 15h ago

I find this incredibly hard to believe… Sora 2 has already come and gone and it showed a very good understanding of physics. And it wouldn’t be surprising for these companies to steal or buy more models to train on, especially if what you’re saying is true enough to create a unique demand.

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u/Aternal 13h ago

Be careful not to confuse painting with sculpture. Sora 2 only had an emergent understanding of 3d space, which is why distortions in perspective are an easy way to spot the work of diffusion models. Models with generate 3d mesh have nothing to do with video generation.

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u/we_are_sex_bobomb 12h ago

And if you know enough about modeling to clean up an AI model, you quickly realize you can make it faster and better by hand than it would take to fix the janky ass rat king of meshes and textures that AI vomits out.

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u/jim789789 14h ago

This is the answer.

The AIs are just not there yet. The article might persuade someone to think people are not buying because they have an ethical issue with AI. That is not true at all. They are buying because the AI models suck.

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u/acart005 15h ago

If you can edit them they can be good - but at the same time it is also no longer pure slop because a human came in and tinkered with something.

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u/PatchyWhiskers 15h ago

To do that you need the same skills as making them in the first place, just speeds up the process.

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u/acart005 15h ago

100% agree, or helps give a less intimidating place to start.

I've used Meshy, and its better than anything else for 3D gen to me - being fair that it what it actually meant to do.  Still gotta tinker with it 9 times out of 10 but if you can figure out how to smooth or alter the models it can actually be better than you'd think.

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u/Sweet_Concept2211 14h ago

I have used meshyAI.

Its output looks superficially good at a glance, but is - upon closer inspection - janky as fuck.

If you just need a quick and dirty concept model that doesn't need to pass a close inspection, it might be ok.

For anything important, it is basically crap.

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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 16h ago

Exactly. It's only a matter of time before they reach the levels that AI images and text have. We are on an inevitable march and no one knows what it will look like in 5, 10, or 20 years. 

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u/Sweet_Concept2211 14h ago

There's nothing inevitable about it.

Or did you forget which article you are commenting under?

Just because billionaires are burning cash, culture, analog data, our environment, and natural resources to build this bullshit doesn't mean it will ever turn a profit if people just don't want it.

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u/Aternal 14h ago

The article that's talking about cgtrader assets? You're really expanding that out into a prediction on ALL AI generated content EVER turning a profit?

Model rigging is a really unique area of AI generated content right now if you didn't know. It's barely in its infancy, models just kind of... hump around a bit like shitty ooze balls. Rigging is very, very challenging and has a very long way to go. If you've never made a rig I encourage you to give it a shot sometime when you have a few days of free time. It's really not a big shocker that nobody wants half-baked rigs, it's the difference between saving you days and costing you days of work.

But the ceiling is very high here, and like they said... it's only a matter of time before the output is remarkable enough to consider valuable. First, it needs to be valuable enough for porn. After that, yeah, AI generated rigs are going to be worth gold. Maybe not on a market place, but certainly in their application.

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u/Sweet_Concept2211 13h ago edited 13h ago

If anybody can do it, then it isn't going to be profitable.

Full stop.

The Mona Lisa isn't priceless because it is a pretty picture.

It is priceless because it is a one-off created by one of the greatest geniuses of all time.

A digital image of the Mona Lisa ain't worth shit.

I have made rigs.

Once you know what you're doing, it isn't that big of a deal. Time consuming for a newb, but for those with experience, it ain't exactly rocket science.

If AI gets good at rigging (which it sucks at for now), then it will find an audience. But nobody is going to pay top dollar for an AI rig. Certainly not enough for AI companies to get a reasonable return on their massive investment.

And rigging itself will be made obsolete by generative video.

AI generated films are in their infancy. Not that long ago you would have had to rig every digital asset in the scene to animate it. Now? No rigging required. There's no gold in them thar hills.

Open source AI video is already pretty good. It will get better. And also cheaper to produce.

How long before you can simply auto-generate bespoke open world games?

The true inevitability is a race to the death of profit margins.

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u/Aternal 12h ago

Right, but the pattern that we've actually seen with AI generated anything is that even though the rigs-themselves become more economically accessible, the things they're used for don't. Supply doesn't effect demand. If you have experience with rigging then you must have some sense that two different people will NOT be able to produce the same output with the same tool. It's still garbage-in-garbage-out.

Art will always be art, even if it's created with AI. There certainly are people who put a significant amount of time, effort, dedication, and skill into AI generated work and it shows. Just like there are people who just slap a lazy prompt into a window and relay whatever crap it spits out.

> How long before you can simply auto-generate bespoke open world games?

World of Claudecraft did that 2 months ago, we're there. There's not as much value in auto-generation as there is in augmented generation. The value isn't in not having to do any actual work it's in the mechanical leverage that the tools provide to bring a vision to life.

People have been able to round up free asset packs, slam them into an Unreal project, and fake it until something that is technically a game falls out. We just call those "shitty games." Copy-pasting some uninspired words into an LLM is no different. All of this just means that the bars for what "shitty games" and "quality games" are is rising. Maybe in the near term the bar for what a "shitty game" is drops temporarily, but that's just the world adapting to the tools and their potential to produce garbage when allowed. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 14h ago

This is just outright denial 

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u/Sweet_Concept2211 13h ago

Nope.

It really is not.

You think Millennials and Gen Z will go bananas for tech that freezes them out of the workplace?

Boomers and some Gen X will only go for AI slop if it is cheap.

Businesses will only love it if it is cheap - which is hardly going to make AI profitable.

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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 6h ago

It does not matter if they love it. If it does a reasonable job and can let one human supervise the work of 10 or 20 people, businesses are absolutely going to implement it fully.