What you're describing is people who are incompetent at that early phase of ideation *thinking* that they are doing something by spraying slop all over their jerkoff Confluence pages. It's so incredibly disrespectful to concept artists to perpetuate this nonsense.
Like I'm not even an artist and I feel insane that this has to be pointed out to ostensive experts in the industry but concept art is not just pretty pictures to help a CEO 'visualize' an idea in his withered brain
I am not in the industry whatsoever so --as an ignorant layperson (I do not mean that sarcastically, I am literally an ignorant layperson)-- Could you explain to me in detail what concept art is, and what purpose it serves within the design process?
(With the understanding that the question was asked from the perspective of "I can see that concept art is an integral part of the process, but I'm not entirely sure how it works.")
Broadly speaking concept art is art that's produced not to be used as an in-game asset but to guide some other part of the process.
This is used for all kinds of things in a game production but the broad strokes answer is that concept art solves problems and answers questions about the game's visuals, it's a key part of deciding what a game looks like both in broad strokes and at a granular level.
That.... that feels like something a.i. as a concept is fundamentally unable to do in the way the people who use those answers need them to be done.
You'd need it to be an actual *person* for it to do that I think, and it's not. It's an algorithm.
basically, it's one part of the system that allows for 50 artists to produce output that looks consistent
To add: The unfortunate part is that for people in leadership who don't know how this works, the end result stage of the concept art process, where Decision-Makers(tm) pick from options, looks a lot like getting an image out of the machine, which is why it's such a go-to "use case" for those types
Concept art to me is a form of communication. It's got enough visual bits to commitcate to the team the intended direction of the project. Easily to manipulate, revise, and build upon ideas with. It's the foundation of any project, the bottom row of a stack of cards.
Yeah idk when the general feel shifted toward this, what I do in production is so different from what I see the general perception is- I see this problem so much reflected in portfolios too... and it became very annoying too when trying to hire someone (first hand experience) ........
my favorite was when I heard that "AI will make brainstorming a lot faster and more efficient" like, motherfucker, WHAT DO YOU THINK THE "BRAIN" IN BRAINSTORMING MEANS, they're just shit at brainstorming, probably from their painfully obvious lack of brains
Everything that people say they use AI ethically for, I’ve accomplished with stock photos and Pinterest.
this and also the problems you encounter with stock and pinterest, like lacking diversity, weird stiltedness, advertisement look to the pics... will be exacerbated in the ai approach
Yeah, stock photos are for vibe, detail, and composition reference only. “I want to make something like this/framed like this”. If you’re trying to go into production on anything not planned and orchestrated by a human you’re gonna have a bad time.