At first it was just because I thought it was a great idea. While I don't do a ton of this type of travel (I wish) I'm like the go to booking guy for my extended family. My in laws travel frequently and are always asking what sports they can see and who's playing. There's just no way to easily look it up and cross reference multiple sports. From there I started searching and using AI to look for a business case. Apparently SportCations (really need to make this stick haha) are a massive industry. Once I saw the number of people that make trips like these every year(est. 5-11million) I thought I might have something here.
Then once I started I just couldn't stop. It's honestly been a ton of fun learning the coding, troubleshooting and just making something that I think is super cool. I've always loved problem solving and finding creative solutions to problems so apparently web dev is right up my alley. I'm currently just obsessed with working on the site and fine tuning everything. Even if it doesn't work out and never makes a dime I'll be proud of myself for making something and I'm just enjoying the experience and excitement from working on something new.
I did stress a lot about the IP thing to start, as I didn't want to give it away either so I get that! When I was pitching it I made sure to only use reputable, large companies and not fiverr or a friend of a friend.
There is quite a bit of chatter online about why anything should be built or created since it won't become a big success. My philosophy on creating anything (apps, music, writing, etc) is that doing it for success is a trap. As cliche as it may sound, the only thing that matters is the journey of creation, and to me this is pretty much the perfect outcome.
He built a cool thing that he otherwise couldn't have, it took him about as much time as it took most of my former clients to write 8 pages of web copy, and he had fun doing it. That's enormously fulfilling, and I think it ties into somewhere deep within humans to create. I remain unconvinced there's much of a point to all of this beyond that.
As for the doom and gloom, I oscillate between incredibly excited and totally petrified. The general tone in the community does appear to be shifting towards a very fast takeoff. There are some people at the helm of the big models that have been fairly conservative and are shifting towards an attitude of concern over the speed this is all happening. Sora 2 was built in a couple weeks, Claude Cowork the same, the people making the models aren't even coding the upgrades (which are coming at an alarming rate). To me the argument that there's nothing here is getting weaker.
Perhaps it's all marketing fluff and these people are just riling up interest? That's my hope because I don't trust government to move quickly enough to adapt, but my concern is almost everything we hear from these people (love it or hate it) is coming true.
Robots are one-shotting tasks that they have no business being able to complete without years of training. Waymos are rolling out simultaneously to multiple cities at once. Agents have gone from working for a couple minutes 18 months ago, to multiple hours per day.
Indes should not have been able to build that site in 6 months. He's not a developer! It just blows my mind that at every turn there's so much evidence of where it seems we're headed yet so many people won't acknowledge it.
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In total, power demand for proposed data centres currently listed by the Alberta Electric System Operator sits at 21.2 gigawatts per day — more than double the average electricity use for the entire province. And that figure doesn’t yet include the Synapse project.
…and the Synapse project alone is expected to require as much power as all of Edmonton.
My personal experience so far: RAM is now really expensive, quality recipes and gardening advice by actual humans with souls is increasingly difficult to find, customer service is increasingly fraught and impersonal, media content is increasingly repulsive, and the once in a blue moon I attempt an AI shortcut I get a hallucination. I see the odd benefit as well, but day to day? Gross.
There is quite a bit of chatter online about why anything should be built or created since it won't become a big success. My philosophy on creating anything (apps, music, writing, etc) is that doing it for success is a trap. As cliche as it may sound, the only thing that matters is the journey of creation, and to me this is pretty much the perfect outcome.
He built a cool thing that he otherwise couldn't have, it took him about as much time as it took most of my former clients to write 8 pages of web copy, and he had fun doing it. That's enormously fulfilling, and I think it ties into somewhere deep within humans to create. I remain unconvinced there's much of a point to all of this beyond that.
As for the doom and gloom, I oscillate between incredibly excited and totally petrified. The general tone in the community does appear to be shifting towards a very fast takeoff. There are some people at the helm of the big models that have been fairly conservative and are shifting towards an attitude of concern over the speed this is all happening. Sora 2 was built in a couple weeks, Claude Cowork the same, the people making the models aren't even coding the upgrades (which are coming at an alarming rate). To me the argument that there's nothing here is getting weaker.
Perhaps it's all marketing fluff and these people are just riling up interest? That's my hope because I don't trust government to move quickly enough to adapt, but my concern is almost everything we hear from these people (love it or hate it) is coming true.
Robots are one-shotting tasks that they have no business being able to complete without years of training. Waymos are rolling out simultaneously to multiple cities at once. Agents have gone from working for a couple minutes 18 months ago, to multiple hours per day.
Indes should not have been able to build that site in 6 months. He's not a developer! It just blows my mind that at every turn there's so much evidence of where it seems we're headed yet so many people won't acknowledge it.
Well, my question was more curiosity relating to that was more along the lines of what motivations allowed him to keep pushing forward. It's easier to say in hindsight which is 20/20 but foresight is totally different. Basically, the reason why I am asking this is that I'm asking on behalf of my children into the mindset of inventing/innovation via AI. Sitting down with a 1000 piece puzzle with a specific goal is different than sitting down to make something with a potentially non-predetermined goal or outcome or even a shifting goal/outcome. The other aspect is wondering about the worries that whatever you plug in, could end up being "owned" by someone else if you're not careful.
I have a specific earworm remix of a song that I want to see manifested. I'm almost at the point where I think maybe I don't care that I gift that idea away, but I'm also not sure.
Me personally, I'm so used to working on projects with a tangible result within an idea of an expected time frame, that I can't understand the concept of putting months into an idea that I won't know the true implications of that project. I don't have issues with focusing on the journey, but I'm struggling with the idea of convincing others as to why go on the journey in the first place and that the struggles and set backs are worth it. I really want to know this, so that I can try to figure out how to coach my kids to understand that mindset... and they have less propensity of sticking to inventing/innovating than I do.
IMO surviving in an AI world is innovating and inventing. Pushing the minimum floor standard forward by also making the limit of the sky higher than the current understanding of that limit. I am not scared of AI at all, but it doesn't mean that I believe that it's daily application will come with basically zero proactive approaches in understanding how each person wants to do with it. I tell myself that infinity is just the limit of human understanding. Someone that looks back at history will find that what was considered infinity in those times, might be considered multitudes of finite in our times. This is easily noted via how many numbers of pi and how fast we can calculate those numbers on a computer 30 years ago vs today.
Like maybe it's a philosophical question of human interaction to AI, that can be mirrored about what AI might run into later. Why should someone invent if no one cares about what they make? If humans don't care about making something that AI can, why should AI make it/use resources doing it?
I keep hearing we can do so many things with AI and AI will help us... but my other question is what happens if we don't bother with AI? AI deals with the modern day to day so that our future generations can go back to living in worlds similar to those in the 1980s-90s where they would go out without parental worry/judgement to play, explore, imagine, interact and go home once it got dark? Or is VR > AR/XR a foregone conclusion?
There’s a lot of pushback in creative spaces around the use of AI. Musicians who are found to have used AI sounds in digital music, or board game publishers who used AI-assisted artwork, are review-bombed and denounced on social media.
And yet it seems most commercial creatives are already using AI tools. They’re just doing it quietly.
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Novelists are using it to develop plots. Musicians are experimenting with AI-generated sounds. Filmmakers are incorporating it into their editing process. And when the software company Adobe surveyed more than 2,500 creative professionals across four continents in 2024, it found that roughly 83% reported using AI in their work, with 69% saying it helped them express their creativity more effectively.
There’s a lot of pushback in creative spaces around the use of AI. Musicians who are found to have used AI sounds in digital music, or board game publishers who used AI-assisted artwork, are review-bombed and denounced on social media.
And yet it seems most commercial creatives are already using AI tools. They’re just doing it quietly.
In terms of the reaction, it’s because it’s not just about the tool, it’s about how it is used and who it is used by. A skilled craftsman shortening their work by using AI to handle menial/time consuming tasks is significantly different than a freelancer who has no business charging a dime using AI to do 95% of the work.
And when it comes to commercial usage, you see a lot of both, the former because AI has gone from an advantage to a competitive necessity in a very short time, and the latter because every idiot with Adobe fancies themselves a designer now.
It’s the nuance between AI allowing a skilled individual to further enhance the job they do with less effort and an unskilled individual relying on AI to do the job for them. A lot of creatives using AI do it in a way that is indistinguishable because they have the ability to do that exact work themselves and know what the result should be down to the small details.
I suggest you go through this thread to get a better understanding of the nuances here. Creatives using AI to do something they couldn’t otherwise do or producing easily identifiable slop should absolutely be shamed and laughed at. Nobody seems to issue when restaurants get bad reviews for #### food.
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In terms of the reaction, it’s because it’s not just about the tool, it’s about how it is used and who it is used by. A skilled craftsman shortening their work by using AI to handle menial/time consuming tasks is significantly different than a freelancer who has no business charging a dime using AI to do 95% of the work.
And when it comes to commercial usage, you see a lot of both, the former because AI has gone from an advantage to a competitive necessity in a very short time, and the latter because every idiot with Adobe fancies themselves a designer now.
It’s the nuance between AI allowing a skilled individual to further enhance the job they do with less effort and an unskilled individual relying on AI to do the job for them. A lot of creatives using AI do it in a way that is indistinguishable because they have the ability to do that exact work themselves and know what the result should be down to the small details.
I suggest you go through this thread to get a better understanding of the nuances here. Creatives using AI to do something they couldn’t otherwise do or producing easily identifiable slop should absolutely be shamed and laughed at. Nobody seems to issue when restaurants get bad reviews for #### food.
Minor quibble. "Creatives using AI to do something they otherwise couldn't do"... I half agree with this. Circling back to the part where you said someone uses it to shorten work they have the ability to do themselves, I think AI is valid for someone to do something they can't do if it's used as a smaller component of the work and not the vast majority of the work.
In legal and law based work, you can spit an scenario into AI and then it spits out a response. Then, it is the professional's responsibility to go through and review/revise the output to determine the appropriate response to specific client scenarios. Now, it splits between the line of shortening the work and doing something they couldn't otherwise do. The reason being either certain scenarios are so complex that it would take a lot of billable hours to do manually, or said individual is in a headspace/training where they'd just totally overlook a possible solution, had AI not pointed at the possibility it could be a valid response/solution.
Using food as an example, it's like using microwaves, pressure cookers, sous vide etc. type of machination to speed up or replace manual techniques for fine dining preparation. I think slop is the key word here. If it's slop, you should get shamed. If you misrepresent your use of AI, even if the output isn't bad, I think there's valid reason for complaint.
I believe there is going to be a high likelihood of AI having application to aid people with disabilities and translation. That's why I have a quibble about applying usage and output without shame only to people who might normally be able to do it themselves. I think it's fine they normally can't do it, but would have attempt to learn it to do themselves manually, if there wasn't some barrier/reason preventing them from doing so.
There’s a lot of pushback in creative spaces around the use of AI. Musicians who are found to have used AI sounds in digital music, or board game publishers who used AI-assisted artwork, are review-bombed and denounced on social media.
And yet it seems most commercial creatives are already using AI tools. They’re just doing it quietly.
I'm designing a board game and make liberal use of AI for creating icons for game components, cover art, generating code to print game cards, even creating a Monte Carlo simulator for my game by feeding it the rule book. I'm creating the board graphics myself using my most accessible tool (Powerpoint ) and overall it doesn't look bad...for a prototype. If I decide to go forward commercially I've already got a designer lined up to do the real creative work, though I'm not opposed to him reusing bits and pieces of my AI stuff like icons.
Have I taken work away from a professional creative? Not really, because I wouldn't have been able to build a decent prototype myself and there's no way I'm paying anyone to work on my brain fart until I think there's potential. One might argue that AI has helped me to create a new opportunity for a professional creative that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Meanwhile, I'm also an amateur musician and AI music can go grok itself. Hypocritical, I know.
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It’s the nuance between AI allowing a skilled individual to further enhance the job they do with less effort and an unskilled individual relying on AI to do the job for them. A lot of creatives using AI do it in a way that is indistinguishable because they have the ability to do that exact work themselves and know what the result should be down to the small details.
I suggest you go through this thread to get a better understanding of the nuances here. Creatives using AI to do something they couldn’t otherwise do or producing easily identifiable slop should absolutely be shamed and laughed at. Nobody seems to issue when restaurants get bad reviews for #### food.
I'm quite aware of the nuances, thanks. It's the people I've seen in hobby and creative spaces denouncing AI who aren't seeing any nuances. They aren't just against AI schlock - they strongly feel that any use of AI in tabletop game publishing is a moral evil. Full-stop. And they denounce, review-bomb, and boycott any publisher who they learn (or suspect) uses AI in any creative capacity.
A successful game publisher that employs 15 artists recently acknowledged that some of the artwork those artists create is AI-assisted. The fact that artwork looks very good - better than much of the art from the same publisher 5 or 6 years ago - doesn't matter in the eyes of the critics who dominate forums and social media. So the discourse around this publisher's next project has been subsumed by anti-AI controversy.
Which is why I find it understandable that even though most commercial artists are already using AI tools in their work, they're keeping silent about it. The tools have tremendous utility. But they're also morally tainted in the eyes of a very passionate and vocal element. And nobody wants the mob descending on them. Meanwhile, I expect most buyers don't care if AI-assisted artwork is used so long as the end product looks good.
I'm curious to see how these conflicting values and incentives will play out over the next couple years.
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I'm quite aware of the nuances, thanks. It's the people I've seen in hobby and creative spaces denouncing AI who aren't seeing any nuances. They aren't just against AI schlock - they strongly feel that any use of AI in tabletop game publishing is a moral evil. Full-stop. And they denounce, review-bomb, and boycott any publisher who they learn (or suspect) uses AI in any creative capacity.
A successful game publisher that employs 15 artists recently acknowledged that some of the artwork those artists create is AI-assisted. The fact that artwork looks very good - better than much of the art from the same publisher 5 or 6 years ago - doesn't matter in the eyes of the critics who dominate forums and social media. So the discourse around this publisher's next project has been subsumed by anti-AI controversy.
Which is why I find it understandable that even though most commercial artists are already using AI tools in their work, they're keeping silent about it. The tools have tremendous utility. But they're also morally tainted in the eyes of a very passionate and vocal element. And nobody wants the mob descending on them. Meanwhile, I expect most buyers don't care if AI-assisted artwork is used so long as the end product looks good.
I'm curious to see how these conflicting values and incentives will play out over the next couple years.
Maybe it’s more a tabletop game publisher phenomenon. I don’t really know that space at all or how people are using AI. Can you share a specific example with a link of the artwork/reactions?
With music it is understandable. AI has zero place in the creation of music, but there’s some argument to be had for assisting in the mixing/mastering process.
But I do think you are missing some of the nuance here by suggesting people are being widely denounced for it and then citing a poll showing heavy usage. That is stripping the nuance from both of those perspectives.
What does “AI-assisted” mean to you? What’s the line between AI-assisted and AI-created?
In the advertising/marketing/PR space there is a lot of resistance to it among practitioners and less so among clients (you’re right there). But that resistance is probably more caution/frustration at bad work getting through because it’s faster and cheaper. It genuinely makes the industry look bad and collectively lowers billing potential across the board. So there is a quality element and a moral element to it. Most people who take issue with that aren’t taking issue with the pros using it to speed up a photo edit.
I can’t say I know or have heard of anyone who is “hiding” their use of AI to avoid “the mob” or whatever lol. Most designers don’t talk about it because they use AI in completely boring, irrelevant ways, and virtually none of them would care to tell you about whatever tool they used regardless of whether it was AI or not. Nobody is showing off a brand new logo they created and calling it “InDesign-Assisted” nor is anyone using generative fill to extend a landscape photo by 6% or remove a weird cloud going to call it “AI-Assisted.”
You’re just applying a small section of the gripes and a small section of the use-cases far too broadly. When I see people going off on AI stuff on Instagram it is ALWAYS something that is very obviously AI, even if it’s not technically “bad.” Good designers don’t let that happen.
The extent of AI in music should be for production purposes (electronic music is another story).
Music is a deeply human form of expression on so many levels and while AI can imitate it well, anything AI-made will always lack the soul and real personal experiences that many timeless lyrics are drawn from.
As a mastering tool it makes sense. If it gets good enough maybe it can even save studio bills/time and clean up and master home recordings as effectively.
It's a double edged sword at the end of the day and we'll probably have to go through a stage of abusing it before we reel it back to what's a reasonable role for it to play.
Maybe it’s more a tabletop game publisher phenomenon. I don’t really know that space at all or how people are using AI. Can you share a specific example with a link of the artwork/reactions?
Here's the publisher's site showing artwork from the previous version of the game (Agricola) and the new version that uses AI-assisted and generated art.
Here's the publisher's site showing artwork from the previous version of the game (Agricola) and the new version that uses AI-assisted and generated art.
A lot of those discussions seem pretty reasonable with differing viewpoints expressed and a lot of the points seem to take primary issue with AI art looking very obviously like AI art and/or using primarily AI as opposed to an outright boycott just for the existence of any AI, so maybe a little less dramatic and a little more nuance there than you first observed?
If it’s true that the developer is using AI art and then having someone go through and lightly touch things up, I think it’s fair to reject that. The cards don’t look very good… but neither do the human-created ones lol so who knows.
I can’t say I know or have heard of anyone who is “hiding” their use of AI to avoid “the mob” or whatever lol. Most designers don’t talk about it because they use AI in completely boring, irrelevant ways, and virtually none of them would care to tell you about whatever tool they used regardless of whether it was AI or not. Nobody is showing off a brand new logo they created and calling it “InDesign-Assisted” nor is anyone using generative fill to extend a landscape photo by 6% or remove a weird cloud going to call it “AI-Assisted.”
You’re just applying a small section of the gripes and a small section of the use-cases far too broadly. When I see people going off on AI stuff on Instagram it is ALWAYS something that is very obviously AI, even if it’s not technically “bad.” Good designers don’t let that happen.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a beautiful and amazing crafted game with a small team of developers and the most awarded game in The Game Awards history, was barred from winning the Indie Awards after winning for confirming of use of AI in part of their development process after anti-AI internet sleuths turned it into a major controversy.
That use was a texture placeholder generated by AI early on for a few posters that accidentally made it to the released game and were patched out within a week with human made textures. This 'discovery' instantly nullified the award and caused the game to get review bombed and brigaded by people who never played the game with a witch hunt solely on figuring out what if anything in it is "AI slop", just so they can get outraged by it.
All this...for a couple of textured posters that you would have to go out of your way to look and pixel peep to find in a game full of reused and generic textures and faces, to point the finger at and yell out "AI".
In terms of the reaction, it’s because it’s not just about the tool, it’s about how it is used and who it is used by. A skilled craftsman shortening their work by using AI to handle menial/time consuming tasks is significantly different than a freelancer who has no business charging a dime using AI to do 95% of the work.
That is in your eyes and opinion though (a reasonable opinion), which doesn't necessarily match everyone's outlook on it. A grounded person can objectively see the difference between generative AI slop and understandable AI use, but in the creative community there is a significant number of hardcore anti-AI advocates with 100% anti-AI stance regardless of use. The premise being that using AI to generate anything regardless or use is taking pay or a job from a real artist
A truly bad AI slop example is the posters used at the Farmer's Market and should be rightfully ridiculed. But in the use example you provided, those benign and boring tasks done through AI is still considered a huge taboo and vilified and seen as equal in hate deserving.
And the irony is that generative AI is so embedded within products like Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere Pro, that anti-AI creatives likely use it themselves but will personally rationalize it because of some of the reasons you mention (that they have the skillset to do manually, etc). Yet tools like the spot healing tool were built through machine learning, which is essentially the same thing. Machine learning is quite literally AI.
The anti-AI hate is so prevalent that Anti-AI art and AI training poisoning is now a subset of itself, with groups and subreddits dedicated to it.
You see a difference between AI created and AI assisted, but that view of nuances is not shared by everyone and those who hate on anything AI regardless of context.
Last edited by Firebot; 02-27-2026 at 10:53 AM.
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The problem these people fail to realize is you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Ya, I understand your concerns, and ya, I understand you want others to not encourage the use that will devastate the creative industry. But, well, this is here now. All this fighting the inevitable is a waste of energy.
) and overall it doesn't look bad...for a prototype. If I decide to go forward commercially I've already got a designer lined up to do the real creative work, though I'm not opposed to him reusing bits and pieces of my AI stuff like icons.
