The problem is that I dedicate so much time to doing this, only to hear someone say, “This is way worse than AI.” Man, it makes you feel like a complete clown — that’s why I’m giving up. If your art is inferior to AI’s, then it’s not worth doing, because with AI there’s no effort at all — you just write a good prompt and that’s it. I think in the future we’ll have very few authentic artists, and I’ll probably not be one of them. The amount of time it takes me to make my art is absurd — it’s not worth it, it doesn’t make sense to me anymore.
Yeah, making good 3D meshes with proper rigging, animations, textures, and all that jazz? Incredibly hard. I know, I literally went to school for Game Art & Design, and my passion was 3D modeling. So when I look at your model and notice how she has only 3 facial morphs and they're all in the Botox Zone, and that comfortably earns her a summer home in the Uncanny Valley, I'm not just talking shit. If you want to improve, clearly there is room for improvement. But if you would rather focus on your storytelling and writing, you have other options besides Gen-AI. Machinima has been a thing for decades at this point, and while not everyone appreciates the stock appearance of Koikatsu or Honey Select, there is a huge base of mod support and even their stock assets are capable of oodles more expression than what your model is capable of. So yeah, your work could use some improvement, but I also have infinitely more respect for you for not just farming it out to Gen-AI. Even if you decide to quit rather than continue, I'll still respect throwing in the towel after an honest try over becoming just another soulless Gen-AI grifter.
And yes, people who use machinima are artist. It's just the artistry skews towards the photography and cinematography skillsets; rather than modeling, texture, rigging, and everything else that goes into making a functional 3D asset.
Also, you cannot get hung up on comparing your work to Gen-AI; because Gen-AI is the slop product of venture capitalist ghouls and silicon valley tech-bros who basically stole the internet, put it all into a blender, and are now expecting all of the money in the world for the privilege of giving you access to their copyright slurry. Gen-AI would be nothing without artist, and while it might be able to emulate what it has been trained on, it can't make new stuff. It operates without intelligence, comprehension, or intent; it is all just a pattern recognition tool with randomized outputs, and it will never be anything more without a fundamental shift away from probabilistic LLM's. Ask Gen-AI to make you an image of a full glass of wine. It can't do it. All of the training data the models use are skewed by adverts and people trying to look attractive with wine, and in every instance the wine glass is never full, so the training data for a 'full wine glass' just doesn't exist. You and I know what that would hypothetically look like, and we could both make art with a full glass of wine if needed; but the LLM's will never be able to do so, because the training data just doesn't exist at scale.
The people who need to worry about LLM's taking their jobs are the executive suites dipshits with do-nothing make work jobs who spend half their day reading emails and the other half at lunch. Those are the people you could replace with AI, and nothing of value would be lost.
The people who you shouldn't be listening to are the ones who say your stuff is worse than Gen-AI, because they're dipshit gooners with no eye for aesthetics and lack appreciation of artistic integrity or intent. Now, does that mean that all of the Gen-AI haters are going to heap praise on you for the simple fact of forgoing Gen-AI? No. Does doing your own work shield you from all criticism of said work? Certainly not. But one of the skills you need to cultivate as an artists who puts out work publicly, is who is worth listening to and who can you safely dismiss. Finding that balance is hard and not at all fun, because the truth of the matter is that not everyone who has something worthwhile to say will do so with the kid gloves on and worded in such a way as to not challenge your ego. It's why professional art schools constantly have whole sessions dedicated to critique, to get their students used to the reality of having all of their peers and their instructors pick apart their work for any and every flaw. Nobody is perfect, everyone has something they can improve on. Being an authentic artist isn't easy, but only you can decide if it is worth the effort.