Why AI is Not a Panacea? After All, Nobody Believes in Magic... (2)
Thank you for your detailed response and for taking the time to go through my profile. I appreciate the openness to dialogue, but the way you interpreted my arguments and my project shows how easy it is to fall into the trap of hasty conclusions when one is unfamiliar with the entire journey behind a work. To a certain extent, your reaction reminded me of the discussions I sometimes have with my daughters — full of a noble idealism, but often detached from harsh logistical realities, and confusing a romantic attachment to manual effort with the value of the final result. I find it truly amazing how erroneously I was interpreted.
I will begin by emphasizing that any collaboration with valuable people is extraordinary — I myself have a profound respect for human geniuses like Renpytom (Tom Rothamel), Hyuchia (Diana Islas Ocampo), fr33mind, etc., whom, if I had absolute power, I would have rewarded better than fate rewarded Bill Gates or the great creator of Apple, for the freedom they offered us through their tools.
Furthermore, the history of free and open-source software (FOSS) is full of messianic figures — people who did not just create lines of code, but true monuments of creative freedom, refusing to sell their souls or their work to major corporations, thereby saving millions of artists from silence. I am thinking of Ton Roosendaal (creator of Blender), Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis (creators of GIMP, a scalpel against the Adobe monopoly), Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux), Richard Stallman (the father of the GNU project and the Free Software movement), without forgetting Guido van Rossum (creator of the Python language) and, why not, the Godot Engine, thanks to the efforts of Juan Linietsky and Ariel Manzur.
Yet, the raw reality of truly independent (indie) creators is that we do not have the budgets or the teams of major corporations behind us. Volunteering and free resources are beautiful in theory, but in practice, they bring massive compromises that, more often than not, suffocate and kill major projects before they ever see the light of day. Yes, even I wasted over 3 years of my life completely empathetic to these ideas of ours, only to experience reality as it is.
Let us analyze the facts you present. At nearly 60 years old, I feel that... "Winter is coming"! From the perspective of human time management — which is a finite and unrecoverable resource — a rigid attachment to manual execution is not an indicator of growth, but one of biological and artistic self-limitation. Like you, I chose in the past to sacrifice nearly four decades to produce a "sub"mediocre aesthetic, just to maintain an "illusion" of "authenticity."
From your response, it seems you assumed that using AI in my project stems from a lack of practice or a desire to find an easy "shortcut." The reality is completely the opposite. Over decades, I have invested an immense amount of labor into pure, manual craft: I have written a monumental body of work that currently totals over 3.5 million words across 12 published novels, I have perfected my own drawing style, and I have mastered 3D graphics and volume projections through Blender, creating complex scenes and complete rigged character models. Only to find, in the end, that it has all turned back into "stardust" covering HDDs long forgotten in the storage room of my life...
In the effort to create the MOS universe, I started from deeply personal elements: the visual characters are based on photographs of myself, my father, and my relatives, and the environment elements start directly from my own technical blueprints as a departure point. Why did I choose to integrate AI assistance anyway? Because of the only completely undefeated and finite resource: biological time. At one point, exhausted by the massive logistical barriers that threatened to bury my life's literary work forever in drawers, I had abandoned the idea of creating altogether, retreating professionally into the field of cybersecurity. The emergence of AI was a lifeline for me, a unique chance to rapidly "leap" over the physical obstacles of time so that these 3.5 million words would not remain trapped within the pages of books forgotten by myself in my personal library. Initially, I invested another 3 years of my life just to revive my accumulations on a writers' platform. But it turned into a 10-hour-a-day effort to understand and not be crushed by the explosion of these technologies before actually starting the production of MOS late last year.
Concluding on this point, the philosophy of MOS (Mortgage One's Soul) refuses, through learned experiences, this type of cultural conformism. I refuse to impose silence upon myself or generate a transmission blockage for my story just because I did not receive the biological ability to paint at birth, or because I no longer had the resources and time of my life to perfect it with sweat to a level that, regardless, would have been far from any possible evaluation of "professional" or "on-trend."
Regarding your observations on my profile, you asked rhetorically why a planet and a brain appear on the board, stating that "someone studying space wouldn't be studying the brain." This remark betrays precisely the lack of structural depth in your perspective. In substantive Hard Science Fiction (along the lines of Theodore Sturgeon or Isaac Asimov), the evolution of consciousness (the brain) and logistical expansion in baryonic space (the planets) are indissoluble. The brain in MOS is not a "sci-fi" decorative element thrown in at random; it represents the biological substrate of adaptation, the architecture of consciousness that must navigate the energetic mortgages of the universe. The AI executed, with difficulty, my orders, which more or less reproduced the conceptual correlation I demanded as a Narrative Architect. The fact that you see a contradiction there only demonstrates that you analyze elements in isolation, losing sight of the bigger picture.
Furthermore, you interpreted these imperfections as a "loss of control." In reality, it was a conscious strategic management decision. I could have forced the algorithms to strictly adopt my drawing style, but it proved impossible for an AI to ever truly understand even a single individual. Yes, strange as it is, it seems that sometimes not even a human being is capable of that! I arrived at a hybrid style, extremely difficult to control, and I deliberately chose to no longer consume my limited time trying to stubbornly maintain an inert aesthetic purism. I abandoned myself, out of pure considerations of productivity, to the errors of the technology, accepting them as an assumed cost so that the story could be delivered.
Look at the rest of the industry. Unity already uses AI massively (Unity Muse and Unity Sentis) in its workflows. The giants automate everything to increase their profit margins. Asking an indie creator to write everything manually, as a "purist," while the platforms they deliver on optimize their production through aggressive algorithms, is a form of economic suicide. Unreal Engine has deeply integrated generative AI and automated scanning (MetaHuman, RealityScan) to reduce execution time. If the top standard of the industry itself uses AI to generate virtual humans and three-dimensional environments, it is absurd to accuse an independent writer of using their own artificial "production department" to illustrate their work.
Is there really any need to further argue that relying on "volunteers" or free resources means turning your work into a hostage of whims and compromises? Limitations do not always liberate creativity; most of the time, in the real world, limitations kill independent projects and send them straight into the individual memory of forgotten ideas.
Accepting digital slavery to "giants," while simultaneously punishing an open-source developer who uses AI assistance to survive the workload, is a double standard that ethics cannot support. Everyone is free to choose their mode of survival. You have chosen the path of asceticism and manual limitation, accepting that your voice looks amateurish from a visual standpoint for the sake of the process. I have chosen the path of offensive Darwinian adaptation: I use AI as a subordinate production department so that my vision can be delivered to the world at maximum capacity, without compromises. History and evolution will decide which organism was better adapted to its environment.
All the best,
Dorin Merticaru
P.S. Oh, yes... My interventions regarding AI are not meant to proselytize or impose a cynical "survival of the fittest" philosophy. They were intended as a simple exchange of experience, honest and transparent, from one independent creator to other independent creators. My message is simple: let us learn to accept and master these tools, with all their errors, because they are our only chance to make our voices heard in a saturated digital world that will soon be completely omnipresent.
Thank you once again for the opportunity to clarify these nuances, and I wish you much success in perfecting your own artistic path.
P.P.S. By the way, my second certified qualification is that of a paramedic, a passion I have sustained with over 30 years of collaborative activity in the field of holistic medicine ("New Medicine")