Art in Real World
AI art has been around for a year now and what’s absolutely mind-blowing is how little it’s changed thing.
You see a bit of it - oh that ad is AI generated, people on Twitter will post Midjourney images.
But you almost never see it in the real world. No Midjourney images framed on a wall,
Various trad types complain about how the modern world lacks beauty. I’m not a trad, but on this one point I agree. Modern Architecture is always a cheap shot, but really - it’s usually hideous:
There are many explanations for the lack of beauty in the modern world, but I tend towards a simple one - cost. The beauty of the past was largely centered in flagship cities, religious sites, palaces. Today in America we spend most of our time in suburbs, and widespread cities. It’s too expensive to have beauty at the scale we operate at - it requires craftsmanship and customization that is energy and human intensive.
Luckily, two trends are intersecting:
- Diffusion Models - The cost of digital art has plummeted to 0 (Midjourney)
- 3d Printing - The cost of creating unique physical objects is lowering
Before design was expensive, you needed a highly skilled human to create what you wanted. Manufacturing was as well - manufacturing processes like injection molding have a high fixed cost for the mold creation. All of this favored mass production of artistic pieces, since the fixed cost was so high.
Now everything is changing. With a diffusion model and a 3d printer, your average person can create completely customized, beautiful art, in the real world. I believe this is actual huge - beauty is important.
Imagine a world where you can order a stained-glass window for your hallway celebrating your childs win at a sports game. Or for his birthday you gift your best friend a statue of him wrestling a lion. A fountain with motifs from your town’s local history.
Omniprescent art, customized to your life, making your home more beautiful. Something that was once reserved for only our holiest places can now be available to your average American.
It’ll be like the Wheaties Box phenomenon of the 90’s but on steroids:
There have been examples of this in the past - San Francisco Victorian’s were built that way because gingerbread, the decorative wood pieces, had recently become cheap to manufacture.
What materials to focus on
Concrete Sculpture
I think the most promising place to explore here is concrete sculptures. We already have 3d printers for concrete. Concrete is cheap, durable, and can be quite beautiful placed in a garden.
Most concrete 3d printers are currently oriented towards home construction, so have a larger print area and create somewhat rough walls. Mudbots seems to be the leader here, and already market monuments as one of the things they can do:
There’s a lot of product dimensions to get correct to offer a consumer product around this:
- Cost - How much does it cost to print?
- Shipping - is it even possible to affordably and safely ship a concrete sculpture?
- Size - what size sculptures can I make?
- My guess is sculptures would have to be around 1 ft for people to be interested in them as desk ornamentation.
- Print Resolution - will the roughness of the print make it unattractive?
- Concrete printers currently produce rough surfaces.
- Print Shape - what shapes are possible to create in concrete?
- Design software - ideally you can create your design from a combination of both text and an image.
- For example “Here’s a picture of me, create a statue where I’m climbing a rock face”.
- This has to be incredibly easy to use
Another alternative is to use a plastic resin or filament 3d printer to create a mold, and then using the mold to cast concrete, like this video. This probably create great results, but will be human labor-intensive.
I think creating the actual art in 3d printed plastic isn’t right - plastic is an ugly material. People don’t like it around, it isn’t beautiful. No one has a plastic statue in their house.
Other options
Stained Glass
Would be beautiful, but as far as I know creating stained-glass is still a human intensive process not close to automation: https://x.com/samswoora/status/1746333280696471620?s=20
Childrens Books
Customized childrens books for a family are interesting. I assume there’s already infinite variety of children’s book however and there isn’t a ton of need for more.
What’s next
The first iteration will be creating a design and 3d printing with a normal plastic printer. I think this will validate the basic flow of creating customize diffusion model prints.
After that it’s taking a stab at conrete - first by 3d printing a plastic mold and puring the concrete by hand, and later by renting time on a 3d concrete printer.