Ai Art, is what he's referring to.
Actually that's not the only meaning of it. Turns out, there's a LOT of types of generative art, and they've been around looooooooong before AI became a thing.
Here, look at this:
This is the sort of thing I was referring to in my post. Fractals, which are a type of generative art (though I didnt learn of that specific term until, well, super recently).
I often like to show off physical drawings I make here on the forums, but I'm primarily a fractal artist, which is what these are. An AI cannot make these. Not truly. The best an AI can do is sort of an... approximation of the idea of how a very basic fractal might look, but it outright doesnt have the ability to make real ones. These are not made out of some word prompt, and no AI is involved at all. The programs/techniques used to make things like this have been around LONG before any of that started, as has the concept of what a fractal is (look up the Mandelbrot). These are literally made of pure math. And I mean *heavy* math. That wiry thing... that took hours just to render that final image. It's just ONE object. Still took hours, on my powerhouse of a PC (or, what was a powerhouse PC at the time). This was after the 8 or 9 hours I spent creating it.
The second one is a different type of fractal, made in a different program... I have a suite of about 12 separate apps I use to make things. This one was the combination of three of them. The original fractal, some extra processing in a separate app, and then the application of kaleidoscopic formulas in a third app (which is in fact the only thing that third app does... turns out there's more to kaleidoscopes than I thought as a kid, hah).
Making these is more akin to making something in Blender.
Here, I actually did this workflow-example video awhile back, and it shows how these are made:
That's the program for making the Mandelbulb type of fractal (which is what that green wire thing is). I sped up the footage a lot there and the fractal image that was the end result was... simple, crude. Not something I'd actually consider a real finished product... I didnt upload that anywhere. It was made strictly to show off the "how", and trying to condense the FULL process... which can take hours and spam multiple apps... into one recording would have eaten my hard drive.
Fractals are weird things, they are literally infinite and recursive. That wire thing there? When working with it in the program used to create it, it doesnt matter how close you zoom in on it... you can always, always, always go deeper, and discover more structure further down. Same with the 2D ones. The deeper you go though, the more intense it is on your PC. Eventually, even the most powerful PC will be brought to its knees. AI images are generally always made in like, 20 seconds? These can range anywhere from about a minute to 20 hours for a final render (in my current experience on my current monster of a PC). And that's not counting the "mini-renders" that must be made as the fractal is altered and explored during the creation process. In the video you can actually see it sorta choking on itself a few times. Even sped up, the process is slow enough that it still shows. I actually bought my current PC with its selected hardware not for gaming, but for fractal rendering. Yet still, a difficult fractal will drain it so much that even the keyboard starts to get weird while the render is progressing (aka, the PC cannot do anything else until it is done, and a tough render like that usually takes a couple of hours).
I actually did a big post here on the forums awhile back that showcased the different apps I use, which can be found here:
https://www.autismforums.com/threads/the-unusual-art-apps-that-i-use.37200/
Yeah I know, I'm rambling a bit here, but I do want to be 100% clear on the things I make, and what they truly are. Making these things is a lot of work, and learning enough to start to produce results that dont suck took months.
I've been working with these for a number of years now, and I still have a LOT to learn, and a lot of ways I can improve. There are plenty of other people who are far better at this than I am, that's for sure. I still consider myself a beginner. Currently I have a lot of my fractal creations up on DeviantArt, though once I move to anywhere else, I'll probably take all of those off of there and close out that account.
There's a lot of other types of generative art (that have nothing to do with AI) but I'm not the one to ask about those.
