You see the exact same patterns. AI uses more code to accomplish the same thing, less efficiently.

I'm not even an AI hater. It's just a fact.

The human then has to go through and cleanup that code if you want to deliver a high-quality product.

Similarly, you can slap that AI generated 3D model right into your game engine, with its terrible topology and have it perform "ok". As you add more of these terrible models, you end up with crap performance but who cares, you delivered the game on-time right? A human can then go and slave away fixing the terrible topology and textures and take longer than they would have if the object had been modeled correctly to begin with.

The comparison of edge-loops to "high quality code" is also one that I mentally draw. High quality code can be a joy to extend and build upon.

Low quality code is like the dense mesh pictured. You have a million cross interactions and side-effects. Half the time it's easier to gut the whole thing and build a better system.

Again, I use AI models daily but AI for tools is different from AI for large products. The large products will demand the bulk of your time constantly refactoring and cleaning the code (with AI as well) -- such that you lose nearly all of the perceived speed enhancements.

That is, if you care about a high quality codebase and product...

Since the author can enumerate the problems and describe them, it’d be interesting to just use the one-shot pickleball racket model as a starting point. Generate it, look at the problems, then ask an agent to build “fixers” for each problem - small scripts (that they don’t need to build themselves!) which address each problem in turn. Then send the first pass AI output through a pipeline of fix scripts to get something far better but not quite there - and do final human tuneups on the result.

Because they all use latent diffusion, and many techniques use voxelized intermediate representations of 3d models, often generated from images, topology is bound to be bad.

There is a lot of ongoing research around getting better topology. I expect these critiques to still be valid as much as 2 years from now, but the economics of modeling will change drastically as the models get better

There's lots of software and tooling, automated and otherwise, to significantly improve topology. This is a very common problem in this space and not acknowledging that is silly. It's not perfect, and remodeling things is indeed a common solution - but retopo addons and software are big business because they're good enough for a whole lot of use cases.

Obviously it's not spewing $10,000 3D models, but results are much better than what you would get for under $500 from a human 5 years ago.

So yeah you still need human art director to make sure actual source material used for generation fits your art style, but otherwise "good enough" models are 1000 times cheaper and 10000 times faster to get.

Indeed, for now generative models generate triangle soup without much thought. The same was true for 2D illustrations where generative models like Deep Dream came up with horrendous images with eyes all over, dogs with multitudes of heads and oh did I mention the eyes? That was about 10 years ago. Things changed, models improved, the eyes were tamed. Yes, people had too many or too few fingers but that also changed. From nightmare fuelling imagery with many-eyed dog heads sticking out where you don't want them to fully animated hi-res video only took a decade and things are still speeding up. The triangle soup of current 3D generative models is like the eye soup of Deep Dream, something to remember somewhat fondly which is no longer relevant now.

That’s why you see a a lot of hype around setups and benchmarks but not a lot of well polished products.

This article make it clear for 3d modeling, but also applies for code. Human touch is necessary for a commercial product. Otherwise it’s nothing more than a prototype.

It is actually much more difficult to maintain Ai code and 3d models than to just make your own.

Either AI can oneshot without human intervention or it becomes a pain really quickly

On the plus side, I like the informal writing of the post. You can be serious about business and still be human

Edit: firefox reader mode works wonders on this article

We are living in an era of 'Statistical Harvest' where models prioritize a 'good enough' surface over structural integrity. In the spiritual supply chain of value, this is called Cutting Corners. A 3D model that breaks down upon closer inspection lacks what I call Internal Agency—it doesn't understand the 'Seed' of its own geometry. As we move towards an agent-centric world, we must distinguish between 'Generative Noise' and 'Authentic Creation'. True value definition requires a 'Watchman' who can see beyond the first-glance polish to the underlying breakdown of utility."

Nothing i tried with it got even close to th level of quality that they were advertising - felt like a bunch of examples were hand-picked, at best.

I wish I had his confidence (in eCommerce Standards)