pooping out of my mega burnout depression crash to remind artists that Procedural Generation (procgen) is not genAI.

April 11, 2026 - 19:37 UTC

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The pendulum’s swinging the other way I see 😣
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the power to make realistic textures outta noises made with math is nutty
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whenever I open up the nodes of one of these in a source file and see what they did I am struck with awe and terror at the tangled nightmare on my monitor
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Pooping 🙂‍↕️
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autocorrect is spiritually genAI
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Procedural generation is the literal opposite of genAI.

Procedural generation is working from the ground up with specific intent to make certain assets faster without reinventing the wheel every time.
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yes! thank you! perfect description
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Exactly. You still have control over every single pixel with procedural gen. You really can't compare the two apart from the fact that they both have node like workflows.
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Making something through procgen requires a *deep* understanding of how that thing is created in order to get a good result.

AI relies on the user having no idea how the thing is created and not being able to judge the output.
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important because procgen can legitimately be art while genai inherently cannot because genai has no human intent in its internals and procgen is pretty much only human intent in its internals
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Kind of crazy people are managing to conflate the term, I've been hearing it for well over a decade now
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I understand the intent from these people but taking a sledgehammer to a mold infection just makes a mess
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i saw someone on facebook calling 'fantasy name generator' genai the other day and this is why we're losing
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I assume they didn't back down when it was explained to them. so many people have the heart of a gamer (derogatory)
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it just sucks how much mental anguish genAI caused on people, to the point some started being worried about all sorts of automation technology we've had for years...
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I have a similar spiel about fractal art lmfao
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fractals are pure math, we've had them even longer
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This. Had to explain this way to many times
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I really feel like I shouldn't have to say this, but I've seen peers who should know better conflate the two. we've had procgen for many decades.
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would you call a Minecraft world genAI? a random name generator that's been on the web for 20 years? Dwarf Fortress?
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of course the genAI grifters *love* muddying the waters between procgen, ML and "AI" because it is incredibly useful for them to continue getting filthy rich off of theft and bullshit
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Right? Beyond my entire lifetime. And I'm old! Even vfx juniors half my age should know better.
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