Why in the world would you want that to happen?

This is just going to replace the skillfully created skins with mass-produced fast food-like material that's mediocre at best. Also, when you generate skins so quickly, the website becomes oversaturated, and none of the skins you make will be memorable enough to last more than a week.

If you want to mess around and have fun, fine. But keep in mind that AI-generated skins require no effort or skill to produce, so you can't claim them as your own.

Not necessarily, AeroPurple. Don't forget, they'll be moderated and rated by the members, too.

Perhaps to get more people into skinning? To bring more folks to WC who'll buy subscriptions and be exposed to the work of Master skinners and others and improve their prompting as well as other SD software? Who knows what might grow from it...perhaps AI Winstep skinning, too?

Skinning has been around for over 30 years.  A few people who were there at the beginning of skinning are still here today.  For them it's quite straight-forward to create another new skin design.

For others just now wanting to get into skinning have a steep learning curve in front of them.  More often than not they simply give up and make do with whatever they can find out there already.

Any 'tool' that can ease some of the pain of skinning's complexity is desirable...

 

 

 

Hear, hear!   

Okay, fair. Honestly, I think AI can be used as a good stepping stone when you don't know when to start or are lost. I just used it today to look up a simple question regarding Android notifications, and it helped a lot.

However, I believe that AI generated content should not be used as a final result of your work. Even though AI has advanced significantly over the past three years, it's still quite inconsistent at what it does. Messy lines, typos, over-generalization, all that jazz. When it's used as a tool, it works really well - improving photo quality, removing backgrounds, etc - all manual and monotone tasks - which is what it should primarily be used for.

And, of course, I'm not your mom - I can't stop any one of you from uploading anything, but I just want you to keep all of the ramifications of AI generation in mind.

An example of how it used to be.

August, 2004, so 21 years ago.

The 'bar' at the top is a rolled up Windowblind, Treetog's "Antares".

The rest was done working directly from Treetog's skin - manually reworked to become a LiteSTEP theme [with animations] as well as a WinAMP 2.x skin.

The learning curve for this was pretty extreme and almost entirely per-pixel graphic manipulation.

I think I'd have a second learning curve if I ever wanted to do it again.

The entire works on my part were in PSP6 [Renato probably did the WB in PS].

Back in the day we had "Community Skins" where someone would post a set of graphics and people would volunteer to create various 'skinnables' using them so they became an integrated set.

These days most of those 'skinnables' are at best 'retired'.  Microsoft has since made it hard enough just to do 'some' GUI modding at all, so getting a current functioning Windowblinds skin is achievement enough...

In my opinion, AI skins would be a positive. Isn't the whole idea of skins to allow a user to customize their screen to create an emotional attachment to their environment. If you can create using AI, and keep prompting until you get something you enjoy, that's a good thing.

I personally don't like a bunch of stuff on my screen, because I like to display art. My screen is a 40" 4K monitor and I really like displaying the art from WinCustomize. I had gone back through all the Wallpapers on WinCustomize from the beginning, and in my opinion, some of the newer AI generated wallpapers are very good. The few who actually post on WC have gotten really good at it.

When (you notice I didn't say IF) AI skins become a thing, it will provide more options for the user to customize. Isn't that a good thing?   

AI still hasn't got a clue about perspective.  To someone who can generate it correctly it's often painfully obvious ...

It's really not hard to get perspective correct in Ps and other apps. Ps even has perspective warp...which is really easy to use:

You are correct about that. Not enough time is spent on post work, and human hands are still wrong most of the time. However, they have gotten better over the past months. 

It's usually easy to correct the errors using Ps. I'd think correcting in PSP would be equally simple.

Autodesk has been generating correct perspective for decades.  I bet your modern Architect wouldn't have a clue how to do it by hand.

Autodesk's Revit is the professional tool for true Architectural CAD drawing.

You input the building's coordinates effectively and presto the mathematics is converted to true perspective from any viewpoint you want.

Cut and paste sampling of a view in a general perspective like a street scene for a car will always sort of 'look right' but if you mathematically analyze it you'll find errors.

Even a single point perspective can be screwed.  [one I did years ago was set with 13 generated VPs and a few more I 'fudged'].

This is the sort of thing that can happen.... typically a single point is a single point... not a vague "somewhere about here" ...

Yes! And that's precisely why AI is the worst thing to use here - it literally can't feel emotions, and cannot create anything meaningful without copying already existing material.



So, let me get this straight - instead of creating something by hand, using dozens of different skills along the way and getting the result you enjoy, you instead want to use the digital equivalent of a slot machine? Why?



Quality>quantity. I'd rather have a few beautifully crafted skins than a lot of mediocre ones.

To close it off, I'll say this:

I'd much rather have AI remove mild inconveniences or process large quantities of data in seconds way before letting it do creative tasks for me. Being creative is what makes us human. A world where you can create art by pressing a button is a world that's only inhabited by soulless husks, not human beings.

Thanks for listening. I'm out.

Art isn't ever exactly 100 percent passion and emotion either though. If it were then we would just have random scribbles. Even artists have to follow rules and logic to create things that already exist in the world.

Sure, AI is more of a science then it is traditional art, but still there is something to be appreciated with what can be accomplished using various different LLM's

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are hand crafted skins out there that that just aren't my cup of tea. Luckily, not everyone is required to have the same tastes. Believe it or not, AI art is really popular right now. You might not like it but a lot of people disagree.

Aside for the above point. There really isn't a lot of new skinners coming into the fold and a lot of good ones are now retired. There already is a very large collection of hand crafted skins that built up for many years now. AI really could help wincustomize enter a new era and get people excited about customizing again