maciek janicki

i like to make things

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@UIbyAdam 🤯

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@POPin4k I was expecting Spielberg to invest some more time and money into cgi. Alien looks horrendous

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@c_valenzuelab This also maps onto how every new medium absorbs the old ones as its material.
Books, photography, and graphic design got absorbed by film. Film got absorbed by the internet. Now the internet is getting absorbed by AI.

[Cristóbal Valenzuela @c_valenzuelab]

The more I meet people who've gone deep into generating AI media, the more I realize we're all reaching the same conclusion: this is a new medium. Not an evolution of something else. Something entirely new, the way photography and film were new.

To understand any medium, you need to look beyond its surface to its core. Some technologies merely augment existing mediums. Collapsible paint tubes changed painting but didn't invent a new medium. Others create completely new forms of expression. Optical lenses, light-sensitive chemicals, and mechanical shutters didn't improve painting. They weren't better brushes or richer pigments. They birthed photography. A medium that captures light itself rather than representing it through human interpretation.

Every new medium brings its own affordances, primitives, and possibilities. Its own audience. Its own generation of creators. When moving pictures first appeared, people saw them as recorded theater. They pointed cameras at stages and filmed plays. It took years of experimentation to discover what the medium actually enabled. Eisenstein discovered montage. That juxtaposing unrelated shots could create new meaning. Porter discovered continuity. That audiences could follow action across cuts. Someone finally moved the camera and changed everything.

Surface similarities deceive us. A painting and a photograph both arrange color and composition across a plane. But mastering paint means understanding pigments, brushes, mixing, color theory. Mastering photography means understanding lenses, shutter speed, aperture, light itself. Yes, composition knowledge transfers. Most knowledge doesn't.

When photography emerged, we made a critical error: we let painters judge it. Because on the surface it looked similar. They dissected this new form through the lens of their own medium, anchoring on what they knew. Predictably, they concluded photography would never match oil's texture, never capture color the way mixed pigments could. They were right and also completely missed the point. Photography wasn't trying to be painting. They were thinking by analogy, judging the new by the standards of the old.

I see this same mistake happening with AI media. Some filmmakers and photographers declare it will never achieve what their mediums achieve. They're right. That's not what this medium is about.

Judging AI purely through the lens of film is like painters judging photography purely through the lens of painting. The surface might look similar. Moving images, composed frames. The core is fundamentally different.

AI has its own affordances. Creation is asynchronous. At scale. It benefits from quantity. You navigate through latent space, sampling rather than capturing. You provide references that drive generation. You work in real time, watching possibilities emerge. Some knowledge from painting, film, and games transfers here. Most doesn't.

Mediums always influence each other. Photography didn't kill painting. It freed painting from documentation, letting it explore abstraction, impressionism, and the surreal. Each new medium changes what the others can become.

AI is the birth of a new medium of perception and expression. We're in the early days, still discovering AI's equivalent of montage, of the moving camera, of all those breakthrough moments that reveal what a medium actually is. The filmmakers judging it by film standards will miss what's actually happening. The painters missed photography. The theater critics missed cinema.

The only way we'll uncover what this medium can do is to stop judging it by what came before. Stop looking at the surface. Start experimenting with the core. We're not watching films evolve. We're watching something being born. This is a new medium

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

We’re all just vessels for data extraction after all…

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@GustawMackay Looks super cool! Are you polish?

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@TOEwithCurt Everything

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@andrewkslo @janleike 100%!

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@janleike That’s a definition of free labor and no one should participate unless you at least open source it.

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@andrzejdragan Można do tego dojść o wiele prościej poprzez stary dobry Idealizm–polecam Bernardo Kastrupa!

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@BillyKryzak @rosscoulthart @GarryPNolan I have a strong feeling these rocks come from Quixel Megascans and this picture was rendered with Octane render. I’d start looking into their Icelandic assets first but I might be wrong about the specific pack.

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@Phoenlxi @regretsbuthope @528vibes It looks like a standard normal or bump map. Boolean would be a total overkill as displacement map would do the job.
I’d put my eggs in the Octane render basket :)

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@Phoenlxi @528vibes Looks like megascans Quixel asset unfortunately. I love the carvings detail, but this could have been done waaay better IMO. Great larp nevertheless.

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@rosscoulthart @YouTube I didn’t expected anything but I am still disappointed. Absolute joke.

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@Coulthart_Zabel No need to be sorry, no one cares anymore.
Ross single-handedly killed the disclosure momentum tonight.
Disappointed to say the least.

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@Plinz Very soon we’ll have non deterministic fully immersive “movies” and we’ll be able to drop in and interact with the world and story however we like. Historically every new type of art uses legacy art forms as its medium. Imagine streaming that straight to theatre of your mind!

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@timventura have you ever expanded on your thought regarding internet being a nervous system of the larger collective? That blew my mind!!

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

So what exactly is “the information”?

https://t.co/afSBLRBJjZ

[Riku Murai @rmurai0610]

Introducing MASt3R-SLAM, the first real-time monocular dense SLAM with MASt3R as a foundation.

Easy to use like DUSt3R/MASt3R, from an uncalibrated RGB video it recovers accurate, globally consistent poses & a dense map.

With @eric_dexheimer*, @AjdDavison (*Equal Contribution)

[maciek janicki @mrjanicki]

@topazlabs Can’t wait to try it!