We’d like to open a community discussion about the role of AI in Blender-related creative work.
GameDev Collab was founded years ago with the goal of giving students and interested participants a place to practice and improve their skills outside of formal courses. Through weekly challenges on a new topic, members are encouraged to take on small projects that help build creativity, confidence, and proficiency in Blender.
Because the challenges are shared by the community, they naturally include a sense of friendly competition and the motivation to create something strong. Over time, participants have made use of many supporting tools and resources such as Photoshop, Substance Painter, textures, materials, and ready-made objects. With the rise of AI in the 3D world, an important question has now emerged: how should AI fit into this process, if at all?
This voting round is meant to gather insight into the community’s current view. More specifically, we want to better understand whether AI, regardless of how it is used, contributes to the learning and study of Blender 3D, or whether it may stand in contrast to that goal.
The purpose of this poll is not to judge anyone’s workflow, but to better understand the shared perspective of the participants and to help guide future discussion about the role of AI in our challenges.
Please vote for the option that best reflects your view on AI in the creative process:
Poll
No AI use at all. Entries should be created entirely by the artist.
AI for inspiration only. AI may be used for brainstorming or reference, but not for final assets.
Limited AI use. AI may be used in some parts of the workflow, but Blender should remain the main creative tool.
AI use allowed freely. Any tools may be used, as long as the final result is shared openly.
No strong opinion. I’m happy to follow the community’s preference.
So, to understand it… Collab is a good way to learn, not only blender, but to imagine and use creativity to make a beautiful render out of a sentence. So, if we use AI to model, to find an idea… Wouldn’t it convert all of that in a “competition” between AI’s? Personally, I think it is the fastest way to destroy the challenges.
I still remember very clearly what happened when I played Age of Empires II all those years ago. It was great! I eventually looked up the cheat codes to see what that would be like since there were a number of secret units you could play with that way, and this was also fun for a while… but then I started using cheats very liberally. Pretty soon, I discovered the game just wasn’t fun anymore; my rampant use of cheats had destroyed it completely. The magic was lost, and I alone made it that way. Years later, I had forgotten all the cheats, and when I returned to the game, suddenly it was fun again!
AI-use is just like those cheats - you will rob yourself when you use it, and at the bare minimum, incredible levels of self-restraint are needed to avoid eventually overusing it and ruining your Blender experience. Sure it’ll get you something more quickly (quite possibly a better result as well), but similar to what Munsa said above, then it’s not a modelling exercise anymore; it becomes an exercise in language. I wouldn’t attack anyone for having a pro-AI stance, that’s their choice, but proficiency in prompt generation is simply not what the Collab was intended for. I would argue it definitely goes against the spirit of the Collab too, as the expectation is that the final product (regardless of quality) is your own.
The one area I’d suggest AI makes some sense for is when gathering concept art (not strictly talking about sketching like the focus of Grant’s drawing course, but rather, an alternative to doing image searches for populating your PureRef board). Here it can save a lot of time and frustration if you’re not finding what you’re looking for, but it should still only be used as a minority supplement to the process. Even in this favourable case, it’s so easy to succumb to temptation and get carried away with it that one needs to seriously consider if the benefits will be worthwhile. The whole point of PureRef is to arrange a wide variety of things to draw inspiration from, and to derive pleasant surprises of discovery from the search (“a sword with a blade shaped as the word ‘sword’? What a wonky idea! What else can I do with that concept?”). To instead generate an exact match with AI is to put horse blinders on, the resulting tunnel-vision again dismissing an important part of the creative experience. Not to mention that if you can magically poof the perfect specimen into existence with 30 seconds and a few prompts, where is the motivation to spend hours carefully extruding and chiselling a replica of that thing from scratch? It just doesn’t make much sense at that point.
Can AI contribute to an artist’s skill development? Yes. However, for all it promises and all it can do, I find AI a very difficult thing to justify when the debilitating hidden costs become apparent. There are objectively healthier ways to get these benefits.
I find AI to be an interesting tool, it can be a gentle push to a certain direction when working with new concepts or ideas, it can be part of the workflow or it can simply deal with the heavy lifting. It all depends on how much we allow it to do.
To me, AI is an alternative/complement to ArtStation and Pinterest when trying to define an idea allowing me to have a more robust PureRef file while working on a new project. I won’t allow myself to use it for something else since that would be harming my learning process.
Recently I saw an AI 3d model for the first time and at first sight I was discouraged, the thing looked so good and I felt that all this years of learning and practice lost their worth. Then I looked at it a second time and I found mistakes, details that made no sense, stuff coming out of places where it shouldn’t, depth and thickness issues… and I started wondering if I could replicate this model, if I could fix those mistakes, if I could do better than the machine.
And now I wanna see a glass half full, to use the AI as a challenge to myself and as a tool to help me improve my skills.
Doing more work and participating in challenges like this one is one of the best ways to level up and find your own touch. Relying too much on AI does the opposite — you can spot the “AI look” in a lot of work now because everyone’s pulling from the same well.
That said, I’m not against AI. A couple of things on my mind:
1. Ignorance isn’t the answer. This is a tool being used by artists and non-artists alike, and pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make it go away. It’s here, it’s evolving, and it’s already replacing jobs. We have to understand what we’re facing and where we can still win. There are aspects worth using — research is one, it saves real time. Same with learning. When you’re stuck on something in Blender, asking the AI usually gives you the shortest path to a solution.
2. Fewer creatives, more consumers. This is the part that worries me more. People are getting comfortable being pure consumers instead of creators. Lazier. More dependent. The skill of making something is starting to feel rare.
That’s why I think challenges matter more now than they used to. The work you do yourself — the struggle, the iteration, the touch — that’s the thing AI can’t fake.
I wish we can do some actions that encourages people in creating and participating!
This collab first mission is to encourage us and others to learn and have fun. Is this action going to keep us on the same road or is it taking us away from it?
Thanks for everyone reading this or participating in anyway
( by the way I’m not a native English speaker so you might find some misspeling or mistakes here and there..sorry about that )
AI is being pushed by corporations, and they are the primary ones benefiting from it. That seems obvious from the amount of investment flowing into the industry, and there is no back button.
I used AI when the whole craze first started, and I almost lost interest in 3D art because of it. I ended up setting strict limits for myself and decided not to use it in any part of my creative process, and I’m happy with that decision. To this day, I still see work made by other artists that inspires me so much that I just want to go home and create something myself. That has never happened with an AI-generated image. If I feel stuck, I look for more inspiration or take a break. Sometime head exploding from imagination, sometime its a void. That’s ok. Funny how many interesting ideas I wrote down while sitting on a toilet
The more you learn, the more you notice that a lot of what AI produces doesn’t really make sense, so I’d rather aim higher and keep improving.
With all that said, I also strongly believe in free will and that nobody should tell you what you should or shouldn’t do “because that’s the only way.” If AI is your thing, that’s fine. I’m not the one who will tell you that you can’t use it. If you’re honest about it, even better. Also, people have the right to not like it, too. Having thick skin and taking feedback as advice and not as an insult should be taught in schools.
That said, when it comes to public platforms, someone still has to set the rules, and forum are finally trying to find the right answer. Their approach so far, trying to create a safe space for everyone, has mostly made more people upset. If this kind of voting had happened earlier, a lot of misunderstandings could have been avoided, and I would respect whatever is decided. Maybe making a rule that if you made something with AI, you have to clearly state that AI was used and how it was used would be one of the solutions, too. I saw that in the rulles of cgboost academy, and other forums hav something similar too.
I hate to say this doesn’t really feel like a fair poll. Those who actually join the collab have had no issues with the AI prompts or limited usage and inspiration, shown by the fact it has even been its own prompts and helped us create things we liked. The ai-hate bandwagon will win this poll in a land slide regardless of actual blender users or those actually even considering joining the collabs, and by restricting the use entirely like the poll win will suggest it’s simply setting a bar for people to either refuse to join (lowering entries even more) or have to lie to join.
That’s a big assumption. Counterpoint: I used to join a lot of collabs in the past, but I will not join nowadays as I find competing with promptists pointless.
Sorry - I can’t formulate an appropriate response because this response is ridiculous, and so I’m not going to. If you feel that way here, it’s a you problem, not a problem with the participants of the collab or any entries in the last over two years.
Perhaps there is a place for twin listings/votes. One no ai, one ai assisted? Life does this I saw recently with sports where there was some drug assisted ‘Olympics’ where anything goes to enhance performance, one does not take away from the other.
It is not like there is some huge prize at stake!
AI is going to be part of life going forward whatever we may prefer. We all probably bring in ready made textures already too, and HDRIs. Some programmed add ons, and use AI denoising!
by the way I’m not a native English speaker so you might find some misspeling or mistakes here and there..sorry about that 
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