A good summary of the AI art drama
(mobile.twitter.com)
Comments (18)
sorted by:
It's important to understand the hate against AI Art is purely against programs that are opensource and community driven. There are plenty of billion dollar companies that have their own forms of AI (hell, many animation programs come with built-in interpolators) and they're already using them.
The hate against programs like DALLE and Stable Diffusion is because more people are able to create art themselves which hurt their bottom line. When people don't have to spend hundreds of dollars and wait weeks at a time for an artist to do their fucking job, of course these autis-... artists are going to get upset.
Joel Haver said it best. Complaining about AI art programs is like complaining about Photoshop or whining about digital tablets. Both of those likely put artists out of business because the market could be served by fewer artists making works at a faster rate. But it also allowed people who might have been unable to create art a way to do so.
You know, I was just thinking recently that when I was a kid comic books had a penciler, an inker, and a colorist. How many of those jobs still exist now that everything is drawn on computer programs?
The amount of jobs shrank for sure, but a lot of that is due to corporate drivel/woke.
I follow a lot of indie comic creators, most (at least the ones that turn out good product) are still specialized. Pencils/inks seem to be the most combined. Inkers and letterers probably lost the most jobs. Pencils/layouts/inks get combined into one artist more and more these days.
Colors often get sent to Philippines or South America for 'flats / flatting' cheap rates separating / selecting all of the components and layers, and laying down flat colors. Then those flats are sent back to a top tier colorist who adds in all of the gradients, detailed edgework, effects.
Letterers still have their place, but because of digital/scans, one letterer is doing a lot more projects than a traditional letterer would have in the non-digital age.
Books that use a standard font, get called out as cheap. Buyers still like hand letters or custom fonts from a pro letterer the most. Letterers also often do the onomatopoeia / sound effects as words, but a lot of pros build those into their actual layouts and pencils/inks.
A lot of the old pros / big names still do traditional paper pages. Most can do digital, but the reason they keep doing traditional, is you can sell them for a good chunk of money after the book is printed. So they get the page rate from whomever, (or self-published) and then sell the physical page (black and white, colors are almost always digital now) double-dipping.
Interesting- I would have guessed it was all one dude with a computer. Seems pretty complicated.
The funny thing is that when I wanted a specific piece of art created to commemorate my friend's wedding, I went directly to an excellent artist I know to commission a piece. I wouldn't for a minute consider giving that task to an AI, even one that's far more mature than the ones that exist now. There is always going to be a market for the work of skilled craftsmen.
That's a good point.
People are just mad they could be losing a job that pays them money, that's all.
If AI Art can replace non-AI art for whatever purpose it is being designed for, GOOD. The results of the product will speak for itself. The end. Every other argument is just fluff meant to disguise the true-motive of a person's argument, which generally is just whatever is in that person's self-interest.
Mostly this. Technology has been taking over jobs forever, it's just now it's taking over the jobs of a group of highly narcissistic people who have the ability to shout at the whole world and a journalistic class who (due to shared politics) are willing to amplify their shouts. Up until now, a lot of the impact has been on the more manual/physical labor classes, and now it is getting into the "creative" people. And the creatives are suddenly finding out they're just as replaceable and no more special than the silly laborers and their mental world is collapsing.
Ironically, it's actually the intellectual/creative types that will be the easiest to replace. Manual labor outside of assembly lines will be one of the last things truly replaced.
I'm gonna be real with you, it kind of sucks knowing that in a few years the AI will be writing better code than me. Having your entire career that's been 20 years in the making just obsoleted overnight...kind of a kick in the balls.
I'm on team Butlerian Jihad.
#LearnToFoldSpace
I don't do nearly enough drugs to do that.
I'd argue that journalists know they are next. AI already produces results that are at least on par with most "journalists"
Can you tell the difference between these dozen stories? Some are written by an AI, and some are written by H1B Visa Indians and Chinese. If you can't tell the difference, you're fired! Learn to code, pay $8, etc.
Almost every artist attacking AI art that I have encountered (and I am artist myself), is being disingenuous.
Their only, I repeat, ONLY gripe against AI art is that it's going to put a bunch of them out of business as soon as their clients decide an AI can give them something close enough to what they want.
But they won't bring this up - they'll offer every other argument they can dream up, pretending they give a damn about their style being imitated, as if artists haven't been imitating each other's styles since time immemorial.
That's literally all it is. It's a whine about losing business because supply is about to outstrip demand for any artist an AI can passably imitate. I understand their pain intimately - it is tough to be an artist. Your work takes every bit as much time, effort, skill and knowledge as almost any other job, yet people will expect you to work for less than a burger flipper.
...And that's why I have been training multiple models on my own art style, on my own subjects and characters. It's why I have produced images and 3d assets specifically designed to be AI input to help it understand and replicate my own work. I am changing my workflow - no longer do I spend 20 hours on an image. Now I spend one to two hours generating images, photobash/average all the good ones on top of eachother, and spend another 4-8 hours painting over that by hand to clean up the errors.
It takes me less than half the time, and my image quality has jumped significantly, because frankly, the AI can (usually) shade better than I can. It can concept better than I can, too - I had my patrons voting on which sketches they wanted me to complete, and their top choices (unknown to them) were the ones where I had traced an AI generated image.
I think artists who familiarize themselves with AI and incorporate it it into their work appropriately will have an advantage. Those who don't are going to get less/worse work done, and get filtered out of the market in the coming years.
I look forward to the day I can have realistic, honest conversations about AI with artists who are more than just 'prompt engineers' without running the risk of someone breaking into autistic screeching.
Fascinating stuff. That day is coming soon I think - this conversation is barely a few months old and look how far we got already.
I used to dabble in art in a previous lifetime, and I would have killed to have something as good as the current AI models that could help me draw things in my style for me to practice on.
Whether it was drawing a dozen rough poses for me to choose as a base, doing all the flat fill colours so I could skip straight to shading shading, or even just making me little exercises to practice drawing hands.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. It's like turning your nose up at using software on a computer because being able to Undo/Redo, or having layers and alpha transparency at the click of a button isn't "in the true spirit of art".
I'm surprised that no one has used the "able-ism" card against them. AI art allows people who previously were disadvantaged physically to now join the community and create art. Why do they hate these "different-bodied people" so much? :^)
On a more serious note, the sheer iteration speed of AI models allows you to explore potentially interesting ideas that would have taken you months before. Case in point: the recent rise of "<franchise> in the style of a 80's horror movie" picture dumps/videos. It would have taken me months if not years to be able to draw anything in that style, only to discover that it wasn't what I actually wanted. Now the computer can spit out examples for my consideration faster than I can review them.
Edit: I actually popped back in at some of the old communities I used to frequent to see what the mood was like, and it was pretty much exactly as you'd expect. The only permitted stance you were allowed to have on AI art was zealous disgust. I have a feeling that if I were to broach the hypothetical scenario of training an AI on my own style to help with my work, I'd have been accused of being a cheater who was trying to avoid "putting in the work", so to say.
innovation = productivity increases = "lost jobs" = luddites coping
the luddites always lose.