A good summary of the AI art drama
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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.
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.