AI Art Seething General

I wanted the painterly look, but i started with digital first. I strived for years, but the only thing that let me achieve it was learning to actually paint. This was one of my bad habits. Another bad habit is digital doesn’t build line confidence, or the ability to visualize what your mark will be before you make it since undo is an always an option.

Color theory practice is great for digital though. Mixing is a breeze if you know what colors work.

Probably should get back on topic and stop artfagging it up so i digress.
Maybe you suck as an artist to explain why you can't do a painterly look lol. I can do it fine digital and traditional. That's not a bad habit, that's you not learning how to do it.

Digital can build line confidence if you work with a monitor tablet. I didn't, yet somehow I'm still able to draw lines on paper lmao. My skills on that were weak but the skills are transferable and I'm able to do lines. It's not a bad habit. It's a skill.
 
Dude I support the cause, but this guy HAS to at least have Asperger's:
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Like every 6 hours just posting "Luddites, Luddites, Luddites"...
 

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Yeah Midjourney v5 looks pretty good if these are representative of it, and there's freaking out and sneeding in the comments, as to be expected on Arse.

this is all happening so fast
The hands thing is scary. It feels like v6 will be indistinguishable from reality and likely to be released this year.
It's moving too fast, I think when photo input from GPT4 becomes available you're going to see wide-spread nefarious use by users. The tech is changing every week, but someone mentioned that's been a problem for LLMs taking user text input.
A friend in the graph arts field is kinda freaking out about this. Not about what we have now but what is going to show up in 5 years. To the point that he's looking at going back into truck driving......but then again in 20 years those trucks will drive themselves. So who knows what job is safe. Probably nothing. There will be jobs where AI enhances a person's skills and doesn't outright replace them but plenty more that can replace them.
Steph Sterling pointed out that AI is coming for porn among many things and the results, and attitudes behind, it, are scummy as fuck. AI has been used for nefarious purposes for a while now. I'm really hoping that governments can pass regulations that stop the avalanche of horrid shit coming our way.
If it decreases exploitation in real time and downstream then who cares what the 4chan mob does with it or thinks about it.

edit: re the porn aspect.
This is amazing. And disheartening.
Oh there is. The quality is a bit mixed but given the way this tech is evolving, we're probably less than a year from AI porn that's indistinguishable from the real thing.

On the less savory side, there's already several AI deepfake porn sites out there that'll take the clothes off of any picture of a woman you give it. I tried one using pictures of my girlfriend (with her permission) and the output was freakily close to the IRL version, and for only about 30¢ per image too.
The amount of bs we are going to have to talk people out of believing is going to go through the roof. We need laws against using ai imagery to lie about someone doing something fast.
The way that AI can be used to generate revenge porn/deepfake porn of real people, something that's become a real problem, points to exploitation increasing rather than decreasing. The "4chan mob" is gonna use deepfake porn against real people they decide to attack. Hell, they prolly already have.
Someone making porn with your likeness or the likeness of someone you know, that's gonna still affect you mentally, even if you know it's not real. It's still fucked up and immoral and should be illegal. "It's not real" shouldn't be a defense of letting someone take your likeness without your consent and use it in porn.
As zigzag_glasses pointed out just a bit farther up, exploitation will still be a thing. And Sterling's video pointed out that there's a depressing number of creepy people who have contempt for sex workers that like their jobs and aren't being exploited.
This will mostly be used to make “photographs” of Dr. Fauci eating babies, so they can be circulated on FB as definitive proof.
Tossing my Canon SLR into the trash tonight. Camera and photographer just died.
I am amazed, and in a good way. As enlightened as Ars often is, I always assumed Steph was a bit much for most, even here. Yeah, sure, the world is burning down all around us, but fuck it -- here in our little pocket there is progress. However slight, silly, and most likely transient, it's what keeps me going.
Waiting for cameras to have secure computing chips to watermark that the image was generated from good old light landing on sensors.

Along with using blockchain somewhere there in the marketing.

No wonder there is such a thirst for authenticity. Almost a cry for help.
I said this in another similar article, but...

I'm continuing to think this whole "Internet" thing was a bad idea...

 
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You know, I feel like a lot of the seething is kind of just people going along with the crowd, and being dishonest.

I say this because Clip Studio Paint just added this, a tool that automatically shades flats for you:


And that is somehow fine from what I see on Twitter.

I just don't get it. How is that okay and using AI as a base not?
 
I just don't get it. How is that okay and using AI as a base not?
If it's not using neural AI to generate those shadows, I reckon it's not similar to AI at all. The shadows generated are not accurate to a light source for more complicated lineart. Even in the video, it misses critical points of shadow generation such as folds of cloth or lines in hair. I guess it might be helpful if you have 0 knowledge of shading, but it's useless for any artist who's gotten past that point. It looks like a less-poor form of pillowshading.
 
The smart 2D artists will figure out a way to feed AI art into their pipeline and elevate their work with it. Much like science, all art is done on the shoulders of giants. AI simply automates the task of drawing inspiration from other artists and instead allows you to draw inspiration from every artist you can feed into the model all at once. But it's far from perfect and there's plenty of room left for human hands to come in and refine the output into a better end product.
I've mentioned this in the main Stable Diffusion friend, but that's exactly what my friend is doing, and he loves it. He works in traditional media (charcoal and ink mostly), and he uses AI to generate images in styles that he wants to draw. The AI gets it most of the way, then he projects it onto his sketchpad and draws it out, fixing errors along the way like extra fingers or limbs or what have you. Because I know what to look for, I can tell which of his pictures have an AI base, but I think most people couldn't because it's pretty subtle.

It helps that he's never been a digital artist, only ever doing traditional work, so he's not seething over AI taking away from his efforts. But he's been having a blast using it to come up with ideas. If more people had that mindset ("how can I use this to my advantage?" as opposed to "how can I stop this from replacing me?"), this thread wouldn't even exist.
I've posted this here but it's relevant to this thread too.

The AI arms race begins!

Glaze, a nonprofit masking program for art uploaded online, has been released: http://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu

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Okay, so they do a little bit of pixel fuckery and that messes with AI that specifically tries to use that artist's style. What would happen if you just re-saved the image or did a slight edit of your own, would that remove their attempted AI shielding? I feel like it wouldn't be that easy or else they wouldn't have bothered to release something that could be broken in only a second, but I'd laugh if it were.

Also lol that the geniuses broke the GPL and stole code while trying to stop AI "theft." Irony.
 
The shortcuts AI will allow for will have the unintended consequence (as any new tool had before it, historically) of rendering some skills less important, and that culture thereby losing some of the refinement it had of those skills. (Specific example: an AI capable of producing a detailed landscape of the kind the artist wants by him inputting a simple drawing of a landscape like it will necessarily degrade that culture's artists' ability to paint landscapes, since such a skill will no longer be as important and somewhat neglected.)

The same has happened many times before, such as how the average digital artist today will not know how to properly handle physical color materials, or how the average composer today will not be able to compose using counterpoint as well as a renaissance composer would after music shifted in focus from polyphony to homophony.

Keep in mind that we are talking about averages and that there will always be outliers who feel driven enough to refine their skills but that, unfortunately, some level of skill turning from common to outlier still means an overall degradation of general culture.

Even if we weren't scared of losing some of the refinement of our skills, there are other, more tangible consequences. The increasing ease of creating art will teach people to expect this same ease in all areas of the artform. This is why if you met an artist who knew how to create and handle paints he mixed himself from pigments, you could be reasonably certain this person had spent the same kind of effort learning perspective, lighting and anatomy. You cannot have that same expectation when meeting someone who owns a drawing tablet. The lower barrier to entry will not only mean encountering more bad artists in your search for good ones, but it will soften and weaken the good artists as well, since the medium will not push them to excel as much as it did in the past.

In other words, AI art is neither fully good, nor fully bad. We can look forward to some amazing things we have never seen before, but also degradation in some areas where we were used to something better before. The people who think AI's contribution to art will be purely positive are as deluded as the people who claim it will be purely negative. Few things are ever that simple.
 
I haven't see this video posted: legendary Disney animator Aaron Blaise gives his thoughts on Corridor Crew AI animation.
I just find so funny how internet artists on twitter constantly have a meltdown every time that AI is mentioned and then you have Aaron, a guy with much more experience and involved in many masterpieces of the world of animation, have a calm and reasonable demeanor without ignoring the issues that have been raised in regards to the ethics of it.

Goes to show the difference between a professional and a screaming child that just so happens to work within the industry.
This sums up my experience to a tee. Talking to both professional artists and prospective artists leaving uni I've noticed they're all pretty stoked.

Every time it gets brought up I expect some soyboy impotent rage about ai destroying the industry, but they're all incredibly excited. The most ai skeptical person I know there, thinks ai is great he's just a little concerned over if it'll be used as a tool or as to generate filler artwork.

It's an exciting time for them.
 
It's an exciting time for them.
Personally, as merely a hobby artist I'm thrilled.
Even using a lower quality program like craiyon already helps majorly with quickly figuring out a good colour scheme, composition, other elements, and overall inspiration.
It makes a good base, it's like a 'finish the drawing' game, and it's fun.

And we've already seen professional artists use higher quality ai art for a base too, so that they can skip a few tedious steps, which saves a lot of time and money (and outsourcing).
Personally, I don't use the more advanced programs becaus that makes it less fun and I'm cheap, but for actual drawslaves it will make them have to slave less.

The people I see seethe the most, are the people who do shitty Twitter comissions, or those who make soulless low quality shit that would probably have been outsourced to Korea within a few years anyways.
Maybe with ai we can finally have pretty things again rather than Steven Universe blobs chugged out by diversity hires.
 
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