My choice for this week! In all seriousness I’d love to be some lazy fail girl with big boobs. Instead I’m a lazy fail girl with small boobs. Can’t have everything!
Last night while googling A Kat’s (GOD AWFUL!!!) Blessing as I do at times because I’m totally vain and want to see if anyone ever talks about it, I have discovered that someone went and scraped the comic from NamiComi and made an AI model of Kat.
First off fuck generative AI art. Get that out of the way.
At the same time it gives me this mixed feelings of “oh, someone likes Kat enough to get a whole bunch of AI art done of her” along with “god dammit.” As someone who LOVES getting fanart of any of my characters, it sucks to see Kat get dragged into the generative AI art realm. I’d much prefer to see someone who had never picked up a pencil in their life and draw the worst drawing of the world of Kat instead of a bunch of AI art of her. Doing that to me show’s willingness to put in the effort to show how much you care about her. Your love shines through no matter the quality of the finished picture.
Another thing was the AI has an incredibly difficult time getting the color patterns on her fur correctly. Every single image got it wrong. I guess at the moment it’s too much for AI to get it right despite it being a rather basic fur pattern. Honestly if you had the skills you could easily toss it into photoshop and fix it, but I imagine if you already have the skillset to do that much you can probably draw already so why bother relying on AI to begin with?
Anywho shit sucks, but also I’m flattered, but also shit sucks. I won’t link directly to it but it’s very easily searchable on Google if you’re that curious.
I understand people’s issues with AI art, I really do… But I find myself unable to get worked up about AI art in and of itself. My issues all** stem from users – I hate AI slop accounts who just post walls of AI and act like they’re artists, I REALLY hate “AI adoptables,” and DO NOT GET ME STARTED on businesses that use AI instead of hiring artists.
I don’t make enough money to commission artwork I would like to see. I only have a PC powerful enough to do AI art because I have legit work needs for a decent PC, and making something halfway beefy increases the odds this system will be viable for a long time to come. So yeah, I mess with AI art generation for fun from time to time… And you’ll never see me post a single piece of it online. I mean, I have a price tag where I’d go and post a bunch of it, but the price to make me willing to be THAT hypocritical is quite high!
The only time anyone but me and a handful of friends will ever see something I generate with AI will be if I finally start making enough money to be able to commission artwork. Then I will use AI for the ONE AND ONLY THING I think people should be broadly accepting of: Using it to create a basic character design concept for the artist to refine into the character I want created.
At the end of the day, when artwork goes online, it is there for people to find and see. And people will use any good art as a reference for SOMETHING. Using AI in this way is just a glorified form of that.
In short I treat AI much the same way as I treat tracing art: If you’re doing to do it, don’t pretend you did it on your own, and don’t do it to make money.
**There are obviously some shady elements in the art scraping side of things that bug me as well, but I opted to focus on the side most people see because I find a LOT of people tend to overlook one or more of the things I brought up, or they just never took the time to think about it THAT WAY.
I won’t be adding anything to this, as this comment is less “let’s have a debate” and more “food for thought.” I’m not trying to force people to change attitudes, I just want to make sure people think about things more.
I couldn’t afford to hire someone to draw Bodysuit 23 for me so I did it myself. I know not everyone WANTS to draw but you’re better off starting now and drawing what you want to see yourself. There’s nothing stopping you. Hell, being paralyzed from the neck down didn’t stop the concept artist for Rumble Roses from drawing and his stuff is excellent and he drew using his mouth.
Putting aside the ethical and environmental harm, you’re cheating yourself out of learning a really cool and fun skill by relying on AI to get near instant gratification.
The only reason I haven’t bothered to try is because I actually have no interest in drawing for such a purpose myself. If I did I’d have seriously given it a go decades ago despite my inability to even draw a straight line. 😛
When my debts are all cleared up(old debts from the lazy period of my life are what’s holding me back more than my income, which is solid though not ideal) my main hobby is going to be collecting classic arcade cabinets. Commissioning art is still only going to be an occasional thing, but it will probably mostly replace my messing around with AI(I’ll probably still poke at it now and then just out of curiosity as to how its progressed).
Speaking as an artist and someone from a community of artists, most artists probably aren’t going to appreciate being handed slop from the theft machine that’s threatening their jobs even as reference. Like at the end of the day a job’s a job but it’s just rude isn’t it?
My recommendation would be instead of writing a prompt, just take those rough ideas and approach the artist you want to commission with them and say “I’m not sure exactly how I want this to look, can we workshop it?”. You’re paying for someone’s skills in taking a character idea and making a visual representation out of it, you might as well let them use those skills rather than treating them like a photocopier. It’s much more respectful and probably going to get you better results in the long run too.
So.. I really did not want to debate things on this, but you did bring up something that I want to mention a couple of things about, so I guess I’ll throw up this food for thought as well…
Please forgive my bluntness on this first one, but I do think this is something that needs to be said quite firmly.
If you’re going to dismiss someone using AI generation to present a base concept, because they do NOT wish to publish anything generated by it, you had better be equally dismissive of using ANY existing image as reference for such. Anything else is hypocritical.
At the end of the day, the AI art systems just reference what’s available to them. Its the people using them that do, or avoid, the morally questionable potential of the system. Using AI, in and of itself, is not the horrible things people want to make it out to be.
Now, onto something I can be a little looser about – your alternative, to go to an artist to workshop things from the get go, is certainly a reasonable response on its face, but it has a couple issues you may not have considered…
For one, there are many people in the world who have the communication skills of a quadriplegic brick. Communicating their idea to an artist is going to be a headache, and I know of no artist who would respond well to being given a super simple AI prompt to work off of.
Secondly, there is an artist’s patience. Workshopping a concept from zero to completion is beyond what many artists who work off commission are willing to commit to – more and more and more artists are putting limits on the number of revisions to a piece they’ll allow. Not exactly the best option for trying to build a concept from scratch. And that’s ignoring other nuisances of accessing their talents that may limit someone’s options.
I’m not going to go so far as to BLAME artists for the rise of AI slop, that would be EXTREMELY disingenuous, but I can certainly say there are artists out there who have been…let’s say “unhelpful” in preventing its spread.
Being anti-AI is understandable, even reasonable, but being blindly so will eventually cause more harm than good – if it hasn’t already.
I apologize for the tone of this response. I don’t know why I chose to speak that harshly in my first comment, especially when I don’t want to get into an extended debate on this, but that honestly makes me come off as feeling more strongly about the matter than I actually do.
It definitely doesn’t seem like there’s much point either of us trying to convince each other on this. I’ve said, from the perspective of someone both in and with a lot of friends in that field, what I’d warn against doing to avoid coming off like a jackass. You’re absolutely free to go around things whatever way you want but… well, now you know how people are gonna view it and you can choose to make peace with that however best suits you.
relatable… ill grab my dusty old art skills n do something n post it online for u then c:
when i have the time that is a :’) i just got a job so i went from all week lazying out to all week working T~T