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Thoughts on AI generated art.
a year ago
General
So first and foremost, for as mediocre as my art can be at times, I am proud to say that I produce it all on my own.
It all starts on paper with pencil, I scan it into my computer, make some edits in Paint.net and then ink and color the whole thing in Paint.net.
I have no desire to create AI generated art myself.
That all said, I personally don't mind AI generated art that much.
A few months back on FA I was browsing the front page when I saw a nice looking monster girl. I click the image and see in the description that it was AI generated. Which credit where credit is due at least the user was honest.
I still saved that image to my computer as I liked the image.
Minutes later I click the front page again to see another post by this same user with yet another monster girl that was nice too. After the third time this happened I kept a tab opened on this user's page and refreshed every few moments. Of the roughly 10 images the user posted 7 of them were great to me.
Obviously this user's page was deleted so unfortunately I was unable to ask them if they had more of these nice looking monster girls.
Another instance of finding nice AI generated art was on DeviantArt. Yes the user there was one of those generating these and selling them as adoptables. Scummy practice yes, but I more so blame the people buying these rather than the user.
That's neither here nor there. I browsed through this user's gallery of AI generated images, and found quite a few images that I enjoyed and saved to my computer.
So where am I going with all this? Well I find it a shame that actual artists aren't creating this kind of stuff. Yes I am a picky SOB, but at the same time obviously I am not impossible to please. If a computer can generate art I enjoy why can't an artist?
For this user on DA they had snakes, dragons, Reshirams, alligators, birds, demons and I loved a ton of them. I'd love to see actual artists produce this kind of stuff because it's visually appealing to me. Not a ton of fetishy stuff, simple pinup styled stuff, busty well drawn girls usually in clothes. I'm certainly not asking for perfection, it's just a bummer that AI generated stuff is creating a higher volume of appealing stuff than actual artists...
But whatever. This isn't a journal to change anyone's mind, just more so me talking about my thoughts on it. After all I DO want to enjoy this silly lewd art of creatures with exaggerated proportions. And unfortunately if I have to find if via people's AI generated content, then, oh well I suppose...
It all starts on paper with pencil, I scan it into my computer, make some edits in Paint.net and then ink and color the whole thing in Paint.net.
I have no desire to create AI generated art myself.
That all said, I personally don't mind AI generated art that much.
A few months back on FA I was browsing the front page when I saw a nice looking monster girl. I click the image and see in the description that it was AI generated. Which credit where credit is due at least the user was honest.
I still saved that image to my computer as I liked the image.
Minutes later I click the front page again to see another post by this same user with yet another monster girl that was nice too. After the third time this happened I kept a tab opened on this user's page and refreshed every few moments. Of the roughly 10 images the user posted 7 of them were great to me.
Obviously this user's page was deleted so unfortunately I was unable to ask them if they had more of these nice looking monster girls.
Another instance of finding nice AI generated art was on DeviantArt. Yes the user there was one of those generating these and selling them as adoptables. Scummy practice yes, but I more so blame the people buying these rather than the user.
That's neither here nor there. I browsed through this user's gallery of AI generated images, and found quite a few images that I enjoyed and saved to my computer.
So where am I going with all this? Well I find it a shame that actual artists aren't creating this kind of stuff. Yes I am a picky SOB, but at the same time obviously I am not impossible to please. If a computer can generate art I enjoy why can't an artist?
For this user on DA they had snakes, dragons, Reshirams, alligators, birds, demons and I loved a ton of them. I'd love to see actual artists produce this kind of stuff because it's visually appealing to me. Not a ton of fetishy stuff, simple pinup styled stuff, busty well drawn girls usually in clothes. I'm certainly not asking for perfection, it's just a bummer that AI generated stuff is creating a higher volume of appealing stuff than actual artists...
But whatever. This isn't a journal to change anyone's mind, just more so me talking about my thoughts on it. After all I DO want to enjoy this silly lewd art of creatures with exaggerated proportions. And unfortunately if I have to find if via people's AI generated content, then, oh well I suppose...
The tool and the technology is cool as fuck.
The training data being ripped from non-consenting artists and making these tools/tech into nothing more than plagiarism engines is horribly wrong.
Yes, it can make cool images, and some styles of AI art are not styles that any one single artist is doing. But it's still plagiarism, and under no circumstances should it be permitted to get copyrighted or allowed to give a company profits off real people's stolen works.
We personally have made a TON of AI art creations (usually using NovelAI) and yet we absolutely advocate for every single dollar that's been made from AI art to be paid out to all the artists that got their work fed into the training data without their consent, the entire libraries of training data deleted and the companies sanctioned into the fucking ground, and made to start COMPLETELY FROM SCRATCH using only legally and ethically sourced artwork that artists SPECIFICALLY CHOSE to give or sell a license for its use for that purpose.
Super cool tech, just needs to be legislated properly because right now there's a wild west and tons of ways to cheese financial systems using AI at the expense of others.
It's a lot like the early wild west of the internet all over again! Would love to see licenses required and audits made on companies to guarantee that their sources are ethically made so what you're saying is music to my ears.
Of course it would impact the economic growth, but do we really need to keep feeding people's quality of life to the volcano god of "the economy"? In fact it's kindda the problem nowadays, uncontrolled economic growth happening in such a way that there's a growing number of poor people and a few amount of people who game the system with new unpatched loopholes like these that get WAY more than they would ever need in multiple lifetimes. I'd like to see less of that.
If you use it to test out a concept or color palette before spending almost an hour on it only to find out you don't like it period then it's a good time saver for artists. If you use it to find a pose you want that's specific then that can help if the character has unique proportions as well when you don't want to do guesswork. If AI gives you an accidental design that you end up liking, then why not take it for yourself if AI is taking artists works for nothing in the meantime? Free OC!
But NEVER use what it generates as final works or "your work". You don't buy a chisel and then display it in your living room. You make something with the chisel and then display the art you made with it. AI is the chisel, not the art piece. Simple as that.
As for the art side, I don't use it. I've seen a fair amount I like, but I have a rule to not favorite such art. That doesn't mean I haven't saved any or even commented on at least one or two AI pics if I did like them; even if it's AI, a good pic is a good pic. The only hangup I have is the obvious data scraping required for the model to produce the images. Almost all of these models are trained on a metric fuckton of images taken without consent. Or, if there is "consent", it's of the "buried in 10,000,000 pages of the TOS no one reads before clicking I Agree" type, which is still scummy as hell.
Same applies to video and audio AI. On a technical level, it's insanely cool what we can do. Hell, we can take someone's voice and make anyone else sound like that person! Of course I wouldn't want that to happen to me, especially if I was a voice actor, but the thought of taking a voice of your favorite character and having them say something stupid or memey or whatever is pretty cool.
In the words of Max Payne, AI is funny as hell, it's the scariest tech I can think of.
As others have said, AI was sadly trained on art that no permission was ever granted for, and this creates such a steep hill that many see it as a wall and refuse to even acknowledge it. It'll take time for the dedicated, consent-getting builders to get that consent and then more time to train on it, even more on top of that to drop the stigma.
-Friedrich Nietzsche,
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra",
Datalinks
But seriously tho, AI art has mostly given me two things; existentialism and slop. It's neat if you're using it as a brainstorming tool but even then, how the AI was "made" is still a copyright nightmare. I thought I had some fringe opinions about abolishing/reforming copyright, but no; apparently Microsoft's AI guy literally said "if it's on the internet without a paywall, it's free to take. Anyone who says otherwise, I'll see you in court."
Speaking of adoptables, if they're AI generated; you can just steal them. The copyright office literally says that AI art isn't copyrightable without some sort of human effort. So you can just take them without buying, they're free. The government wants you to know this. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_pol.....y_guidance.pdf Please feel free to share this fact around if you want to.
like, i want to find actual artists, i care about the process of making art, generated art has no purpose to me. if i find it hard to find artists because theyre only using generative tools and generated work begins to vastly outnumber real artists im gonna get annoyed.
For it being a "shame" that artists to not producing "enough" of this kind of stuff and that AI can do better.. I mean, I think some people feel that way, some won't. I don't think there's such a thing as it being a "universally bad" thing. There's a significant category of people who kindda get bored just seeing pinups and want characters to relate to, and I've very rarely seen AI artists use their generations to make OCs - so if I understand your perspective, the reason you like this kind of art is that it helps you satisfy your tastes. What the artist is expressing exactly or what the OC is about isn't the main point, so it'd make sense that you won't get bored of a gallery full of mass-produced generations so long as it's to your tastes.
For me what matters a lot is the "Artist Soul", or the "magic". When an artist is super into the thing they're creating, and are putting in crazy amounts of effort to express what they love, that just makes it x1000 more hotter to me. I find that AI artists are a lot like Adoptable creators - that the TENDENCY (not 100%, but from what I see Most of the time) is that it's kindda done with a level of dispassion, each piece is just what it says on the tin and that's that. Ironically even if it's a super niche thing that I like, when the magic is lost I find it really hard to enjoy something when I know it's done by a specific artist who is dispassionate about their own stuff, especially if they give me the vibes of "in it just for the money". Definitely not saying it's all, but I'm just reporting a Tendency that I see with my own two eyes.
I say again that something is x1000 hotter to me when someone is SUPER into their own stuff and has a lot of bells and whistles to their imagination. More of that owo
But i often see AI art as like characters.ai something goofy and fun not to be taken seriously... and yet it is being taken seriously which can be a valid problem as stated above