I wouldn't even dabble with it, that's enough to "feed the machine" and waste resources, as tempting as it can be.

I originally started using it to try to generate character references. Then I moved on to stuff I've thought about but would never commission, and now I'm kind of just trial-and-erroring it.

And again, it's my experience that 99% of the criticism of A.I. art is correct. And it's my personal opinion that A.I. art will only be recognized as truly having any merit once it's used by and for artists instead of against them.

I don't want to hear Elon Musk or some other tech. bro. dumbass boast that a whole movie was made by A.I. I want to hear Bob Iger or Margie Cohn bragging about how they're going to double the number of animated movies they make in a year because A.I. handling all the mind-numbingly monotonous work saved their animators so much time and money that they can afford to start taking risks on making the movies their animators actually want to make again.

I know AI was used in Spiderverse but that's not same kind as generative, not all AI is bad, it's mostly generative AI that shouldn't be touched imo

It depends on how it's used, IMO. Right now, it's being used for way, way more than it ever should have been, and again, by people who despise art and want to put artists out of business, not by people who want to be artists but lack the time and tools necessary to pursue their art.

From what I have seen, AI art is just good for replacing stock images and not completely, either.

I don't like it; taking most of it was trained without compensating original artists is a dick move.

The only AI I enjoy is ChatGPT, helping me with dealing with esoteric errors, and fucking DateTime; I hate it with a passion; can I tell you how much I hate how computers do time?

Another thing I love is Grammarly; it has gotten so much better. It still does weird things, but it has dramatically improved my writing.

Honestly the problem with AI art is whenever people try to sell it for a profit. So I'm not upset about the stuff you post on DeviantArt. Like you said, it's the AI bros that have ruined the reputation of generative art and also drop shippers on places like Etsy who will sell t-shirts with ai art on it.

I will say generative art isn't really my jam because it almost always comes off as feeling the same visually to me. But like you said, you're still going to commission artists that have their own unique styles to their work. So no I'm not upset at all about the ai art you have. It's not taking $ from talented artists.

I do have at least a smidgen of respect for people who produce it, now that I've spent hours at a time trying one prompt after another and going through thousands of shitty generations just to get two or three good ones. But what I've effectively been doing had all the challenge and mental stimuli of lying in bed and bouncing a tennis ball off the wall. I don't know how anyone can do that and think "I should get paid for this."

agreed, I feel that ai art should be used to help artists, such as to help with brainstorming, or to have an image to go with the character profile or story you want to share.

Probably the most satisfaction I got out of it was when it came to character generation. I had a rough idea of what I wanted a character to look like, and after experimenting with a few different prompts, it ended up producing something that not only looked exactly like what I had in mind, it did it in 3D.

That was cool.

But then I burned through the remainder of my daily allotted prompts just trying to get him in one single pose. One single pose that, to this day, it still hasn't been able to do. Like I said, it's incredible at sometimes, pathetic at others.

What I would absolutely love to see is an A.I. program within an artist's program, IE: something that you can tell it to "render a character that [insert description here]," but then you get that character in a T-pose and with the option to adjust its proportions manually just as you would when using a character generator in an RPG. Or that you can tell it to "have character A move [blah blah blah]," and it does it within an animation file so you can still go in and remove all the jank manually if you think that would be easier.

But too many of the people championing A.I. hate artists overall, and too many artists hate A.I. in its entirety. So it's probably going to be a very long time before anybody but a billionaire can make their own animated movie.

AI is a tool its not inherently bad and as a gamer who recently got a serious GPU upgrade to a RTX 4060. And Pardon my whole being a techie enthusiasm cause I love technology but I understand it has its problems.

AI is basically near required to play games with full Raytracing and Pathtracing and you dont want to spend an arm and a leg for a 4090/the upcoming 5090. And even then getting anything above 60FPS with the best stuff is a big if at times without graphics setting compromises unless you want to run multiple expensive GPUs, and compete for the highest electric bill in the country.

So I can agree its a useful tool and that applies to things other then just art like science, tech, and medical which can improve peoples quality of life or in this case make highly advanced Gaming tech far more accessible to the common person who don't have thousands of dollars to burn for a hobby. Enthusiastic Techie gushing aside.

In the artist sphere when it comes to AI I think it also has its use cases as a way to bob around ideas and make art from those ideas people detract it but I disagree with that we all have are own ways with coming up with ideas. Or create a very basic proof of concept to see if its worth investing the time to make something more serious because you can easily overstep mentally/physically in this sphere if your not careful so proving something is worth doing is sometimes best to do first then doing it and I can see AI being used for that.

But I do agree it needs regulation and that AI as is, is far to easily abused by bad actors that give it its bad name. Its useful it just needs safeguards and rules in place to prevent people from using it in all sorts of wrong ways. And it also should be sorted away from human made art to allow it to have its own space without hurting the human first internet we grown to love.

So now that you seen my valid complaints with AI that most can agree with and how I feel it should be addressed I feel its also fair that I show my biggest complaint with the art sector. My main complaint with the art sector is the slippery slope of possessing this overly-judgmental mentality on subjectivity that Artist tend to fall into. And AI suffers the worst for it while possessing understandable problems it causes Artists to get on a while understandable but still very much a high horse and say it should be abolished entirely without providing any solution aside from complete prohibition. I simply cannot agree with that on principle because of what good it can do in the right hands.

Its also me being a realist, AI is a Pandora's box that's now open, and as far as I can see no one can close it... Trust me alot do wish but wishing doesn't make it happen sadly, especially with where this world is headed with tech. So now the best we can do is decide what is and is not okay to leave said box and peddle for regulation to make sure we can agree on what can and cant be done ethically with AI now that the cat is out of the bag so to speak.

As for what I think you should do if you want to dabble in it. You should stick to DeviantArt thanks to there content filters, and Pro AI approach there is a sector in there art that acts as a sanctuary where AI art and dabbling can flourish on its own so you stand to encounter way less criticism for using it there then here.

But also because of FAs upload policy.
More Specifically - UP # Artificial Intelligence (AI)
"Content made using AI, machine learning, or similar generators is not allowed, including derivative works created from it (e.g. stories, audio, backgrounds, paint-overs, using one's own content to generate new content)."

If you make derivative works with it even if you made said thing with your content it can cause you to line ride what is and is not allowed on the site, and if staff find out that you based something on AI and posted it here they may disagree and hand you a warning and take down the piece despite the work you put into it. While FA staff have gotten less aggressive due to serious community criticism from another rule that had backfired in there face, I personally wouldn't trust the staff with things that are line riding given there history with over-enforcement on things that line-ride the rules despite there recent leniency.

I actually don't mind at all F.A.'s policy on A.I. art because it's very clear cut. Half of what made 2023 and its 2.7 changes such a headache was that they were vague and made it too easy to abuse the ticket system. "No A.I., no exceptions" is very clear cut, and as long as it's still fine to link to websites that do allow A.I. art, the inconvenience to anyone who has ever used it for anything is minimal at best.

EDIT: By the way, DeviantArt wants you to upgrade to a premium subscription to post anything 18+, so it'll never replace F.A. That's more or less my policy regarding the two sites: DeviantArt for the content which offends actual artists, F.A. for anything that will offend the stick-up-the-ass "I'm so much more pure than you" types.

And I absolutely agree that there should be restrictions. Using it to impersonate actual people, for example, should straight up be a crime. Which, I have a feeling they will be soon enough. I've noticed, for example, that some A.I. programs already treat "Elon Musk" and "Donald Trump" as curse words and will straight up reject any prompts that include them just as they would anything with a swear word or implications of sex or violence (though will still make it hard vore no matter how many times you type "whole, alive and unharmed" in the prompt >_<). It hasn't happened yet because Musk himself enjoys making deep fakes of democrats, but once somebody uses a Chinese A.I. to produce something that really hits him where it hurts, I think we'll soon see legislation with criminal charges proposed for anyone who uses A.I. to impersonate and/or ridicule any living individual.

The other no-brainer restriction, IMO, should be that all A.I. art should be tagged. Or, if you prefer, "that the copyright be acknowledged to the programmers who produce it." Which I have a feeling is also an inevitability. All it'll take is for one person to make a financial killing off of something that was A.I. assisted, after which I guarantee you the A.I. programmers will demand a cut of it.

That's all a fair assessment I mainly point out 2.7 as an example to avoid line riding rule in general with FA. And I wont lie I also pointed it out to throw deserving shade at them for that fiasco of being overly vague while providing an example to the prior point.

But I do think AI is fine as a tool though it has its rough edges that need to be dealt with. And hopefully with consideration for all those involved.