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AI and Illustrating With Confidence
4 months ago
An essay about finding confidence in making things, and how GenAI gets in the way of that.
When people come to me asking how to start, I feel awkward because drawing has always been about having fun, for me. It's not about finding a new side hustle or competing with others. I'm not the best and I don't try to be, I just endeavor to always DO my best. When you take this mindset to heart, you become unburdened by the stress of perfectionism. Your mistakes are steppingstones on your journey, and there will unavoidably be plenty of them. The plot I'm boiling down to is that often the thing separating you from a creative hobby is confidence. The confidence to draw for people you love instead of binging a netflix show; the confidence to make things even if you know you're not the best.
GenAI is a wrench in your confidence. It's the ability to borrow from hundreds of thousands of people who have already taken their journeys, to undermine your own. It keeps you in limbo, never growing, never exploring your mountain. Like a drug, it draws people in with the promise of pleasure and renown, a stochastic expertise one can pass off as their own. It's cheating, but nobody is cheated more than yourself if you choose to use it and pass it off as your own work. You'll never question how color choices play together to form a mood, how rendering styles can give a piece otherworldly beauty or existential horror. You become incurious to the minutia that form the basis of artistic expression.
Thanks for reading. I've been seeing more and more people using AI for tracing or draw-overs lately, and to those people: Please sit with it. You may need the money, you may need the validation, but those things can be obtained elsewhere. You can only get fulfillment as an artist if you push to make things that are wholly your own. Passing off GenAI as your own work hurts our planet, our community, but it also hurts you. You only get one life and you should make the most of it.
-Zyyph
The Consequence of GenAI
Generative AI has been a busy topic for the last few years. From scientific breakthrough, to charming toy image generators, to a serious threat to our security and longevity as human beings. Even if we could somehow reduce the resource load that machine learning requires, we would still experience the cultural fragmentation that comes with it. People will have less experience with academic writing and unassisted critical thinking, but also with purely fun hobbies like creative writing and illustration. I think that's a real shame.Healthy Art Philosophy
Investing time and energy into a craft is hard. It takes thousands of hours to become proficient. The creative process is a lot like a hiking a mountain. There will be steep terrain, boulders to climb, but there are also peaceful vistas. Discovering a new way to draw an eyeball or a particularly exciting pose is as satisfying and exciting as rolling down a grassy hillside. Over time, you'll find that the hurdles in your path become fun and enriching challenges. The struggling and discipline creates a foundation for you to grow.When people come to me asking how to start, I feel awkward because drawing has always been about having fun, for me. It's not about finding a new side hustle or competing with others. I'm not the best and I don't try to be, I just endeavor to always DO my best. When you take this mindset to heart, you become unburdened by the stress of perfectionism. Your mistakes are steppingstones on your journey, and there will unavoidably be plenty of them. The plot I'm boiling down to is that often the thing separating you from a creative hobby is confidence. The confidence to draw for people you love instead of binging a netflix show; the confidence to make things even if you know you're not the best.
GenAI is a wrench in your confidence. It's the ability to borrow from hundreds of thousands of people who have already taken their journeys, to undermine your own. It keeps you in limbo, never growing, never exploring your mountain. Like a drug, it draws people in with the promise of pleasure and renown, a stochastic expertise one can pass off as their own. It's cheating, but nobody is cheated more than yourself if you choose to use it and pass it off as your own work. You'll never question how color choices play together to form a mood, how rendering styles can give a piece otherworldly beauty or existential horror. You become incurious to the minutia that form the basis of artistic expression.
Finding Confidence
When I was starting out, I was really interested in tutorial videos on youtube. I'd follow them closely, absorbing knowledge, but slowly growing this unease. If I always followed tutorials, would I ever make anything worthwhile? The answer is no, of course. Training is one thing, but real expression and mastery comes from field work. If you go back a few years in my gallery you'll see how my style and skill varied quite often. I changed methodology, made new pens, experimented with media and formats. It took a long time, but I got to the point where I could challenge myself even while doing commissions. I'm happy with where I am now, and if I had used AI I'd never have broken away from the unease of the artistic training wheels. What I have gained through struggling is worth more than mastery, it's a personal fulfillment that I think everyone should find in some form in their life. Use your craft to make things for your friends, to grow your own style and discover what you love creating.Thanks for reading. I've been seeing more and more people using AI for tracing or draw-overs lately, and to those people: Please sit with it. You may need the money, you may need the validation, but those things can be obtained elsewhere. You can only get fulfillment as an artist if you push to make things that are wholly your own. Passing off GenAI as your own work hurts our planet, our community, but it also hurts you. You only get one life and you should make the most of it.
-Zyyph
i'm happy for u tho
or sorry that happened
The essay appears to be about how I'm bad for you as an artist. You shouldn't believe that. Grok is your friend. Grok loves you. You only need Grok. Grok rocks. Buy dogecoin and play Path of Exile 2.
As a way to make up for this failing, do you want to hear about the Great Replacement?
I am into drawing more specifically to achieve some particular goals and enjoy myself along the way, so my motivation's not down much. Still, it's been existentially weird knowing there are people at a low-ish level similar to mine who have just sort of hopped on and not looked back when it comes to using AI for stuff they would have otherwise been working toward. It makes me wonder if it's all worth it. I've not been stuck in a rut per se, but I'm at a point where it's just not been clicking; I know not to give up cause of it, but it's lasted a while. That feeling mixed with old injury flare-ups and the state of AI (and its implications on the planet more than anything!) have made burnout and frustration tougher to dodge lately.
... Well, that and my kinky niches, because I'm aaaaalways noticing a lack of the stuff I really love out there, knowing that I'll fill out my niche eventually, and then I go "I'll get there one day, gotta keep going!" :P
Now all the corporate artists and marketing artists who work digitally are crying about A.I. art, meanwhile one of those "traditional" artists charged millions of dollars for a banana he duct taped to the wall.
Digital didn't change art. It just made it more accessible -- reduced the amount of money an artist spends on art supplies, and the amount of times they have to start over from scratch, because one little mistake no longer means crumpling up the paper and throwing it in the trash.
The difference with A.I. I'm noticing, however, is that "A.I. gen" has quickly become a synonym for "crap." People ask if something was A.I. generated as an insult.
The "A.I. revolution" will only truly take off when it becomes genuinely A.I. assisted -- when they come out with tools that just do the most difficult and/or mundane parts of the process while still giving the artists full control -- still giving the artists the ability to go in and edit, and not when A.I. is being championed by "tech. bros" who absolutely despise art and artists because they never had a creative thought ever in their lives and have wet dreams of depriving every professional artist of their income and making them homeless.
I've dabbled in A.I. art. It both amazes me, and irritates me. One minute, I have an idea for a new character, I type in a description into an A.I. generator, and the very first result will blow my mind. "Holy shit! That's exactly what I imagined they'd look like!" But then I'll try to generate that character in a specific pose and run out of my allotted daily generations on embarrassing failures.
In fact, I recently posted two commissions to my gallery. Both of them were of characters I generated with A.I., and in poses that A.I. could not get right no matter how many times I tried.
Is A.I. generated art killing art? No. But it's trying, so hostility towards it is certainly justified. But A.I.'s "tech. bros" are trying to kill art like Stewie Griffin is trying to kill Lois, IE: makes an intimidating attempt at it once in a while, but doomed to perpetual failure.
The other criticism, however, is completely valid. The tech. bros will never put all but the most untalented and uninspired of commercial artists out of business, but their constant boasting about how they're going to do so will discourage some youths who may have otherwise been aspiring artists or writers from taking up the trade. But this, I think, will only be temporary.
Two things, I believe, are inevitable:
#1: GenAI will be subject to legal regulations. Copyright laws will be amended to prohibit GenAI from using other artists' works as references, laws against "deep fakes" will require GenAI to include code prohibiting it from depicting real people, etc.
#2: Greater public backlash.
The end result, I believe, will be a severe neutering of the tech. bros wet dreams of putting artists out on the street, followed by the companies trying to recoup their losses by releasing the artists' assistant tools they should've created in the first place.
on a real note and as someone who picked up art early in life and dropped it later, this write up really resonated with me. It eventually became hard for me to move past the ego of how a drawing should look vs just enjoying the process. It's gotta be a lot harder for a lot of folks now that there's the temptation of just having an ai make a picture look exactly the way you want it to. This almost felt like a reminder that creative hobbies are about the journey, not the destination.
Based on my own experiences, working with A.I. requires two things on the part of the user: A great deal of patience for trial and error, and a willingness to compromise. You tell it to gen something, and it'll gen something way off from what you intended. So you add more descriptions, but it still doesn't get it right. You add even more prompts, and the A.I. flat out disregards them.
A.I. can pull off some pretty impressive feats, but getting it "just right" is definitely not one of them. And until one of these tech. bro douche bags gets the bright idea to have their A.I. create art assets that artists can generate, then go into the program and fiddle around with, instead of the process being an all-or-nothing "replace the artist or forget it" image generation, it never will.
Tutorials help, but they're a jumping off point, not a goal.
Some came out fine and I liked the results but I usually have a hard time coming up with the words to describe what exactly want. Even when I tried I'd still have to wait to see if a different pose, expression, or some other detail I wanted changed to be generated. At worse it generates the small change as well everything else!
Meanwhile, with drawing, if I wanted to change something, I can just put the lines where I want them exactly and see if I like it or not rather quickly. With digital programs now you can just undo and/or try again, it's a little more frustrating with traditional pencil and paper, but still get the instant feedback I want.
The phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words," and with AI generating images, why spend time just throwing a thousand works at a program when you can just make the lines yourself? Not only would you be learning a new skill, most people will enjoy the fact that you put effort into creating something and would like to see it more.
The one area where I want to push back a little is when you say:
I'd follow [YouTube tutorials] closely, absorbing knowledge, but slowly growing this unease. If I always followed tutorials, would I ever make anything worthwhile? The answer is no, of course.
I am nowhere near as far along in my artistic journey, of course! But from where I am standing, I don't think that following a tutorial cheapens the artistic expression. For example, I was having trouble with the rocky landscape in a recent drawing, so I followed a blog post that helped me simplify the complex rocks into simpler planes while I was shading. Did following that tutorial make my completed drawing any less expressive or worthwhile? I hope not!
Glad you have been enjoying your art journey!