#ai art utilized by artists

[burningchandelier]

regarding the Old Wounds video

If an artist can utilize a controversial medium in their art, that's cool as hell. This has been done for centuries and it is always met with resistance. That means that it is hitting the right buttons, socially, aesthetically, and politically. If you are mad, ask yourself why and at whom you are upset.

Then look at this for a while.

#l.s. dunes #old wounds #ai art utilized by artists #fuck gate keeping #don't tell me what real art is I will decide for myself #old wounds music video #but is it art? #anthony green #frank iero #tucker rule #travis stever #tim payne

[therobotmonster]

Remember when I told you Disney wasn't going to "save you" from AI?

Megacorps like Disney have mountains of exclusive data they "own" that they can use to create their own internal, proprietary, AI systems. They have every sketch, development photo, unused concept art piece, cut scene, note, doodle, rotoscope/animation reference footage, every storyboard, merch design document, you name it.

And that's on top of every single frame of every movie and TV show. Every panel of every comic.

That's why Disney supports the efforts to clamp down on AI for copyright reasons, because they own all the copyrights. They want that power in their hands. They do not want you to be able to use a cheap or free utility to compete with them. Along the way, they'll burn the entire concept of fair use to the ground and snatch the right to copyright styles. Adobe has confessed this intention, straight to congress.

When the lawyers come, you won't be accused of stealing from say, artist Stephen Silver. You'll be accused of stealing the style of Disney's Kim Possible(TM).

But don't listen to me. Listen to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

#ai artwork #generative ai #disney #copyright #copyleft #fair use #i told you so

[poor-boy-orpheus]

I think folks have really lost the plot when it comes to AI.

Imo, the issue we are faced with is not how to prevent ai from being utilized or advancing, frankly I think that ball is already rolling. The issue also isn’t designating sacred work that can’t be touched by AI (I’m sorry to say, art is not inherently better than manual labor). The issue we are really faced with is now that we are embarking on a world wherein AI is rising and gaining genuine ability to match or exceed humans, how will we ensure we are taking care of our people?

A lot of folks seem to be really concerned with protecting the idea of intellectual property, but at the same time don’t we believe in an egalitarian sharing of knowledge? Should we really be prizing exclusivity of access to media or materials? I don’t really think so, but the challenge we face is how to ensure that a society that will increasingly have less and less need for human labor (particularly in data analysis or data entry jobs that AI tends to be the best in) will still see its citizens financially secure.

I have no problem with AI making art, regardless of whether I think that art is “good” or whether someone a machine makes can even be defined as “artistic” to begin with. Frankly, I don’t care. I do care that many artists will be out of a job and we don’t have a mechanism for ensuring they’re taken care of.

And that is where the discourse is so often falling short in my eyes. Many leftists who claim to want to leave the idea of personal ownership behind become the most forceful advocates for protecting intellectual property. A development that should be spurring on the greatest advance in humankind’s ability to universally take care of everyone is instead demonized on the left for somehow being theft and largely ignored on the right as a pipe dream.

AI is growing more powerful exponentially. Our lifetimes will see a shift on the level of the invention of electricity or the internet (if not much much greater) and we need to be prepared for that. The outcry cannot be “You used AI tools and therefore your work is invalid” but rather it must be “How are we restructuring ourselves to better absorb this new change?”

Universal basic income has to become a default. Removing healthcare from being tied to a job is a necessity. Eventually moving past currency might even be a possibility.

You can’t stop the world from turning, you can’t stop this progress from happening. But we still have time to focus our efforts on taking this change and handling it well. History will watch what we say, what we do, and how we addressed this.

#ai #ai artwork

[burtoo]

Today I learned of Tumblr's plan to begin (or continue) selling user content to OpenAI and Midjourney, which is the last straw for me and my presence on the site. Regardless of their claims that users can opt out of this, I frankly just don't believe them.

I've used Tumblr since 2010 when I started photography, and this blog is the largest existing archive of my work on the internet. It's a liability for me to continue to allow it to be hosted on a site that is now actively contributing to the theft of art, directly from artists. I know my photos have already been stolen, repurposed and claimed countless times over the years from Tumblr and other sites, but I have to draw a line here. I will unfortunately be removing all my past work from this blog, perhaps something I should have done when the suspicions first arose about Automattic's greed.

Many aspects of my creative career have been negatively impacted by AI already, I just see this as one less path in which to be exploited.

That being said I want to thank all of you for the support over the decade plus I've been active on here, I stuck around much longer than most because of my appreciation for a website that was a huge influence to my early creativity as a kid. I still think it was the best format for social media, and I really am going to miss Tumblr and the creative community it used to be.

I will still do my best to utilize this blog as a place to make announcements about any new projects, such as my upcoming book I aim to release at the end of the year.

You can still find me and my (Glaze/Nightshade protected) work elsewhere on the internet at Instagram, Twitter, and my website.

So long,

Brendon

#Goodbye #Tumblr #AI

[sygol]

everytime you utilize an ai art generation tool, thousands of independent artists will shrivel up and die, i swear, this uncaring god i worship called "intellectual property" conveyed this to me through a medium known as "flawed rhetoric" and i am now a figure in his grand play. did you know you will go to hell if you dont listen to me?

[sirfrogsworth]

I found these replies very frustrating and fairly ableist. Do people not understand that disabilities and functionality vary wildly from person to person? Just because one person can draw with their teeth or feet doesn't mean others can.

And where is my friend supposed to get this magic eye movement drawing tech from? How is he supposed to afford it? And does the art created from it look like anything? Is it limited to abstraction? What if that isn't the art he wants to make?

Also, asking another artist to draw something for you is called a commission. And it usually costs money.

I have been using the generative AI in Photoshop for a few months now. It is trained on images Adobe owns, so I feel like it is in an ethical gray area. I mostly use it to repair damaged photos, remove objects, or extend boundaries. The images I create are still very much mine. But it has been an incredible accessibility tool for me. I was able to finish work that would have required much more energy than I had.

My friend uses AI like a sketchpad. He can quickly generate ideas and then he develops those into stories and videos and even music. He is doing all kinds of creative tasks that he was previously incapable of. It is just not feasible for him to have an artist on call to sketch every idea that pops into his brain—even if they donated labor to him.

I just think seeing these tools as pure evil is not the best take on all of this. We need them to be ethically trained. We need regulations to make sure they don't destroy creative jobs. But they do have utility and they can be powerful tools for accessibility as well.

These are complicated conversations. I'm not claiming to have all of the answers or know the most moral path we should steer this A.I behemoth towards. But seeing my friend excited about being creative after all of these years really affected me. It confused my feelings about generative A.I. Then I started using similar tools and it just made it so much easier to work on my photography. And that confused my feelings even more.

So...I am confused.

And unsure of how to proceed.

But I do hope people will be willing to at least consider this aspect and have these conversations.

[spitblaze]

Kinda fucked up ur reblogging ai art as an artist yourself

Ah, I knew this would happen someday.

I've stated multiple times: I have no beef with generative art, in and of itself. I feel there are genuinely good reasons you can employ it, ranging from harmless fun to accessibility to actual artistic use. The issues I have mostly involve 1) acquisition of the dataset, 2) involvement of money, and 3) authorial intent. I have jumpy lizardbrain issues with 'machine what will steal my job' too, but the generative art that I reblog on purpose is stuff that I feel meets my criteria for 'ethical', as lame as I sound for saying that.

So let's look at this post I reblogged from @infiniteartmachine. This is a project from @reachartwork, a disabled artist who made their own dang generative program and dataset in order to facilitate their creative endeavors. To my knowledge, they have done the work to do this as ethically as possible. Criteria one passed.

Criteria two is the involvement of money. The pinned post on the Reach side is a patreon plug. Understandable to get jumpy at first sight, before remembering that not only did this person develop their own dang program and dataset, they also make art the old-fashioned way, and are mostly asking for money to help with living expenses for themselves and their partner. No ludicrous commission fees, no use to avoid employing the talent of human artists. Two, check.

Finally, authorial intent. Looking back both on what we know and the contents of the image, I feel like I can safely call this one fine. No intent to deceive, no intent to avoid the utilization or payment of a human artist, no intent to impersonate. Just the intent to generate interesting imagery.

I've said it before, I feel like generative art's biggest advantage is its capability for surrealism and uncanny imagery. To me, there's something inherently interesting about the construction of these images! The fact that it's not a thinking person creating something with intent is both its biggest downside and its greatest strength. It doesn't 'know' anything, it can't exactly replicate an image so it puts down pixels based on its training set. The imperfections, utilized well, turn from weird smudgey marks into something that elevates the inherent strangeness of the imagery and the system.

I understand people who have reservations with the entire idea of generative art, I get your jumpiness and want to dismiss all of it entirely. But I still stand by my assertion that a hammer is morally neutral, it just depends on what you're using it for. I've found no good arguments to sway me that even generative imagery that meets my personal requirements is 'bad' in and of itself. That's where I stand on it.

#spitblaze says things

[reimenaashelyee]

Hello what do you think of Ai generated artwork and videos?

I have a whole entire blog post I wrote last year btw: The Rise of the Bots; The Ascension of the Human. (Reading it again a year later I am glad I am still validated in my thoughts)

My entire being and output as an artist is rooted in process, thought, craft and connection. I am open about my process and I share/create resources constantly. I have literally experienced the thing people mean when they say 'art transforms you' just by being so close to it every step of its making. All my comics have this centrality of personhood attached to them - if it's not obvious that the artist's hand (me) is in it, there is the characteristic focus on our emotional/cultural/artistic thread across history. Just as NFTs and what they represent were antithetical to how I interact with the world as artist and audience, so is the use of so-called AI art. NFTs and AI Art share a common hype cycle / speculative mania that comes out from an annoying vulture mindset that only knows how to eat itself to fill its belly, so I don't expect it to last too long. However I don't appreciate the damage both things have done to the utility of the internet, the degradation of art as a commercial pathway and the destruction of the image as a historical/educational/legal tool. (Which is why I am becoming more underground and turning towards alternatives like the Web Revival, small presses, curated resources and in-person communities)

The technological concept around LLM (pattern recognition and matching it to a goal), especially for medicine and statistics, is not itself problematic, especially when it follows ethical and data handling regulations that have been defined. However, when people talk generative art, what we are talking about, and fighting against, is the exploitation of resources and labour, and the further disconnection of worker = labour, human = society artificially imposed by the Corporate MBA / techno class in the pursuit of infinite stockmarket growth which then introduces a type of brainrot that can only think of things as producing value in relation to how fast one can seize for themselves Westernised Ideals of Fame and Fortune. Also like, this whole AI thing is part of the degradation of entertainment (the loss of small-to-medium outlets, constant mergers, nobody owning their digital streaming products they bought, the laundering of journalism/curation into press releases), the internet (the algorithimification of everything, constant spam, search engines getting worse, the worsening of socmedia as a tool) and the intellectual rigour of all information.

It's all part of this rot that's spreading outwards.

TL;DR bro I make all my art by hand and I am a nerd about informational integrity

#everytime anons ask a question of this style I am always wondering it's genuine or... #only cos if you know my work and what I am involved in you'd clearly see that I embody my position

[writingquestionsanswered]

Do you have any tips to get back to the writing mood when the bad news on TV that I see/hear make me sad and/or stressed? In my country there's a TV news show that almost always has very interesting stuff, but some days there are those news about climate change, violence and imminent AI problems for artists and then I feel bad. I don't want my family and I to loose all the good moments because I'm sensible.

Struggling to Create in Bad Times

There's a lot of awful stuff going on in the world right now, and it's hard to find a balance between staying engaged and maintaining a reasonably healthy well-being. The whole point of staying informed and engaged with world events is so you can do better, be a voice of reason, make more informed choices, and spread helpful information to others. But if you're so burned out that you're sad, depressed, and can't enjoy doing the things you love, you'll be too burned out to have any impact by staying informed. Also: storytellers rule the world. It's through the stories we tell--books, music, art, photographs, essays, articles, video games, poems, plays--that we take what we've learned about humanity and use it to change hearts and minds. And you can't do that if you're so burned out on the world that you can't create.

So... that said... it's okay to unplug from the news for a little while. Yes, it is a privilege to be able to do so, but you're not using that privilege selfishly. You're using it to give your heart and mind a rest so that you can come back strong, re-engage, and make an impact with the knowledge you absorb.

It's also important to practice good self-care while you are staying engaged. Pay attention to your daily limits. Set rules for how and when you engage. Talk to your family and friends. Utilize online resources designed to help cope with the stress of a tumultuous world.

You can also read through my Motivation post master list for general help on rekindling your creativity when it's zapped.

.♥.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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[luvtonique]

I just woke up and I chose violence let's go.

Look all I'm sayin' is

If you're gonna attack AI generative art

You should, for the same reason, attack Toby Fox.

The reason I've seen the most for people not liking AI is that it's not "Real art" and that it "Takes jobs from artists" and that it "Steals from other artists"

Well, then, let's talk about how Hopes and Dreams by Toby Fox uses fake Violins to mimic a symphony orchestra. Toby could have hired a real orchestra but he used a fake one and y'all came in your drawers over it.

Why'd nobody ever lift a finger to cover social media in how Toby Fox doesn't deserve to make money because his song "Undertale" uses a fake guitar that sounds just like a real one? He could have hired a musician to play guitar but he didn't! That cost a REAL guitar player a job, didn't it?

And how come when it was found out that Toby Fox stole entire lietmotifs from other games like Kirby n shit, y'all had like 600,000,000 excuses to defend him?

I don't dislike Toby I think he's amazing, like 100/10, one'a the brightest examples of a success story of all time and one of the nicest most pure-hearted people on earth who made two of my favorite games of all time and a ton of my favorite music. Spider Dance has been my ring tone for like 8 years.

I'm just saying, the literal same reasons I see people attacking AI gen art is shit that Toby does, all of it, and y'all worship Toby for it but attack artists.

And neither here nor there, but hear me out?

Y'all will say you're in defense of artists keeping their jobs and their livelihoods which is so very noble of you, but if an artist draws shortstacks that are just a little too short, or if an artist utilizes AI, or if an artist draws Rose Quartz skinny, or if an artist draws Sans and Frisk getting a little too Frisky, or if an artist votes for Trump, or if an artist says a dirty word you don't like, or if an artist draws a black person that looks just a little bit too stereotypical, or if an artist draws a lesbian character getting fucked, or if an artist doesn't believe in gender identities, or if an artist doesn't put trans characters in their graphic novel, or if an artist makes a sexy character with butt-jiggle the protagonist of their video game; Y'ALL ARE COMPLETELY OKAY WITH SAYING THAT ARTIST SHOULDN'T BE MAKING MONEY, AND BANDWAGONING A HATEMONGERING BRIGADE AGAINST THEM.

Or in the Sans and Frisk case: PUT SEWING NEEDLES INSIDE OF COOKIES AND GIVE THEM TO THE ARTIST WHO DREW IT, PUTTING THEM IN THE HOSPITAL.

Listen

Spare me this "We hate AI because we care about the jobs of artists" shit, you lying scoundrels. You don't care about my job! You've tried to cancel me like 500 goddamn times, got my Patreon frozen twice, got my PayPal frozen over 100 times even right in the middle of conventions, flooded my stream chat and spammed the N-word in chat trying to get my Twitch banned, flooded my Discord multiple times with links to CP trying to get my Discord banned, and you have entire Discord servers literally called things like "Jay is an asshole" and "The We Hate Jay Society" (YEAH I KNOW YOU FUCKERS EXIST, HI, HAVE FUN SCREENCAPPING THIS).

My artistic career has been under fire for the past 12 years because I draw things y'all disagree with, have opinions you don't like, and have family members who vote for politicians you think are the boogeyman that's the cause of all your problems (and haven't disowned those family members). With all due respect, when I hear "We hate AI because we believe in fair wages for artists and want to protect the jobs of artists" I just wanna strangle your lying ass.

You hate AI because it's popular to hate AI.

AI is like a prosthetic robot arm that helps you carry the groceries, and disabled people like myself (rheumatoid arthritis) benefit from its uses greatly (such as being able to draw backgrounds much easier which has greatly improved my art and INCREASED MY COMMISSION REVENUE DUE TO MY ART QUALITY IMPROVING [But y'all don't care that AI helps artists earn more money, you hate AI because you claim it's hurting artists' ability to earn money]), but you're so hung up on people using the robot arm instead of their real arms that you think you're some crusader against injustice.

You aren't.

You're just looking for reasons to attack people, it's what you do. I've been dealing with y'all looking for any goddamn reason to attack someone that you can muster for the last 12 years, hell even before that I dealt with you types. You just want to hate, you want to be prejudiced so fucking bad that you look for literally any reason you can possibly find to make some vaguepost about how much you hate an artist and post it to Reddit, and then when you get called out, get so surprised that I found your bitch ass that you start pretending you didn't mean any ill will, and start pretending that you're someone else in the most pathetic attempt to dodge blame I've ever seen.

[Context: The OP of this post accidentally revealed who they are on Tumblr, and then when I called them out on Tumblr, they pretended they were someone else because they were scared I was gonna out them on Tumblr and they tried pathetically to cover their ass, and even politely said "I never wanted to garner hate against you" when they literally posted "I hate the way he draws women" on r/mendrawingwomen and flooded the comment section (mostly now deleted) with how "disgusting of a person" I am, while I was in the comments politely giving context to the shit he was saying about me, and he started getting furious when other people were liking my art and agreeing with me instead of him. I have like 600 screencaps of all the cringe this guy spewed, but I'm not gonna post it all because it's tangential anyway. Case in point? This guy's blog is absolutely covered with how much he hates artists for drawing things he doesn't like, and he regularly posts about how AI is taking jobs from artists. Not gonna out his blog, but that's who he is. A shining example of exactly what I'm talking about. "I hate AI because it takes jobs from artists!" "THIS MAN-THING DRAWS WOMEN IN A WAY I DON'T LIKE AND HE'S A DISGUSTING PERSON, EVERYONE JOIN ME IN HATING HIM AND TRYING TO RUIN HIS REPUTATION AND THEN WE CAN CELEBRATE WHEN HE LOSES HIS JOB!!!"]

Like, y'all can sit there and act like you're defending me and artists like me all you want, you're liars. You're boldfaced fucking liars. You are disgusting. It's completely pathetic watching you attack a tool that can be used to improve our art, and claim it's in defense of the authenticity of our art and the continued financial stability of our artistic careers. Fucking give me a break.

You're looking for people who say positive things about AI art so you can attack them and feel justified because it's popular to attack them.

All while sitting there and gladly swallowing the cum of any musician who makes amazing music with synths, fake symphony instruments and autotune.

"We care about the jobs of artists."

Yeah.

Long as those artists fall in line with your opinions and only draw things that agree with said opinions, right?

Wouldn't wanna care about the jobs of "problematic" artists who draw "offensive" stuff or vote for politicians you don't like.

Final note: This isn't even an attack against any political opinions or activism or anything like that, but I'm being realistic here because these are the people I see brigading against AI art. It's not me saying those people are dumb for having their opinions or political standpoints or being activists for their beliefs, it's me saying those people are the ones who are constantly attacking AI art in "defense of artists," while in the same breath attacking artists for not sharing their political standpoints or also being activists for the same causes. If you truly, truly cared about the livelihood of artists, you'd stop attacking artists' livelihood for disagreeing with you. Or for that matter: Any reason. Stop attacking artists' livelihood, or stop pretending you care about it. Be consistent, at least.

[389]

Ruben and Retoka's artistic project offers a captivating visual experience that transcends reality and immerses viewers in a new realm of New York City. Using their photography and digital art skills, they have created a unique and mesmerizing representation of one of the world's most photographed locations. What sets their work apart is their steadfast commitment to craft their artistic vision without the use of AI or third-party effects. Instead, they have relied on their own creative intuition to express their unique perspective of the Big Apple, utilizing vivid colors, intricate shapes, and innovative forms to transport the viewer to another world

#art #landscape #cityscape #night photography #night #new york #new york city #digital photography #digital art #city #u

[maxwellatoms]

as a person on the inside of the animation industry, are there signs that we might be heading to another dark age of animation like the 1980s (e.g. animation is regulated to just glorified toy commercials or dark fantasy movies)?

"Kid Vid" regulations mean you can't advertise for stuff kids might buy from within a show anymore. Generally, you can't even have (say) Yogi Bear wearing a shirt with his best friend BooBoo's face on it as a gag, because "what if someone made that shirt one day?" Then it would be a retroactive ad, I guess? I'm not schooled in reverse-time law like studio lawyers, so I can't really say. Still, it's almost impossible to get even a fictional product into a kid's show these days, so I think the 1980s will probably stay in their timeline. At least in that way.

I do think a bit of a "Dark Age" is upon us, though. Maybe just a small one. Just a wee little snip of a Dark Age is all.

As far as I can glean, there are going to be precious few animated shows coming out over the next couple of years because not much was picked up during the pandemic. There are only a few things being developed here and there, and I'd wager that those properties "win" simply by existing in a competition-free environment. It takes a long time to produce animation, so almost anything greenlit right now is looking at a full year for turnaround. If you talk to people in the industry right now about jobs, they use words like "wastelend" and "ramen noodles".

Then you've got A.I., of course. The other night I was having dinner with a friend and I found myself in the A.I. conversation I always imagined myself having one day-- the one where we're talking with some immediacy about what the rest of our futures look like as artists, because we know they're not going to look the same ever again. It was pretty cool in a William Gibson sort of way, but I honestly didn't expect to be having that conversation for another decade. Turns out A.I. is becoming a problem right now.

I've already talked about the "art theft" angle, and that's not the problem I'm speaking about here. The problem I'm talking about is the "what do I do when what I do becomes trivial?" problem. If anyone can make a TV show or movie in a week or a day using AI assistance, who determines what gets seen? Networks, I'd imagine, would become redundant. You don't need to fork over $15 a month for Netflix if you can make Netflix-quality content yourself. And if you can't make anything decent even with A.I. assistance, surely someone on the internet can. There would be an incredible glut of content to choose from, so again... who decides what gets seen? An algorithm, probably. Who owns the algorithm?

Peak Dark Age will be the time period when the networks realize that they're going to die, and sink all of their resources into forcing their own survival on the rest of us. I imagine massive layoffs (you don't need multiple writers or artists or support staff when you've got the right tools.) Studios will want to own the tools (of course) and/or suppress the use of those tools by anyone who might want to cut into their profits. Expect to see "A.I. is just too dangerous for the public to utilize, so it needs to be left in the capable hands of corporations". Expect to see customizable Batmans, the ability to put your mom in any Star Wars, and the serialized fever-dreams of billionaires.

I think that's the next 5-10 years. And while that's happening, the tools will keep getting better and better until literally anyone can sit down, ask for an Oscar-worthy part-rom-com/part action movie starring a twenty-five year old Steve McQueen and and eighty year old Daniel Radcliffe rescuing Air Bud from the Death Star, and then watch the resulting film with some degree of satisfaction. There'll come a point when content of any visual, auditory, and written complexity can be generated on-the-fly, and the traditional limits of budgets and schedules will just be gone.

It's easy to spin off into fantasy and try to guess exactly what's coming. I could probably spin on that all day. But what I know is that the future of the animation industry won't look anything like what I've become accustomed to. And maybe that's okay because what I've become accustomed to looks nothing like the industry I started in. Things change, and you roll with the punches. Thanks to the self-fulfilling dystopian prophecy we find ourselves in, just about everyone on the planet is finding themselves rolling with the punches coming from the Powerful Greedy. That's less a "me problem" and more a planet-wide problem we should probably all sit down and hash out, like, yesterday.

My immediate problem as an artist (and yours if you're an artist too) is figuring out how to get your ideas seen in a world where the amount of entertainment content is exploding exponentially. Especially if you're the sort of artist who needs to eat and live somewhere.

So yeah, I think there's going to be just a little peppering of Dark Age coming up. But in every time of change, there are opportunities. Hey, I'm down for an animated Dark Fantasy movie. Let's do this!

#animation dark age #a.i. art #animation #the future #maxwell atoms

[filmnoirsbian]

seeing you reblog that barbie ai "art" was so disappointing, i hope it was a mistake and that you didnt know it was ai :(

A lot of people on here are frankly very annoying about ai art. Synthography as an art form has existed for decades and that artist has been using multiple visual mediums to create art for years including their own photography. Not every artist who utilizes some form of ai is plagiarizing and this conversation is getting far too similar to the accusations that people who use photoshop are not real artists.

#asks

[lilyoffandoms]

Sat on this a few days cuz I wasn’t sure how best to answer the question and I’ve been thinking of leaving the Choices app behind for good for a while now and this ask kinda opened my eyes.

@playchoices is either sticking their heads in the sand and pretending the artists they hire aren’t passing off AI-generated content as their own or they think we are too stupid to identify AI-generated/assisted content in their app. Either way, they are lying to us and are using stolen art to make a profit and that don’t sit right with me.

Given PB’s use of AI generation in the creation of their covers, I will no longer be utilizing the app, nor will I create anything for any of the newer books that utilize this technological theft. I will consider and most likely still create for the older books from before the app’s complete greedy cop-out era but it will be a case by case basis.

In addition, anyone in the Choices fandom (or any fandom for that matter) that uses AI-generators or reblogs AI-generated content will not be eligible to request or be gifted anything from me from here on out. Also, from this point forward, I will only take requests for fics & art if you are off anon to better ensure this.

[More on my stance on requests can be found here under the header, Fic & Art Requests/Commissions.]

Edit: This is not directed at anyone in particular. Yes, anon listed a few names and I have yet to look into those but what’s done is done. I can’t change the past and what I’ve done back then. This is simply talking about moving forward.

#hope this answers your question anon #forgive me for not posting the ask but i don’t want to call out individuals i’ve not looked into myself #ask #anon ask #question ask

[morlock-holmes]

I don't know, I get bummed out.

"Good taste" as an artistic value has been destroyed, a fact which would be heartening except that at my most pessimistic it seems like rather than being replaced with a cacophony of personal creativity instead good taste has been replaced with "Market Value" and "political utility" as the primary value of art.

The thinking on AI art is that because it has the potential to monetize an artist's work without including them in the revenue stream, it therefore constitutes theft, and therefore, cannot be art.

I don't care about the creation of adversarial technology, if anything I'm probably for it.

Rather, watching an astonishingly pro-piracy website explain that AI art models constitute theft just kind of constantly grinds on me, reminding me how inconsistent people are.

If Stablediffusion models constitute theft, so too does fanart and piracy, both of which rely much more directly on the work of previous artists.

I also think it's bad because we live in a world where a tiny handful of media companies already own a tremendous amount of imagery, in the legal sense.

Perhaps I've misunderstood the tech, but couldn't Disney just train a model on images that they own the copyright for?

I have some serious misgivings about AI art, but a world where only Disney can monetize it, and it constitutes piracy for everyone else, strikes me as even worse than a total free-for-all.

[genericpuff]

I followed artsangel since her previous comic immaterial. I have to say she IS talented and has the skills. But her style is verrrrry time consuming and she would only update every 2 weeks. I used to study her art a lot because I was always impressed by it, and Im fairly certain it did not look like like that when it was on canvas. I used to see her progresses on her stories and she uses a lot of assets and predrawn faces to keep her consistent pixar look. The faces were less uncanny and more expressive. Now the eyes are all wonky and displaced.

I think she may have used ai to polish her panels. Perhaps the workload proved too much, or maybe she was feeling insecure. I was concerned when she got picked up by webtoon because I could tell it would be difficult for her to keep up the schedule. Ai is super powerful but its not powerful enough to make a COMIC, not even consistently. She probably using it as an enhancer to her already great skills. A shame though, she doesn’t need it.

Also I think the reason her preproduction period was so quick is because she was highly prepared before launch. She already has multiple comics under her belt and webtoon probably didn’t need to change much. Im sure she just reused her canvas comic for her reboot and built a buffer in the meantime.

Having to meet deadlines can definitely be a reason but not an excuse IMO.

One creator I can think of who has a similar style (albeit in black and grey) is figmentforms, creator of A Tale of Two Rulers.

Updates are slow, she posts maybe a new page once a month, the art is gorgeous but it's clear it takes her time. It's a free to read comic. It's worth the wait.

That said, if she wanted to make her updates more frequent, I wouldn't blame her at all for utilizing new tools and methods to do so - but it wouldn't justify her in using AI tools that are stealing other people's art.

There are loads of shortcuts that artists already use that are fine because they're still genuinely handcrafted. 3D models, overlay textures, blur effects, etc. are all tools that artists use to help speed up the drawing process and were made by hand.

And beyond that, the need to make the process more efficient isn't a crime, but it's in how you do it. You can use these tools irresponsibly or at the cost of your own comic's quality. Case in point, Lore Olympus and Let's Play, which are both godawful in how they implement 3D backgrounds and stock images:

Creating comics is finding a balance between efficiency and quality, not sacrificing one for the other and using it as justification to avoid criticism for that sacrifice.

If Sarah Ellerton was using AI based on her own art and being honest about it, I don't think anyone would be nearly as upset. It might prompt a debate over what's ethical in the world of comics - whether or not it's right for consumers to pay for a product that's being churned out of an AI prompt - but at least it wouldn't be theft and it would probably just be there as an aid to an artist who's been doing this for 20 years and had to find a way to make the process more efficient. I think AI can be used as a productive tool if it's implemented responsibly and without being at the cost of another artist's work.

The issue is that 1.) Sarah is being VERY suspicious over the whole thing which leads us to believe that she's NOT using ethical AI assistance, and 2.) there's a VERY clear distinction near the end of her previous comic, Immaterial, where you can basically tell when she adopted AI. The main character Alex, for example, literally became a whole other person.

This is a common problem for AI coloring prompts, a LOT of them are bad at rendering darker skin tones (I think I mentioned this in my last post, but I literally got to playtest AI coloring tools from WT's a couple years ago, and they could NOT figure out darker skin tones, any dark colors that were put down were assumed to be shadows so characters just looked like white characters with the curtains pulled over their face).

She just looks like a SamDoesArts poster girl now. Everything unique about her has been stripped away and you can see this transition in the final page of Immaterial and the first episode of Quantum Entanglement:

None of it feels like organically her, it feels like a cheap machine reproduction.

I don't doubt that this person has evolved a lot as an artist or that her older work was genuinely her, she's clearly got a lot of skill that only someone who's been drawing comics for years would gain.

But it's clear somewhere along the way she succumbed to insecurity or stopped caring enough to start using AI to do the heavy lifting. I mean honestly, her work from before was fine! So I don't see why she would be using it for 'polishing', there are so many ugly ass webtoons on the platform so even the art from Immaterial - even if she had to simplify it a bit more to make it easier to meet deadlines - would likely be a refreshing change of pace.

But the way she's utilized AI here, I was quicker to assume Sam Yang drew Quantum Entanglement when I first saw it.

And it is a shame, because, as you said, she doesn't need it. Her art is perfectly capable on its own and while I can understand her need to make the process more efficient, there are better ways to do that than using AI that's clearly ripping off other artists and then lying about it. It's a shame she'd put her reputation on the line as a seasoned artist just to meet Webtoons' stupid deadlines. Like, how can it be worth it?

#quantum entanglement #webtoon critical #anti AI