But they conveniently leave out that it costs money to do anything with AI. It’s more like “open to anyone with a credit card.” The vast majority of people don’t have computers powerful enough to run generative AI models locally, and even then, server farms with a billion GPUs will always produce better results
This means that people have to rely on corporate platforms where you buy tokens that you use to get pulls at the various AI slop slot machines, hoping you get something decent. The mechanics more closely resemble a gacha game than any kind of artistic process
By contrast, learning how to draw, animate or make 3D models costs nothing. There’s free tutorials and tools everywhere, and you can also just pirate commercial ones if you want
Art was already open to anyone just pick up a fucking pencil
Edit: drawing all the talentless hacks out of the woodwork lol
im not going to take a pencil and personally draw a courtroom sketch of Macdonald’s The Grimace giving live birth in front of a judge
That sounds like a you problem
it sounds like a problem for whatever entity has to draw something like that
Stop kinkshaming
i really hate this reasoning. when people say “i can’t draw” they mean “i can’t draw what I set out to draw” not that they can’t make marks on a paper. People want to make what they have in their head, likely to a level of competence that would be appreciated by an audience beyond their mom, not some other thing that they physically can that will look bad to them and anyone else.
I also dispute OP’s assumption that we can all learn to draw competently, i’ve tried on and off for years with various tutorials and programmes and my brain and hands just do not work that way.
Ask any artist if they are satisfied with their art. They won’t be. That is the nature of the beast. Doesn’t matter how good they are at it.
I have done art on and off for years as well. I would estimate I did maybe a few thousand hours of art in my life. Other people have done literally 10 to 100 times that and they are better because of it. You hone your skills over time. Anyone like me dabbling in art has to accept that there are countless people who put in more time, who are better and who will stay being better because they will keep putting more time in then us.
Using AI, you steal those hours from those people, for a product that doesn’t show what’s in your head. It’s stilly to pretend AI can do that and you know it. If that were true, all the art prompters wouldn’t include the names of existing artists in their prompts.
So yea, put in the fucking time, or get off the field. Don’t be fucking selfish and then try to defend it in flimsy ways.
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All of the art that was used to train generative AI was used without its creator’s permission, meaning they weren’t compensated for all of the years of work and study that went into creating it. Then all of that labour was repackaged into a product that corporations are selling at a premium, with none of the money going back to the people who made the creation of it possible. These companies have well admitted that they wouldn’t be able to make a profit if they had to actually pay all these artists for their work. Now obviously, that isn’t technically stealing, but neither is it harmless. I personally know several artists who’ve told me that work has dried up in the years since generative AI became popular, and who are upset that their own work was used to train the machines that are replacing them.
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I mean, yeah, piracy is stealing. I thought most people were okay with it because it’s mostly done with games and movies made by huge corporations who’ve already paid their developers and actors, and thus you’re not actually stealing from artists. I’ve personally never understood the “I never would have bought and watched/played this anyway” argument, because here you are, watching/playing it. But also, I really don’t care if other people pirate stuff, people must have their reasons.
Maybe I’m just going hard on the whole anti generative AI thing because of my personal connection to and harm I see it causing to people I know. But on the whole, considering the environmental impact, the corporatization of the technology, the exploitation of artists, the killing of creativity/critical thought, and the absolutely gross techbro culture that’s spwaned out of it, I just thought more people on this site would be against generative AI in general.
piracy is not stealing, stealing deprives someone of something.
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“Hey man I need to see all your text and all your images you ever made.”
"“Why?”
“So I can make bad collage-copies of them and write shitty listicles.”
“I don’t want you to do that.”
“Too bad, you put your stuff somewhere I could see it so I already did it and you have no recourse now because the powerful people that made me are above copyright law.”
There is no personal use with this, because the AI was trained on everyone’s stolen information. That is the problem, not the fact that it can make a bad picture because that was done. If the AIs could actually make anything from whole cloth, then we’d be having a different debate, but that’s not what’s going on.
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Steal from corporations, not form people’s pantries you sick, disgusting fuck.
For real, do you not understand that the corpos are taking everyone’s…EVERYONE’S things and making them theirs, for these garbage bots? That there is a difference between stealing from an individual as opposed to a company? You are gleefully saying that theft of personal property is okay, so long as it’s the big boys in silicon valley doing it.
Sterling fucking socialist theory there, bucko!
And since you clearly need this explained more clearly: stealing from individual artists that honed a skill to the point they can make a living from it is bad, because you are stealing the livelihood from a fellow worker. Stealing form any individual is bad, actually. It really should not be hard to understand this, yet somehow…
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duh. but “good enough” or “ok this is fine i need to work on something else” are out of reach too.
lmfao
idk lots of musicians try to copy the guitar tone or whatever else of their influences. what’s in your head might be a copy of styles you’ve seen until you develop your own style… idk what “your own style” maps to in generative “ai”, i’m not here to defend ai or say that the people using it are doing art per se, my whole thing is that I can’t get even remotely close to an acceptable level of competence and it ticks me the fuck off when someone goes “aNy OnE cAn mAkE aRt” or upholds capitalist framings of intellectual property.
In that regard, I do think there’s a distinct difference between sampling (whether a still image, moving pictures, or sound) and using the AI treat generator. There’s plenty of people who can’t play a musical instrument worth a damn, but give them some loops, one shot samples, and sequencers and they can transform the samples material into something new and fascinating. Likewise with visual media.
12tone on YouTube had this interesting argument that samples, rather than being “cheating,” are turning a particular performance in time into an instrument unto itself. Whereas AI is a smudging of all past art into an average. So while sampling celebrates the greatness of a performance, AI reduces it to a Borg-like state.
It’s always sad when I gotta actually block someone from hexbear, but since you are just a larper who doesn’t care about others as soon as you can have the slightest whiff of a treat for yourself, I am not really sad about it.
??? comrade if you see this while logged out, i don’t use gen ai to make visual “art”.
this is only about the misunderstanding that people want to make stuff and can’t because what they want to make is more specific than the head up ass maximum position that anything is art regardless of quality.
i am a professional artist (and maybe this makes me a bit out of touch,) assuming that it’s for personal use and not for profit at all, i would rather have someone take my work into photoshop/gimp/krita/whatever and trace it near directly or make edits to it to fit their vision than have that person go spend money to further refine The Slop Machine. other artists may have differing opinions on this but since generative AI has gotten popular i just simply do not care anymore as long as my work isn’t being fed to train image models. hell, if you’re tracing someone else’s work using tools on paper, that’s still building muscle memory and linework skill and while not the ideal scenario it’s doing more for you than you might think. with generative AI you are paying to generate an image based off countless images that already existed from artists that were not paid for their work to be included in the model. is that…not capitalistic or not at the very least exploitative?
end-users aren’t necessarily paying into anything other than their own electricity bill. We universally have a problem with the companies profiting at your expense of course, and that might be the more common case.
Those parts of “ai” discourse are tangent to someone’s aptitude or ability to have something that looks how they want it to look and i’m trying to limit myself here to being mad about the position that art is accessible already because everybody can make shitty art that isn’t what they want to make.
Also a professional artist, and I agree with you. Someone making a collage or a trace from my art, or even just photoshopping it is still practicing creativity. Someone typing a prompt into the art slot machine has no creative process, they aren’t learning anything, experiencing anything, struggling with anything, it’s just empty output. It’s just a “pretty picture” there’s no sense of accomplishment or understanding. One of the most rewarding things in my life is when I draw something and recognise that I flat out wasn’t skilled enough to do that 6-12 months ago.
And this can apply to any hobby or skill, are people so alienated from themselves that even the most basic concepts of satisfaction at self-improvement are seen as outright insults to them?
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Stable diffusion works and learns on a conceptual level. If an AI model even understands artist tags, bias was trained into the model with a LoRA.
You looked at other people’s art when you learned to draw you thief? Hand over the pencil and come out with your hands on your head
So you are seriously saying that AI has the ability to understand concepts? Waow.
Please educate yourself and don’t spout bullshit, thanks.
Not concepts as we humans operate on, but concepts in the feature extraction sense. You have a gross misunderstanding of how these models work.
Imagine it as how an image detection model learns how to detect images. It extracts features (that are vectors of data that are completely meaningless to humans). Image generation can be somewhat imagines as the inverse of a feature detector, it creates features from noise.
These models are not plagiarizing your work. You teach it the shape a dog is expected to have, and you teach it the color black. Without such thing existing in the training set, it can generate a black dog.
This is fundamental to stable diffusion otherwise it could never work at all.
I mean, yeah this true not everyone can make art up to their desired standards. But everyone can still make art, there’s tons of different genres and styles of art, all humans are gonna have the ability to engage with some of them. Maybe not to the level they’ll become famous for it but they can do it.
Edit: to provide a personal example, I suck at drawing and painting but I used to do actual paper collage art, which doesn’t require you make any images yourself but is instead about the composition of other premade images. With pretty good results.
top one is giving 1990s magic the gathering. sick.
but i don’t want to cure cancer, i want to turn people into dinosaurs.
art is in some ways a uselessly broad category, people don’t want to make things generically, they want to make something more specific than that, it does no good to tell me to go make a sandcastle because i can actually physically do that to some extent when my creative desire is for something else.
Okay, but then their frustration isn’t that “art is inaccessible” it’s that they can’t visually represent images in their head to a level they’d deem impressive.
Which is frustrating I guess when you want to make a nice looking avatar for your discord DND game, but you aren’t being denied access to anything. Also there’s millions of fantasy concept art pics for free out there you can probs find something nice looking for you kitsune rogue.
i disagree, based on what people have called “inaccessible” for the last decade+, this is a perfectly fine usage of inaccessible.
Both of those images are great
Aw that’s so kool <3 thanks for uploading
yeah i think there’s some ADHD thing that short circuits the connection between my mind image and my fingies
and i doodled and drew for years up until my late teens. also took tons of classes, including drawing classes in college.
luckily I read a lot and apparently could write well (back then at least) and did that instead. but I was always envious of people that can just do the whole “my hand is a printer connected to my brain”.
I’m curious if you’ve tried https://drawabox.com/
It’s set up to be very rote and effort in = results out. If you like studying and practicing that way, it works a lot differently than the typical advice.
drawabox is one of the worst programs for learning something from scratch i have ever tried. That shit is horrible. I am capable of imagining its good for people who already draw a bit and want to get better, but from scratch its horrible.
i’ve heard of that and it looks reasonable but i’m busy with blender things and the feedback loop is more compatible with where my head is at.
I’m not categorically against generative AI tools and believe they can be fun and useful. I just don’t think you can call their output art. I would compare them to character creators and similar creative tools in video games
You wouldn’t call yourself a character designer after making a cool custom fighter in SoulCalibur or an interior designer after making a house in the Sims, but that doesn’t take away the fact that both are valid creative outlets
tbh create a soul have enough going on that you could do character design in it, if we just mean visuals. i remember when mario maker was new a bunch of actual game devs were like “holy shit i wish our tools were as good as this level editor”
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