I am genuinely trying to get better at art. I’m not there yet (likely never will be), the lying machine is still better than me.
The context:
This is my sketch.
And this is what the ai output.
I like to think I poured my heart and soul into it. I know there are people who will tell me that I’m terrible for using ai at all. I’m also sorry if this is the wrong community to ask this question (ask reddit would delete my post instantly if I tried to post there).
Again, is this slop? I am not an artist. I drive a forklift real good, that’s my skillset. So if I were to use the ai upscaled version for my book, well, I’m asking for opinions.
First of all it’s your hobby and you can do whatever you want forever. That being said if you want to improve your skills you won’t get there by relying on shortcuts. Drawing is 10% talent and 90% practice as are many creative skills. There are great tutorials out there to teach you about proportions, perspective, lighting and so on. And the most important thing is persistence. Draw everything you want to and try not to care too much about the outcome. If you stay at it then sooner or later you will be able to draw all sorts of things just like you imagined them without even thinking about it.
My opinion is different from most other comments here. AI is a tool. If it gets the job done exactly the way you intended it, there is no problem in using it. In my opinion, it’s only slop if it’s generated mindlessly and without care. In your case, you gave very specific constraints. If the result is exactly what you intended it to be, if you can get behind it 100%, it is your art, it is not slop. I think people need to reflect on their definition of art a bit. There was a time when people claimed using Photoshop made your art unworthy. The new tool is now AI. Just because it makes creating something so easy doesn’t mean a tool is not “allowed” in art. Actually, anything is allowed in art, there are no rules.
The first image is your artwork.
It represents your slow but steady progress in your hobby. It may not be what you want yet, but it is still a stepping stone on your journey.
The second image is a compilation of your artwork and the stolen efforts of millions of unpaid artists, their works unceremoniously ripped away from them and sold as a tech company’s product without any compensation to them for aiding building such a machine. It isn’t art.
Keep at it, yo. Art is a frustrating hobby at times, but enjoy the learning.
Don’t say, “stolen”. It’s the wrong word. “Copied” is closer but really, “trained an AI model with images freely available on the Internet” is more accurate but doesn’t sound sinister.
When you steal something, the original owner doesn’t have it anymore. AIs aren’t stealing anything. They’re sort of copying things but again, not really. At the heart of every AI LLM or image model is a random number generator. They aren’t really capable of copying things exactly unless the source material somehow gets a ridiculously high “score” when training. Such as a really popular book that gets quoted in a million places on the Internet and in other literature (and news articles, magazines, etc… anything that was used to train the AI).
Someone figured out that there’s so much Harry Potter quotes and copies in OpenAI’s training set that you could trick it into outputting something like 70% of the first book, one very long and specific prompt at a time (thousand of times). That’s because of how the scoring works, not because of any sort of malicious intent to violate copyright on the part of OpenAI.
Nobody’s stuff is being stolen.
Nobody’s stuff is being stolen.
An artist’s work is copied without asking or compensating them and then sold as a product.
It’s like piracy, except instead of individuals pirating a corporation’s content (which they can’t actually buy anymore) for their private use, it’s corporations pirating an individual’s content to sell it for profit and drive the individual artist out of the market.So I’d disagree. The images themselves aren’t stolen, but the money that can be made off of them is.
What about self hosted AI image generators or companies who pay royalties to artists for units sold?
I think you have created complicated rules for “piracy I enjoy/condone is good. Copying that I don’t like is bad.”
I don’t see there being a lot of room for to ever defend piracy and also hate AI influenced art
That’s not “upscaling”. That’s having the AI color it in for you. Like a comic artist who has a colorer (person that literally does that).
Upscaling just makes the image bigger (resolution-wise). It uses the same exact technology as regular AI image generation though 🤷
There’s degrees to everything. AI haters are at the point where they’re arguing with digital artists over what counts as art and it’s getting insane.
I think this helps, but I’m not sure what to do with it. Of course, I’m going to keep practicing, and eventually I won’t need ai to help me anymore, but between now and then…
Is there a well defined “then”? Shortcuts are hard to stop arbitrarily using. If your goal is to become a better artist I would focus more on practicing your art instead of fitting AI into your art.
Lemmy largely is very anti AI art. You’re basically going to a vegan convention and asking “Is it ok if I have a little meat? As a treat?”
