Source (Bluesky)
Whoever thinks they could get away with such tripe at Dragon Con, full of the most rabid fans of the characters they’re “arting”. Not to mention the copyright issues.
This reminds me so much of the HDR photo craze. I remember seeing booths just like this!
Going to local restaurants/attractions and seeing shitty “art” with price tags starting over $200. They were all bad digital photos, taken with no comprehension or awareness of lighting, perspective, composition, etc. Cloddishly fiddle with various sliders, maybe delete the entire green color channel for some reason, hey I discovered this filter called Posterize, hit print.
A third of them were angle shots of the photo-takers modded Subaru. I’m trying to paint a picture here, don’t take it literally.
I am sincerely hoping, despite my positions against AI for most applications, that there will be some positive effects in the end from this AIArt baloney.
I think the same-y-ness of what the visual generators are outputting will wear so thin on people, so quickly. Because in a broad sense they’re all drawing from the same “averaging out”. And maybe there will be a bit of a cultural backlash, if you will, where people unconsciously become attracted back to hand made things. I don’t think we as a huge collective blob of humanity will be able to stand hearing the same note over and over.
Maybe I’m deluding myself, hell I probably am to a degree.
This reminds me of an old story I heard about how a very talented pottery artist got a lifetime ban from the handcraft fair for selling molded products (pottery made with molds, not by hand).
It was interesting because his quality items actually were handcrafted, he just had molded basic stuff on the side that I guess was selling decently well.
Would be funny if an AI booth did the same.
I am an artist who works exclusively in the medium of gummy
bears?
What if actual artist are using AI to enhance their art. Like, they draw stuff and then scan and edit with AI imaging software to make changes and add depth, etc. Is that allowed? It’s still an artist creating art, they just enhance it with readily available editing software?
What if you just get better at doing your art instead of using a skills-reducing crutch?
What if you also made it clear that a large part of your art is AI-created instead of passing it off as human-made?
What if you stopped making disingenuous arguments in favour of slop?
It’s not me or my art. Dude is an amazing artist, in any media format. I am not being disengenous, nice try. I am also not defending fake AI art as art. Just like any tool, in the right hands it can craft marvelous things. How is using rendering software any different? It just speeds up the process, but time and effort are still applied. You have to know how to use it to use it well. He does t generate images, he enhances his own art. He also went back to school on his 40s to study machine learning because he finds it fascinating and cool. Not your average Joe.
OK. Replace “you” with “your friend from Canada who totally really exists and isn’t made up for rhetorical purposes”.
Hey man, believe what you want. You are wrong and I ain’t afraid of telling you so. I’ll bet a million bucks you don’t know a single artist. I know dozens of them, but only one that likes to use AI, that I am aware of. Not a lot of use for it in the sculpture medium I suppose? I’m an artist to, though not commercially. I can barely draw, have no interest in using AI for anything. I’m just saying, but you’re not here for it. Cool. Big boogey man scary! I get it.
Right. I’m not here for AI slop boosting. Absolutely correct.
This is why the group is called, literally “Fuck AI”.
Maybe you need to find or start a “Can I Please Orally Service AI?” group.
Is this whole stand an art piece? Even better is this whole stand an AI generated art piece?
I’m getting into some anime art. I never really liked the art style of a lot of it but I’ve found a couple artist that do really beautiful works. What’s a good source for finding artist that are similar to artist you like already?
One thing that bothers me about most of anime art is that it’s just filled with drawings of female characters with balloons on their chest.
I don’t even mind artist doing nudity or “sexy” artwork. My favorite artist I found primarily does that. But it’s so hard to find good art even if it’s not AI. I feel like most of it is just drawn by 30 year old virgins that have never seen a women’s body before.
Edit: Soranamae is my favorite artist I’ve found. Most is NSFW stuff. I wish they had more variety or did different characters more because their art is beautiful. The saddest thing I found was some AI model trained specifically to mimic their art style. Made me upset.
Pixiv is a site that was made for japanese artists, though it’s technically open to anyone.
An unconventional way is to look for artists from yearly releases. I have 2022 of this one:
https://united-states.kinokuniya.com/bw/9784046848000
And you can even find regional artists from similar artbooks
https://www.tcb.tw/en/news/596
Edit: I forgot to mention but you don’t have to purchase the physical book, you can find the features artists like so:
Pixiv is what I’ve been using. I guess I should research Japanese tags better. I really wish there was a “no balloons” or just a “natural looking” tag to filter it. I will definitely look at the artists other artists interact or follow though. That’s a good idea.
I get that it might be “obvious” in this case, but how do they actually prove it?
There are lots of artists that get called AI because theiir style is the kind that AI uses. So how do they make sure they dont kick one of those people out.
There are many tells for AI art.
My favourites are:
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Look for a long thing that is briefly interrupted by something covering it. A good one is, say, the button line of a shirt that has a crossing shoulder belt or the like. Another is a long branch that goes behind another object like a person. Yet another is a walking stick that goes behind a cloak or sword or something. Almost invariably the line does not match on each side of the interrupting object. Often it doesn’t even continue at all. So with the buttons, you’ll see the line of buttons, the belt … and then just fabric. Or the buttons have jumped to the left by half a torso. Or some other such artifact.
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Talking of buttons, look for buttons that don’t do anything. Like a line of buttons on what looks like a sweatshirt or the like: i.e. no gap that needs buttoning. Or buttons that look like they’re buttoning the shirt into the jacket. Or buttons that parallel the main, legit button line temporarily for no reason. (And no, I don’t mean double-breasted jackets!) Or buttons that change styles for no reason. Slopmongers have a very hard time making buttons consistent.
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Text. 'Nuff said. Even the newer models still fuck this up, usually either by having gibberish that only resembles writing if you flash over it quickly with your eyes, or by having text with terrible spelling, weird artifacts that has the text growing into or out of other things, or text that sounds like it was robotically generated.
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Appendages. It’s amazing to me that after all this time and money was spent, you still can’t get consistent numbers of fingers, thumbs, toes, or even primary limbs. We all know the finger thing, but how may times have you noticed the phantom extra hand or two?
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Eyes. Eyes are usually well drawn, actually, but they tend to look everywhere and anywhere but where it might make sense.
All of these flaws (and many, many more) are a result of the slopmaker not having any kind of model of what it’s making. Lines stop or shift for no reason because it doesn’t know that the line on one side of an obstacle is the same as the line on the other. Eyes don’t look at sensible things because it has no idea what the picture is of and thus no idea where eyes would naturally be directed. In general look for things that require a coherent mental model to do right and you’ll spot the AI in no time flat.
Not long before we see a lot of art that is created manually to look like AI slop, where they intentionally do that stuff.
That won’t last long as it gets dumped on the heap of stuff people don’t want to look at.
All these can be touched up if the maker is actually trying to put any effort into it.
But if they’re just using diffusion as a stencil or editor, and they disclose the process… That’s fine, really. That’s more akin to extensively using photoshop.
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Just like speed running, artists will now have to video tape their process if done digitally. I think Photoshop documents as well as other formats can track version history.
Artists have been doing exactly that for decades. I used to run a larger art community around 2016-2018 and providing several in-progress sketches or a video was a minimum requirement for being featured on the homepage. It made sure that people didn’t just literally download someone else’s work and put their signature on it.
I fail to see the difficulty, if the style isn’t obvious enough, the organisers can just ask them to draw/sketch something on the spot or check their previous work on social media (bonus points if they have VODs drawing while streaming).
I dibt think artist shoukd have to prove that though. Abd while im sure its pretty uncommon this would stop an artist sending someone else to a con to sell their works if they cant make it themselves.
Or would be fairly easy to spoof, maybe the guy selling AI can actually draw well enough to put a rough sketch down, or can pull someone elses vod as proof.
this would stop an artist sending someone else to a con to sell their works if they cant make it themselves.
This point has nothing to do with identifying AI
sellersscammers. Real artists already have to notify and confirm with the organisers if they’ll be attending or if someone else will be (due to them having different passes and access), this changes nothing.Or would be fairly easy to spoof, maybe the guy selling AI can actually draw well enough to put a rough sketch down, or can pull someone elses vod as proof.
If the person can draw well enough for that, then I have this stupid faith that they would rather pursue that high of drawing by their own means than to rely on selling shit. If they play someone else’s VOD… I find that hard to achieve, since most either show a webcam or an avatar of some sort, which can be identified and then check the socials which can lead to them saying if they would be attending or not. If they show a cropped video/image… well that just would make it worse for them.
Like… yeah, if the organisers are idiots or plain don’t care about the event, then I can see these kind of things happening, otherwise it’s such a huge stretch that I fail to see the problem.
Now someone just needs to start doing this to all of them (and the lazy 3d print booths) popping up in farmers markets…
Where is it? Nice avenue it must be if they do this.
Dragon Con is Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, Georgia. (Annual). It’s the second largest con behind Comic con I believe. Used to have around 65,000-80,000 people but that was a while back. Not sure what it has now
I have no problem with people selling AI art, it’s just… Tell people that’s what you’re doing.
Finding cool images and printing them off to sell to people is a thing people do. Print services have been selling the same thing, more or less. They’re printing the images and that’s worth something.
But don’t lie to me about it. Be upfront about what’s going on, and let the buyer decide. Also, be aware of your surroundings. Don’t go to an art expo and try to sell AI slop. That’s just disrespectful. Maybe do it on a street corner or something idk. Set up a kiosk at the mall.
Context matters.
I mean, I wouldn’t pay for a print of AI slop, but I imagine there are people who see cool pictures and just want to pick them up… That’s not me, but I’m sure that’s someone.
They don’t want to disclose that’s AI art because people won’t buy it or at least not for the same price as art made by people. AI “artists” mislead for a reason.
There’s also the knee jerk reactions. There’s indie games that are being called AI slop.
Theres one game thats $1.50 but getting ripped because the dev admitted to using AI to create the cut scenes. That’s all it was.
I agree, and the picture in the original post is the outcome of that.
If they charge printing fees plus a modest markup, and disclose that it’s AI generated, they’d make fewer sales per hour and less money per sale, but they would be able to operate for more hours and likely go home with more money.
The math on this isn’t hard, but it requires thinking more long term/economically than I’ve ever seen from selfish/capitalistic people who would do this kind of thing.
It’s possible for ‘AI art’ to not be crap.
One can use sophisticated tools, like depth maps and controlnet, to compose an image/video in all sorts of ways. One can spend hours touching up a generation in photoshop, like, you know, an artist that actually cares about what they’re presenting. One can use models that don’t feed blood sucking corporations. And like you said, one can disclose the whole process, upfront.
It’s just that the vast majority is crap from a few keywords mashed into ChatGPT, with zero deliberate thought in the work and that full ‘tech bro quick scam’ vibe.
So I guess what I’m saying is this:
Tell people that’s what you’re doing.
Is an unlikely scenario.
“AI artists” seem to be scammers. They will lie about their process. That’s who will attend things like this.
Meanwhile, the few hobbyist artists with diffusion in their creative pipeline would never dare show up to a place like this, because of the scammers ruining any hope of a civil reception.
It’s also important to remember these models are trained by sampling (imitating aspects of) images they don’t have the rights to use directly. I think it’s justified being angry about someone using your work -insignificantly mashed together with millions of other people’s work- without your permission, even if it’s to extend a background by 10 pixels lol
It’s also important to remember these models are trained by sampling (imitating aspects of) images they don’t have the rights to use directly.
So is basically every human artist. Basically any artist out there has seen tons of other art prior and draws on that observed corpus to influence their own output. If I commissioned you to draw something you didn’t know what was, you’d go look up other depictions of that thing to get a basis for what you should be aiming at.
The way AI does it is similar, except that it’s looked at way more examples than you but also doesn’t have an understanding of what those things actually are beyond the examples themselves. That last bit is why it used to have so many problems with hands, and still often has problems with writing in the background or desk/table legs.
We can actually look at a hand, and understand it, logically thinking about the composition and style to work with. AI can only copy paste the difference of pixels’ colors on digital images whose metadata happens to contains the word ‘hand’. No matter how many ‘examples’ have been scraped, it can’t actually interpret them the same way we do.
If some alien species asked you to draw part of it’s anatomy that can move into a wide array of configurations, but you are required to do so based only on pictures the aliens sent you that they tell you shows that part among other things, would you do better?
Like, what you said is specifically why it’s bad at hands and table legs and the like - they can appear in many different ways and it’s only reference point for them is pictures of them it’s seen. You understand hands and think logically about them mostly because you have a not just wider but deeper set of experiences to work from. Even then, 4 fingered hands have been common in cartoons because even having hands, being surrounded by other beings with hands and in a culture that makes heavy use of hands a lot of artists have trouble doing them quite right.
It’s also important to remember these models are trained by sampling
IMO, training software on the corpus of human art without payment or attribution is not good for society and art in general, but, humans who create non-abstract are trained and honestly create in a strikingly similar way. The person hired to make an art piece of Catherine the Great doesn’t disclose that he looked at Alexander Roslin’s painting of her and is greatly copying the look and feel for the face or the Google search they used to find options for 1700’s royal clothing. The big difference in process between AI and an artist with reference art is the removal of the human element, and that’s super important.
But instead, we focus on how it was trained, when we train much the same way, or we call it all slop regardless of the actual quality, instead of calling out the real problem, the one problem that we can do something about, it’s taking a living away from humans.
Slop machines have more in common with tracing than with learning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv-5mZ_9CPY
You can hate the output, you can hate copying the IP, you can hate the people involved, but the process is nothing like tracing. It’s closer to black fucking magic :)
It’s not magic.
You’re in a cult.
funny, I didn’t feel like a kettle this morning.
anyway have a good one
Not all them. Some are trained on pure public domain data (though admittedly most folks running locally are probably using Flux or Stable Diffusion out of convenience).
And IMO that’s less of an issue if money isn’t changing hands. If the model is free, and the “art” is free, that’s a transformative work and fair use.
It’s like publishing a fanfic based on a copyrighted body. But try to sell the fic (or sell a service to facilitate such a thing), and that’s a whole different duck.
50 Shades of Grey be like…
Yeah, that’s an interesting case.
I guess there was no incentive for Stephenie Meyers and E. L. James (and their movie adaptation money banks, Lionsgate and Universal) to sue. But apparently it was brought up in some kind of lawsuit over an actual pornographic adaptation:
In June 2012, the film company Smash Pictures announced its intent to film a pornographic version of the Fifty Shades book trilogy…
Smash Pictures responded to the lawsuit by issuing a counterclaim and requesting a continuance, stating that “much or all” of the Fifty Shades material was part of the public domain because it was originally published in various venues as a fan fiction based on the Twilight series. A lawyer for Smash Pictures further commented that the federal copyright registrations for the books were “invalid and unenforceable” and that the film “did not violate copyright or trademark laws”.[206] The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum and Smash Pictures agreed to stop any further production or promotion of the film.[207]
I mean Thomas Kinkade built an empire on basically the same bullshit so like, a lot of people will do it. Although at one point he was selling his own brand of slop as an investment.
Perhaps don’t call it “art” either since it’s just the result of one’s and zeros spewing out data… those people are not “artists” just talentless hacks…
It is sadly, not far removed from how a lot of photography works, especially now.
Take thousands of pictures, pick the few that look good. Even bad photographers get lucky often enough.
I’m not saying it’s the same, there are obvious differences. But it’s not a huge leap.
I’m sorry but that’s a really dumb take discrediting millions of photographers around the world.
Theres more to photography than taking thousand of pictures and just pick the one where you got lucky. Painters often also need many trys to get their art perfect.
You also have to go somewhere to take pictures. Then invest the time to find different angles of the subject. Then select the ones that you like best and edit them.
Theres a massive difference in taking a nice portrait of a real subject vs prompt “engineering” one in two minutes from your smartphone on the toilet.
Of course photography is much more accessible today, but so are most art forms nowadays.
I’m sorry I’ve worked with a dozen or so photographers. Some good, several very bad, and one or two who are genuinely talented.
They’re all shooting as much as they can and picking what they like. Editing is 90 percent of the job.
One gal literally had no idea what any of the functions on her camera even did, just let it do everything. She just had a good eye for it in the editing room, and shot enough to take luck out of the equation. She is still being shown in galleries around town and has a stall at all the craft fairs around town. Photography is the only thing she does. The few who were and remain talented photographers aren’t standing head and shoulders above their competition. The two really talented guys are teaching.
Brother, you’re not sounding very discerning here.
Just because some clown picked up a camera and started taking pictures, and representing themselves as a pro photographer, doesn’t mean shit.
There is still a skill and a science that professional photographers employ.
You surrounding yourself with hacks does not mean everyone who does photography is a hack, like are you that silly?
I can buy a basketball and then call myself a basketball player. It’s not a protected title. That doesn’t mean there’s no skill to basketball, and success in the game just means throwing the ball enough times and hoping probability takes over.
You don’t have to master all the functions of a camera to make art with it, just like noone expects a componist to play every instrument. Or a painter how to make his own colors. Of course it helps, but thats not part of what makes it art.
Also, if editing is 90 percent of the job, would you say thats not part of the art?
And why would the art be less valuable just because you took more pictures than you show? Does a musician publish every piece of melody they have ever created? Does an authornpublish every text?
Art is just something that makes you think, though, and jogs something inside of you. Hell, you could print this thread out and sell it, and suddenly it’s “art”. The point is, I don’t care about the process so much, I care about the end result: how it makes me feel as a consumer of art.
This is why “art” itself is not just a passing fad, but a constant commentary on the zeitgeist, often poking fun at it, or presenting it from a different angle or through a different lense than you personally would have been looking through.
That’s why I would caution everyone here to not “throw the baby out with the bath water”.
Is thoughtless AI slop itself “art” - no, obviously, of course not!! In fact I’m glad this person was booted. But it can (and will) be leveraged by realtm artists who are trying to land a point, so I would encourage all critics of AI to have clear eyes and an open mind so they can enjoy all the very VERY fun and thought/conversation-provoking art that is to come on the subject of (or rebelling against) generative AI in the coming years.
The point is, I don’t care about the process so much, I care about the end result
And here a lot of artists would disagree with you. Because for artists, the act of creating is as important as - if not even more important than - the end product. To quote a smart college student’s musings I once heard: “Art is how artists process life experiences.”
The rest I agree with, AI is a tool and the biggest issues with it are the people who are creating it and the people abusing it and making life for artists worse. Adam Savage once said that someday some film student will do something really amazing with AI (and then Hollywood will steal it and copy it into the ground), but that hasn’t happened yet. He said that what he cares about when he looks at a piece is what he can see of the artist in that piece, and with AI, you see nothing.
As an aside, there’s a real conversation to be had about how the word “consumer” has replaced all forms of interaction in our vocabulary. We no longer enjoy or appreciate art - we consume it; we’re not customers, we’re consumers, etc. But that’s not really relevant to the conversation except as a comment on how companies have pushed all forms of enjoyment down to the level of eating a fast food burger.
Other dude doesn’t understand the difference between imaging and art. Art is the human perspective. This apparently is more than they can comprehend.
if a banana taped to a wall is art than processing millions of images, finding correlation between said images and their captions and using the vectors to find those patterns in noise is art too
A banana taped to the wall has more human expression than any AI generated image
human expression has never been a requirement for art, apes can make art too
This is at the core of why you don’t understand anything and everybody is yelling at you and down voting you.
Art is not the same as imaging.
A computer can output imaging. A human artist can output art, which is the human perspective portrayed via imaging.
No it’s a scam for money laundering.
Clearly you can’t draw or paint and just another tech nerd happy to denigrate human made artwork as no different from the garbage spat out of a machine with little to no thought other than “draw me in Ghibli style”
Perhaps try understanding what art means and stop trying to equate human made art with mass produced content garbage?
Plenty of other artwork to choose yet funny how people always want to bring up the banana taped to a wall as an example as to why art is nonsense you must be an American 🙄
R. Mutt 1917 flashbacks
I do so much art printing pages upon pages of /dev/urandom, please buy some. Computer made it artfully in art form.
My local hardware store has been selling cheap random “art” like this here for as long as I can remember. It’s copy-pasted low-quality slop since way before AI existed. I don’t see any more or less artistic value in a mass-produced print like that versus an AI generated image.
In that context, I really couldn’t care less whether that slop has been made in 5 minutes in paint by some underpaid intern or in 5 minutes using ChatGPT.
But if you go to an art expo with undisclosed AI “art”… well.
I’m with you, btw.
I mean, you can spend days refining a prompt while looking at a trillion variations of the same possible image. Then trying to upscale it while improving important details instead of losing them. Then checking textures and backgrounds on photoshop to clean up hallucinations.
Or indeed you can just save a cool image from the midjourney feed and print it. There’s no real moral dillema yet because most people aren’t trying to do art with difusion models.
No moral dilemma, but also no legal issue since AI doesn’t get copyright protection.
it’s just… Tell people that’s what you’re doing.
and sell at the appropriate TEMU pricing.
Eh. They can try selling at whatever price they want. As long as they disclose its AI art then people should be able to make the evaluation for themselves. I’m not convinced selling at lower prices makes things any better. If anything that might backfire and people expect real artists to compete with the ai low prices.
They can generate thousands of slop in hours. So <$1 is fair.
Whatever the market will bear… I think is the phrase.
So is " a sucker is born every minute". Bored Ape Yacht Club is valued at $404M.
You love to see it!
Now penalize all corporations for using it and boycott any you catch doing so. Its nearly impossible. But we can try. Fuck the theft of art and humanity.
I walked through the vendor hall on Sunday and I was skeptical of a few of the tables. I think that’s more due to AI being trained on these types of artists.
The time stamp of this was Monday but not sure I would even remember the artist if you showed me
I haven’t been to Dragon Con in a number of years, and the only prints I bought I’m sure someone would think were possibly AI now. A lot of the AI models were likely trained on art prints found at conventions
Holy shit, this brought a big smile to my face today, thank you! 😄
