Best Of

I must say that I am now genuinely torn between two very conflicting states :

• On one hand the combative spirit is a powerful driver, and the rollercoaster of the last few days/weeks put a lot of incredibly important things in sharp perspective : how one expresses oneself through their craft as imperfect as it may be, and how it is possible to retrace the whole life of a person through the marks they left. This is imho truly beautiful stuff, especially in contrast to incredibly polished "/beautiful woman, /big breasts, /sunset, /4k, /8k, /realistic, /superrealistic, /in the style of xxx, /trending on yyy" AI vomit. Even the small mistakes sometimes made by master craftsmen become suddenly more beautiful than ever in my eyes. Seriously : Frazzetta posters, Bilal and Moebius comics pages, Miyazaki storyboards, and of course Kim Jung Gi madlad murals are real tear jerkers now because of how beautifully imperfect their art is in many ways.

• However ... on the other hand the complete disregard to the love that artists put into their craft (as expressed by the incredible toxicity of AI bros, the deafening silence of Artstation/Epic, and the way the masses splurge on LensaAi (including tech "influencers" who should really know better) is just an incredibly heavy weight to carry and that's really new. I of course understand that people who never had the desire (and from there the opportunity) to be involved in a creative field are unlikely to know the feeling of rolling up their sleeves to tackle a seemingly huge task as a team and eventually getting it done ; so I can't blame them for not knowing that the biggest motivator is knowing that someone out there will appreciate the result. But now that there is an audience absolutely ready to consume (and generate) bot-made content at breakneck speeds thanks to an unethically trained model, I feel like the incentive for artists to work on entertainment properties will take a nosedive. Why put in the hard work, if a massive part of the audience doesn't actually care that someone did it ? This is now impossible to blissfully Ignore.

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I also feel like it will be harder than ever for younger artists to gather the strength to self-improve and attempt to reach the heights of the masters they look up to when knowing full well that someone, somewhere is gleefully typing up prompts to generate pictures straight up emulating that one fragile thing they cherish. Of course that doesn't prevent anyone from picking up a pencil, but the mental background noise to filter out is pretty damn massive. This simply wasn't there before and this is very invasive in many ways.

Same for seasoned pros : I just can't imagine Miyazaki gathering up strength to design/direct another movie after witnessing people gleefully generating facsimiles of his art at the click of a button (because of course "in the style of Ghibli" is a popular prompt).

On the plus side, perhaps the sometimes challenging and tedious aspects of "human" art will become something to cherish more than ever. But for it to be even possible, one still needs to put a roof over ones head first ...

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Lastly another somewhat related shower thought : Now that AS/Epic crapped the bed, artists from all over the entertainment industry have a permanent grudge against them. How can this possibly be reconciled with the massive market penetration of Unreal Engine in games and now TV and movies as well ? Sure enough there's a irreconcilable personal conflict there for anyone working at a studio commercially tied to UE. Or (sigh ...) producing marketplace assets.

You said it yourself, "his sincere desire to continue to draw and become an artist because that's how he feels most connected to others and regulates his own well being." — he sounds like a true artist, someone who needs to do art for his own human reasons. This should never be discouraged, even if it becomes unlikely as a career. Art has its own value, separate from the capitalist rigamarole.

This thread has been a pretty good read all around. Sad, funny, ironic, depressing, and uplifting all in one. How fun. Some random thoughts to toss into the fire. Some of this will be rehashed shit in slightly different words, I just feel like writing again:

I think the whole "AI doesn't store data - nothing is stored, so nothing is stolen!" argument is hilarious. How would we define storing data? A piece of technology that holds information in a form that allows it to display, deliver, or have a user access that information at a later time? If AI can "learn" something well enough that it can reproduce it - then it's fucking storing the data. Maybe not as a .jpg, maybe not in a way that can be easily searched in a traditional "files" sense, but it's a technological thing that can retrieve data and allow you to access it (afghan girl being a solid example). That's fucking storage - might be non-traditional storage, might not be wholly reliable storage, but it is storage nonetheless. Next you're going to tell me my brain doesn't store data, because you can't access my memories with a Windows OS.

Another thought - I am just sick to fucking death of the whole "AI is good, it lets everyone express their ideas!" Spoilers, ideas are useless. Dime a dozen. Nobody gives a shit about ideas. Ideas are not impressive, ideas are not uncommon, and a significant majority of ideas are not unique. "Boy wizard with dead parents goes to wizard school, fights bad wizard who is like the baddest bad wizard". "Hot guy with cool voice and silver hair and like, doesn't age fights demons and monsters and stuff and also is in love with powerful magic lady who also basically gets to stay young and hot forever and they run into djinn and witches and elves and wraiths and all the supernatural fantasy stuff". Don't give a shit. The execution of the idea is what matters and being reliant on AI means you're not executing it (or at least, not a substantial part of it) - and consequently, you don't get credit for it.

I think that's something only actual artists can really appreciate - what it means to actually know your idea. To actually know what you want it to look like, or at least to have to consciously make every decision in its creation. Most people don't actually realize how unfamiliar they are with their own idea, their own "design". Until they try to actually create it. Then they realize, "Oh shit, I don't actually know what this guy looks like, in detail. I don't know how tall he is. I don't know where the seams on his clothes are. I don't know how long his arms are compared to his body. I don't know what kinds of buttons are on his shirt. I don't know what the lip of his boots looks like exactly. In what...style, should this be depicted in? What actually makes that style work?"

But once you do know - once you have designed it, once we can see Geralt of Rivia or whoever it is in detail - how that was executed, then it becomes something of value. The execution is the value. The journey of that execution, and how that impacted the final result - that is its identity. When you make it, you own it. When you don't do that - it's not yours, and I don't give a shit about it. You don't get artist points for picking the right prompts and personally selecting the results anymore than I get points when I type some shit into google images. Even if I spent a really long time on google images.

Final thought:

Funnily enough, if you actually know what you want - if you actually have an idea, down to the details - I can't tell that AI's really any faster at all. In the bit of testing I've done - I've never been able to get AI to actually show me what I want. And by the time I get even remotely, sort-of-kinda-eh-I-guess-it's-similar, I could've just done it myself. I've seen many pro-AI folk actually use this exact same argument, "It's really hard to get AI to show you exactly what you want - it took days to get it to generate _______!"

And that's something that actually strengthens my distaste for AI works - because it is so incredibly difficult to get AI to generate EXACTLY what you had in mind (assuming you had something very specific in mind)...

Then, chances are - if they're an AI "artist" - well...we're not actually seeing their designs - what they had in mind, are we? So they want credit for... not executing the work, AND credit for showing us something that's only sort of close to what they had in mind?

Hahaha.

No.

Actual final thought:

It does warm my heart to see the discussion here on Polycount. I feel quite proud to know this community, and to have been so molded by it. I appreciate everyone sharing their thoughts on the subject, even though it's kind of a shitty subject.