Best Of

"What you basically would do is to blind the AI by taking away the training data"

I think that is one of the key issues artists want a remedy for. They're basically saying "hey, I didn't post my portfolio online to have it be used by this software unbeknownst to me, that anyone can use for commercial purposes...please remove it."

It's a sensible request. And trivial to do for the software...for the hypothetical blind child in our example: not so much.

It's the wild, wild west for sure. A new frontier. People will want to explore, mistakes will be made, lessons hopefully learned. It's pretty cool to have discourse about here, because it is us, our industry, our peers, our colleagues and friends that can shape and change it.

"It's completely normal for people to want their piece of mind back.

Next false claim. You cannot want back what you never lost."

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Being a contrarian/taking the position of the devil's advocate/being in disagreement is one thing ; showing a pure lack of empathy is another altogether.

I still can not understand the reason why somebody would call it AI "art" in the first place other than for cynical manipulation of social narratives.

For sociopaths everything can be a "tool", even another person. No wonder they are so loud right now in defending AI with rather very weak arguments, e.g. that it is fun for THEM, the reward is so FAST, oh, it's such a cool toy etc.

Ethics is something beyond their understanding.

They simply can not grasp, that many CG artists aren't against AI in general, but against being treated unfair.

Well first of all it is absolutely possible to design AI-driven tools that have been trained ethically. That's what the team behind Cascadeur did, sourcing their own animation work into a tool that helps ... animators.

But that doesn't mean that an AI-assisted tool, even ethically trained, is necessarily desirable. For instance the 2d side of me would (perhaps) not want some magical AI-driven line smoothing tool even if ethically trained, because it would still feel like leeching on the effort of others. Whereas I don't see that much of a problem with algorithmic line processing (as done by LazyNezumi) because it is 100% coming from ingenuity and clever software design, overcoming the limitations of poorly performing or limited hardware and software.

I also don't know what to think of the inevitable "2D to 3D" AI tools. Sure, they'll be fascinating to watch evolve, and sure enough many designers will love the idea of being able to turn their sketches into 3D renders, skipping manual modeling/sculpting/VR Sketching. But is it really that desirable in the long run ?

Also, I tend to think that a place for artists that doesn't allow any AI-generated imagery (even if ethically trained) would overall feel more welcoming and less toxic. I guess we'll see how all this turns out in practice within a few months to a year.

At the end of the day perhaps it comes down to making the conscious choice of not necessarily being at the forefront of technical progress, for the sake of preserving "slow art". Whether such slow art is commercially viable is a big question, but I honestly don't think that the most successful products are necessarily the ones with the most intricately detailed visuals. See pixel art, Minecraft, and so on.