US gov rejects OpenAI's request for financial bailout, Sam Altman is cracking. This is usually where techbros turn to hard drugs to cope, I've seen it happen before in crypto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj4zATlfwUU
"People want genuine things, like actual paintings", some say.
Two years after this thread was originally starated here is where we are now : "Instagram artists" scamming museums with their tracing-to-canvas-and-color-matching-within-the-lines of Midjourney slop.
This being unnoticed by a whole team of museum employees goes to show that people outside of the tech world are so incredibly uneducated on these topics. I suppose the silver lining is that at some point it's going to become so very obvious, since everyone can learn how to trace and color from reference in about a weekend.
speaking as a former student of fine-art ... The thought of art-world wankers getting (effectively) scammed gives me a lovely warm feeling - I'm giving this one a pass
"People want genuine things, like actual paintings", some say.
Two years after this thread was originally starated here is where we are now : "Instagram artists" scamming museums with their tracing-to-canvas-and-color-matching-within-the-lines of Midjourney slop.
This being unnoticed by a whole team of museum employees goes to show that people outside of the tech world are so incredibly uneducated on these topics. I suppose the silver lining is that at some point it's going to become so very obvious, since everyone can learn how to trace and color from reference in about a weekend.
So, what exactly was scamming about this? I see videos of her painting, I see skillful work, I see boring subjects... visual candy, which is a lot of what AI offers, for sure, but-- what's new or particularly scammy here? Do you have proof of AI being used as the traced source? And beyond that, what makes that different from any other number of traditional art techniques, like camera obscura tracing, etc? Assuming AI IS the source, does that immediately make it a scam? Or, if it's just visually akin to AI work, does that make it a scam? Googling, I'm not finding anything obvious about this artist and generative AI.
Do I find this work compelling? Not at all. At the same time, I also don't find those huge painted copies of photos compelling either, and those are in museums. Jeff Koons is in museums...
If this is AI, truly, then fine-- but it kind of feels like reactive paranoia to me.
..So, what exactly was scamming about this? I see videos of her painting, I see skillful work, I see boring subjects... visual candy, which is a lot of what AI offers, for sure, but-- what's new or particularly scammy here? ...
What is so scammy about the work (the link doesn't work for me so I cant view it, just an educated guess) is the cheat. I worked as an illustrator for 10 years in Holland and we often used polaroid cameras for our work. Uneducated and inexperienced people called that cheating too. That is until you put them under the projector and they quickly found out that it isn't easy at all. If you are curious just try to trace over a human and see how far you get. Yes I actually did that to some loud mouthed prick who slinked away to be forever forgotten. So that hair has been split.
Filling in a prompt is vastly different from actually engaging in the activity yourself. In fact stealing is stealing and the drawing is at the foundation of this example. AI is a toy to be used by the inexperienced, unimaginative and hypocritical.
Renaissance masters traced and copied work whilst apprenticed, a relevant technique in order to train hand eye coordination and if indeed ai prompt projected reference executed by 'paint-by-numbers' then traditional training is still required to manually fill in blank space, with oils no less onto large gesso primed canvas. Quite a difficult medium to work with in the first place, anyway in my opinion only discrepancy was that sketched either traced or drawn freehand...
There are people on artstation consistently getting hundreds of likes and often reaching the front page with AI stuff, so even pro artists can’t tell what is AI just at a glance anymore
It absolutely is Midjourney tracing, because this person doesn't work from imagination (that's obvious, since not even the greatest comicbook artists who ever lived can do this kind of accurate material rendering without reference) ; and the work isn't photo-based either, since never does she mention setting up photoshoots or hiring models. And, all the usual signs of AI are there ... including the poorly fixed hands.
And of course, during interviews showing her all busy working on a painting, the reference is not shown. She is purposedly misrepresenting what she does.
It's all a very cynical act. The *whole* thing is based on a lie by ommission making the museum curators and the visitors believe that she somehow conjures these images in her mind onto the canvas, through "years of studying colors and materials" ... whereas this is just paint-by-numbers-inside-the-lines of Midjourney slop. And poorly done, too : just look at the buildings above the silver twins She'd probably be more accurate if she turned her reference and canvas upside down, working "blind".
I suppose that her earlier works are photo traces ... which happens to be 100% illegal if the photos aren't her own, or if she didn't aquire a proper license from the photographer. The fact that countless people have been doing that for decades doesn't change a thing If anything, the "art world" turning a blind eye on the theft of photos for so long is IMHO in part responsible for the flood of AI-tracers. Hence I am in agreement with @poopipe on that.
Also, while the process of tracing and color matching is the same regardless of the source (it being MJ or an actual photo), a MJ source simply means that the work is not that of *any* human ; and on top of it, the stylized quality of MJ images makes them even easier to colormatch than photos. This is why it is so easy to, say, port MJ-prompted images in the style of famous (but preferably dead) illustrators onto a canvas - because all the simplification is already provided.
I actually don't have a problem with photo tracing and color matching being part of the process of constructing an illustration ; it's boring and *very* easy to do but it can certainly be part of a whole. But here this isn't that. 100% of the qualities of the work come from the Midjourney output, and 0% from the person.
@pior I think you're making a lot of reactive assumptions-- which may or may not be correct. But I don't think we should encourage this culture of suspicion towards art just because of AI. Especially since we have no real proof she uses AI in any way, in my opinion. This becomes a witch-hunt in its own right. And the last thing I want is for artists doing their thing to have to worry about being accused of using AI when they don't. If we care about art, why would we want to encourage suspicion without explicit proof?
The hands are pretty bad, but they don't scream AI to me. They scream amateurish hands.
A lot of art out there visually may as well be AI, but I still like that that art exists, because it's taking a job from AI, and giving it to a human with a sense of craft but maybe no ability for creative thought. And that will always be more interesting than AI. And the last thing I want to do is discourage those people.
There's a reason a lot of midjourney stuff looks the way it does. Lest we forget, it stole from us first. Can we really now turn around and say "Midjourney is unique in looking the way it does" and assume anything colorful and boring is AI? That would be a shame, and it would be a victory for AI.
In a vacuum I'd mostly agree with you (outside of "A lot of art out there [...] thought". This part makes no sense )
But here, the simple fact that she lies by ommission during the interview by clearly misrepresenting her work (roleplaying as someone conjuring detail and colors onto canvas without reference) is personally all I need to see in order to be 99.99% convinced that it is all a grift relying on Midjourney tracing and color matching. And to be honest I don't really give her the remaining 0.01% of benefit of the doubt, since even if it was (uncredited = illegal) photo tracing then the stolen source for these images of twins holding hands would be known.
Anno 117 recently shipped with generated content that was noticed by the general public, Mark Derrah of Bioware fame discusses. tldr; studios are testing the waters of what is and what isn't acceptable, and shipping with generated content was intentional.
Large transfer of wealth from taxpayers to big tech, tax breaks and incentives on AI data centers. We are headed for another (3rd? 4th? Like school shootings in America, I lose track of these after awhile) recession
Not saying they're like that, I never worked with them, but knowing some about the tabletop industry the cynic in me can't help but think "sure, ML would be more expensive than artists". TTRPG 2D art pay is notoriously bad, deadlines tend to be very short — every day is crunch day, and so are your weekends — and the pressure of the deluge of slop on rates has not been positive, best case scenario they stopped keeping up with inflation. There's little room to replace artists with ML there without going full bad ML art and cranking out generic sus products.
Yesterday, Google announced Project Genie,
a new generative AI tool that can apparently create entire games from
just prompts. It leverages the Genie 3 and Gemini models to generate a
60-second interactive world rather than a fully playable one. Despite
this, many investors were scared out of their wits, imagining this as
the future of game development, resulting in a massive stock sell-off
that has sent the share prices of various video game companies
plummeting.
The firms affected by this include Rockstar owner
Take-Two Interactive, developer/distributors like CD Projekt Red and
Nintendo, along with even Roblox — that one actually makes sense. Most of the games you find on the platform, including the infamous "Steal a Brainrot," are not too far from AI slop, so it's poetic that the product of a neural network is what hurt its stock.
Unity's share price fell the most at 20%, since it's a popular game engine.
Replies
Two years after this thread was originally starated here is where we are now : "Instagram artists" scamming museums with their tracing-to-canvas-and-color-matching-within-the-lines of Midjourney slop.
This being unnoticed by a whole team of museum employees goes to show that people outside of the tech world are so incredibly uneducated on these topics. I suppose the silver lining is that at some point it's going to become so very obvious, since everyone can learn how to trace and color from reference in about a weekend.
The thought of art-world wankers getting (effectively) scammed gives me a lovely warm feeling - I'm giving this one a pass
Do you have proof of AI being used as the traced source? And beyond that, what makes that different from any other number of traditional art techniques, like camera obscura tracing, etc? Assuming AI IS the source, does that immediately make it a scam? Or, if it's just visually akin to AI work, does that make it a scam? Googling, I'm not finding anything obvious about this artist and generative AI.
Do I find this work compelling? Not at all. At the same time, I also don't find those huge painted copies of photos compelling either, and those are in museums. Jeff Koons is in museums...
If this is AI, truly, then fine-- but it kind of feels like reactive paranoia to me.
Filling in a prompt is vastly different from actually engaging in the activity yourself. In fact stealing is stealing and the drawing is at the foundation of this example. AI is a toy to be used by the inexperienced, unimaginative and hypocritical.
It absolutely is Midjourney tracing, because this person doesn't work from imagination (that's obvious, since not even the greatest comicbook artists who ever lived can do this kind of accurate material rendering without reference) ; and the work isn't photo-based either, since never does she mention setting up photoshoots or hiring models. And, all the usual signs of AI are there ... including the poorly fixed hands.
And of course, during interviews showing her all busy working on a painting, the reference is not shown. She is purposedly misrepresenting what she does.
It's all a very cynical act. The *whole* thing is based on a lie by ommission making the museum curators and the visitors believe that she somehow conjures these images in her mind onto the canvas, through "years of studying colors and materials" ... whereas this is just paint-by-numbers-inside-the-lines of Midjourney slop. And poorly done, too : just look at the buildings above the silver twins
I suppose that her earlier works are photo traces ... which happens to be 100% illegal if the photos aren't her own, or if she didn't aquire a proper license from the photographer. The fact that countless people have been doing that for decades doesn't change a thing
Also, while the process of tracing and color matching is the same regardless of the source (it being MJ or an actual photo), a MJ source simply means that the work is not that of *any* human ; and on top of it, the stylized quality of MJ images makes them even easier to colormatch than photos. This is why it is so easy to, say, port MJ-prompted images in the style of famous (but preferably dead) illustrators onto a canvas - because all the simplification is already provided.
I actually don't have a problem with photo tracing and color matching being part of the process of constructing an illustration ; it's boring and *very* easy to do but it can certainly be part of a whole. But here this isn't that. 100% of the qualities of the work come from the Midjourney output, and 0% from the person.
I think you're making a lot of reactive assumptions-- which may or may not be correct. But I don't think we should encourage this culture of suspicion towards art just because of AI. Especially since we have no real proof she uses AI in any way, in my opinion. This becomes a witch-hunt in its own right. And the last thing I want is for artists doing their thing to have to worry about being accused of using AI when they don't. If we care about art, why would we want to encourage suspicion without explicit proof?
The hands are pretty bad, but they don't scream AI to me. They scream amateurish hands.
A lot of art out there visually may as well be AI, but I still like that that art exists, because it's taking a job from AI, and giving it to a human with a sense of craft but maybe no ability for creative thought. And that will always be more interesting than AI. And the last thing I want to do is discourage those people.
There's a reason a lot of midjourney stuff looks the way it does. Lest we forget, it stole from us first. Can we really now turn around and say "Midjourney is unique in looking the way it does" and assume anything colorful and boring is AI? That would be a shame, and it would be a victory for AI.
In a vacuum I'd mostly agree with you (outside of "A lot of art out there [...] thought". This part makes no sense
But here, the simple fact that she lies by ommission during the interview by clearly misrepresenting her work (roleplaying as someone conjuring detail and colors onto canvas without reference) is personally all I need to see in order to be 99.99% convinced that it is all a grift relying on Midjourney tracing and color matching. And to be honest I don't really give her the remaining 0.01% of benefit of the doubt, since even if it was (uncredited = illegal) photo tracing then the stolen source for these images of twins holding hands would be known.
We are doomed.
they seem to have taken down the video. Here's a reupload
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/20/tax-breaks-for-tech-giants-data-centers-mean-less-income-for-states.html
https://www.polygon.com/warhammer-ai-games-workshop-ceo-kevin-rountree/
Not saying they're like that, I never worked with them, but knowing some about the tabletop industry the cynic in me can't help but think "sure, ML would be more expensive than artists". TTRPG 2D art pay is notoriously bad, deadlines tend to be very short — every day is crunch day, and so are your weekends — and the pressure of the deluge of slop on rates has not been positive, best case scenario they stopped keeping up with inflation. There's little room to replace artists with ML there without going full bad ML art and cranking out generic sus products.
Good news: AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
Yesterday, Google announced Project Genie, a new generative AI tool that can apparently create entire games from just prompts. It leverages the Genie 3 and Gemini models to generate a 60-second interactive world rather than a fully playable one. Despite this, many investors were scared out of their wits, imagining this as the future of game development, resulting in a massive stock sell-off that has sent the share prices of various video game companies plummeting.
The firms affected by this include Rockstar owner Take-Two Interactive, developer/distributors like CD Projekt Red and Nintendo, along with even Roblox — that one actually makes sense. Most of the games you find on the platform, including the infamous "Steal a Brainrot," are not too far from AI slop, so it's poetic that the product of a neural network is what hurt its stock.
Unity's share price fell the most at 20%, since it's a popular game engine.