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.
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.
Making the sketch felt nice, and I’m enjoying being able to show it to people and say I did art. I keep rereading this thread, and all this validation is going to help me keep going.
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.
It’s stealing
Unless you think people painting replicas to pass off as their own aren’t stealing.
You bring up a great point! When someone does that: Painting a replica and passing it off as their own, what law have they violated? They have committed fraud. That’s a counterfeit.
Is making a counterfeit stealing? No! It’s counterfeitting. That is it’s own category of law.
It’s also a violation of the owner’s copyright but let’s talk about that too: If I pay an artist to copy someone’s work, who is the copyright violator? Me, or the artist that painted it? Neither! It’s a trick question, because copyright law only comes into force when something is distributed. As long as those works never get distributed/viewed to/by the public, it’s neither here nor there.
The way AI works is the same as if you took a book you purchased, threw it in a blender, then started pasting chunks of words out of it in a ransom note.
You need to stop pretending like there’s an excusable way to take something someone else made and pass it off as yours.
But if someone directs the generation of an image, and represents it as an image generated by a tool trained on basically all public images ever, they aren’t really passing off the result as theirs, are they?
It’s hard to understand the resulting image as being made by particular people and stolen from them. None of those people have ever seen it or know it exists, for example; are they genuine co-author?
If you think of it as made by all artists, somehow, can one properly steal something that’s of an essentially publicly-owned or common-heritage nature?
If it couldn’t be made without using their unwilling contributions then that is theft sorry
So the people training the models are stealing art by using it for training over the objections of the artists, right?
The products of the models couldn’t be made without everything that went into the models. But why is (making? using?) those products “theft”, and also thereby bad, versus something like stealing spray paint and doing graffiti on the side of the hardware store? Or shoplifting a bunch of figure drawing reference books and cutting them up into a collage?
The fascist project to transfigure the entire history of art into capital they can rent out is obviously wrong. But surely when you steal a thousand works of art and sum them together to make something else, you’re making the very definition of a transformative work, right? What about all those human artists where appropriating stuff was an important part of the art?
What the AI did isn’t something you can’t do with practice. Besides, you probably wouldn’t have put the belt buckle on the back of the pants. Believe in yourself and work at it.
ai also really fucked up the hands. The more I look at it the worse it gets. It looked great while I was drunk though.
Who cares what other people think? Do you, unapologetically.
I care what people think, because I’m soft and squishy and everything I’ve ever said about not caring was a lie.
That isn’t just upscaling, it colored it in too. If it just upscaled it’d be different.
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?”
yeah. But I need to hear it for myself.
I’m trying, ok?
First. You are an artist. You make actual real art and have skills. Your sketch is pretty good as well.
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.
There is not a well defined “then”. I might not ever get there. I said from the get go that I’m not an artist. I want to be one though.
If you are using AI to do things you cannot do yourself, you’re not an artist- and it’s slop.
Instead. Do it yourself and keep doing it poorly until you do it better. Then poof: an artist emerges.
Yeah, it generated everything that wasn’t the monochrome silhouette. That is AI generated
If you can do a rough sketch this good then yes you are an artist.
Just finish your own art. You already did the hard part.
I think it’s more like a police sketch: it might help you clarify an image you have in your head and communicate it to others, but there’s generally more to art than that (just like conveying an idea through a pastiche of song lyrics isn’t poetry).
Your sketch is essentially a highly detailed prompt. If you want to be an artist, stick with what you can do and use practice and repetition to get better. You’re already far better at drawing than you think you are.
If you insist on using AI to finish out what you sketch, then it becomes a product of AI and everything that comes with that. It is no longer your own work.
That’s the kind of thing that I needed to hear. It’s not what I wanted when I posted, but you’re right. Also, the more I look at the ai version, the less I like it. It looked great when I was drunk last night though.
Being slop or not is not the issue, the real question is is it morally correct. To me it depends on your usage, are you generating stuff for yourself? Then it doesn’t matter. Are you generating stuff to communicate to the artist you’re hiring your intended vision of the thing, or building a mood board or similar? Then it’s probably okay in my book. Are you using the generated image for something or selling it? Then it’s wrong.
Were you on some sort of deadline? That’s the only reason I can think of that you would allow AI to steal this opportunity for you to grow and improve your skills.
I was drunk and lazy, and my hand hurt because it’s been years since I’ve done much drawing. Honestly, I’m liking the ai version less the more I see it. It looked great when I was drunk though.
Wanted to applaud you for being vulnerable, putting your work out there, and facing the tough answer, especially when it wasn’t what you wanted to hear. Shows a lot of character.
Id say dont be lazy. Its a slippery slope. Better to not use it at all if you even have to question it as cheating.
That and its blatant theft. Every llm company should be being sued to the moon and back.
