AI has its place in art, but it’s limited.
I’m a professional underwater photographer, and AI upsacling and noise removal are excellent tools for me because they serve as technological solutions to technological problems. I put a lot of effort into planning, framing, lighting, etc, but noise and balancing resolution and exposure (higher pixel density on a sensor results in less light reaching each pixel) can have a huge impact that’s unrelated to the art itself.
When the best solution aside from AI-powered retouching is to spend another 40 grand on better equipment, the AI isn’t taking away from me as an artist. It’s giving me the ability to improve my art more affordably.
I read that as professional underwear photographer at first.
“AI” is a shit term. there are many different models and types of AI, the AI used to fold proteins are vastly different to GPT… and calling them all “AI” is a marketing stunt to lump the useful models with useless LLMs or diffusion models.
AI tools are useful and amazing, but “Generative AI” are just useless slop machines
Even gen AI has its place in my workflow. Gor instance, if there’s a random bit of floating debris that catches the strobe on my camera and fucks up a portion of the image with the backscatter, generative fill tools vastly simplify the process of removing it. Yeah, I can do the old fashioned cloning and brushing path in many cases, but gen fill takes seconds and doesn’t take away from my photos.
yes but that’s a specific tool for a specific job. AI is useless if it generates everything
Exactly. There’s a time and place for it. The difficulty comes in drawing where the line is.
Not that difficult, that’s why Superman is handing you a pencil, so you can draw that line yourself.
That’s cool, but it sounds more like a useful tool for your work. If we’re talking about artistic merit, upscaling and noise reduction isn’t getting you there.
Clients expect a clean, high-res image because they’re paying for it, but no one has ever been a great photographer just because they had a lot of megapixels.
Exactly. Generative AI tools have their place in an artistic workflow. The difficulty is deciding where that line is, and I’m not sure it’s something I’m qualified to judge.
I had a friend reach out a few years ago when her mother died asking me to retouch an old photo of her mom for the portrait at the funeral. It was a great picture of the deceased on a work trip to Japan, but she was wearing a big ugly lanyard and nametag, and hlthe color balance was really bad because of some lighting issues on site.
I spent a few hours retouching it and it came out really nice. It was something I was happy to do for a friend, but if it had been for a client I would have charged a few hundred bucks. Realistically, if my friend didn’t glhave someone to do it for free, she wouldn’t have been able to justify it.
Now, with generative fill and a few other tweaks, anybody could have achieved good enough results in just a few minutes. For someone trying to have a good picture of their Mom for their funeral, I’m 100% okay with that and don’t feel artistically threatened by it. Is it doing something thay took years of work for me to learn to do? Yes. But the same thing could have been said about Photoshop in general versus the days of lightroom editing. Just a few years ago “serious” photography studios wouldn’t touch digital anything, but adopting the CF card over the roll of film happened, and we’re mostly fine with it now.
Tools change over time and make art and science more accessible, and that’s mostly okay.
And it’s not just art. I started my career in remote sensing (my actual degree is in Geography) using light tables, rulers, and razor blades to edit and analyze aerial photographs. Photogrammetry involved taking hand measurements with an engineer’s scale of overlapping aerial photographs on 9"x9" film taken from aircraft at known altitudes and applying differential parallax calculations to determine structure height at one point, and now I can perform that math on hundreds of thousands of points simultaneously. I can do in 10 minutes what would have taken years to do manually. But the result wasn’t the destruction of my field, but the expansion of it, because most people simply wouldn’t use detailed aerial analysis. Now that we have cheap drones, cameras, and 3d mapping software, analysis that would have cost millions a few years ago costs thousands, so they’re justifiable and now there’s actual demand for the skills.
Do new geospatial analysts have it easier than I did? Yes. Is it annoying that many of my skills I worked hard on are outmoded? A bit. But that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have access to new tools.
And that’s whuly the AI art conversation is difficult for me. There’s plenty of examples of soulless AI slop, but where do we draw the line between useful tool for augmenting human effort and slop?
TIL about photogrammetry! Also, you’re right. My field is the same. Feeling threatened by technology is just fear of a redundant skill set and fear of the effort of adapting. As it says, “you’re much more talented than you think”, and those talents prepare you well for new horizons, there’s no need to lash out, out of fear.
It was most likely trained on stolen data to do that. You’re ok with using it having that be a very real possibility?
Edit: nevermind this comment.
Different types of AI. What you say is true for LLMs and other generative AI but noise reduction and up scaling algorithms are of a different class and don’t rely on stolen training data to function.
Ah I see. I misunderstood. Thanks for the info.
Someone edit that into a joint please
Powered by Gemini©️
usage of gemini misses the whole point, it’s also not a joint
it’s also not a joint
Why is it not a joint? It looks like the ones I’ve had.
I stand corrected
No, im pretty sure its making fun of this memes point by demonstrating one of the many reasons its out of touch and a poor argument to anyone really.
Don’t you think it is weird to use AI when the post is asking specially them to grab a pencil? I honestly would like someone’s MS Paint drawing with a mouse than your AI slop.
irony…
the image itself is AI, doing a random edit request like this is exactly the scenario where llm art makes sense…there’s nothing creative about fulfilling some random internet strangers request to replace a pencil with a joint, there’s no expectation of payment, there’s no real skill/growth involved either unless the artist is incredibly inexperienced
Thought he was handing you a blunt at first glance
I feel this is like when synthesizers started threatening musicians back in the '60s with the Moog and then samplers and drum machines in the '80s. Or something.
Nope, There are ai music generators and they suck as Well.
Um, (whispers) that’s what I meant when I said “like”.
We already had something “like” that when digital art came by, at the same time as synthesizers by the way.
Intriguing, even AI can’t parse that.
I’m sure a 5 year old can draw better than this naive bullshit.
Are you ok?
Yep. Just can’t stand this narcissistic bullshit is all.
You don’t sound ok. You sound whiney.
Then we have that in common.
Ffft ok, doing the “no u” response? What a baby
no u
Pathetic green xer response
…the rest of the fucking owl
Who is this for really? Like people who are here, presumably hate AI, and to the person the meme targets, this is obviously just condescending while simultaneously minimizing the amount of work that goes into actual art.
minimizing the amount of work that goes into actual art.
Idk I read it as a sarcastic way of telling someone to draw and see how bad they’re without AI
How is that an argument though? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say using one tool made them good at using others.
??!!
Circle Jerk
A circle drawn around jerk chicken, is that it?
an famous artist I knew gave me some advice
just draw what your mind’s eye sees. You can make it happen exactly as you see it in your mind if you focus on that mental image and stay true to putting it on the medium. If it doesn’t happen at first, it just means you need to practice. It will happen if you stay true to yourself and what you see in your head.
interesting, I have aphantasia, and drawing/creating is how I can see things from my imagination.
Yup. I close my eyes and I see absolutely nothing.
To be honest, that might be the hardest thing to draw. Lemme take my pencil and magically make the paper disappear!
I can still draw, just not copy pasting from my mind
I can’t even make my handwriting look like it does in my head.
Did this work for you? I’m earning my living as an illustrator and designer and for me it’s part of the process that what I envision and what ends up on the (digital) paper is never the same. And that is ok, sometimes I feel it was better “in my head” but almost always whatever ends up in reality takes over / erases what I thought I wanted to do. Which is ok as well.
I also think if you never drawn before you could for sure just draw stuff in your head but it might be a good idea to at some point (or even start with) doing classic “learn to draw stuff” like doing online or in person courses, copying others (DO NOT PUBLISH THESE ANYWHERE) etc, to learn about perspective, colour, anatomy etc. But then I’ve drawn since I was a child and have no idea what the best way to learn drawing would be (I’m also sure this is different for different people).
it helped me a lot but it’s not a perfect science
That’s the thing. I don’t have a mind’s eye.
you can’t see images in your mind? oh my friend, I am so sorry 😞
I dont have that my mind flickers, I did the apple test a lot with strangers and friends in college, results varied greatly, some ppl can hold a image, some ppl cant even make an image, in my case anything I visualize in purpose flickers, when I zone out its solid
Basically imagine an apple on a table, the apple falls off
what color wass the apple what did it do after it fell just ask for any sort of description
some ppl see nothing at all, like no visual
for some the apple doesnt hit the ground for some it doesnt bounce, for some it rolls, etc.
for some its red
for some its the concept and no color I dont get that one
I know this is word vomit felt I had to explain the apple thing, I saw it on reddit once and just started asking everyone for years because it was fun to heae the differences
This has real “draw the rest of the owl” vibes.
The “mind’s eye” (if ygu’ve got such a thing) doesn’t really work that way. You usually don’t have a fully formed image in your mind.
Your brain will leave out stuff without noticing that something is missing. Also: you can’t really get proper proportions from your “mind’s eye”. Also: what you’re imagining usually also shifts a bunch.
Each person’s mind’s eye is different. Some people can keep a fully formed image in their mind for hours. Other for minutes and some people can’t form an image at all.
People are weird and run the full gamut of abilities.
IMO, much better advice from an art teacher who once told me that this is their response to when people say that they can’t even draw a straight line: “Don’t you have a ruler?”
Start with just drawing basic shapes. Then think about how you’d turn things you see in the world into those simple shapes. Practice doing just that. Spend a day just drawing curves the way your favorite artist does. Look at how they use color or texture in a drawing that you like.
Talent is simply an applied interest in something. Learning the how and why something works and then building the muscle memory to do it yourself.
And for one more trick that blew my mind when somebody first told me: a ruler works just as well on a tablet or screen as it does on a piece of paper.
Well, that’s just a lie. Learning to draw is one of the hardest fucking things.
It takes years just to get good enough to learn the very basics, much longer to become good enough to draw anything like that Superman.
Fuck AI, but let’s not bullshit. Unless you have hours and hours to give for years, you’ll never be able to draw anything like you see in comic books.
one of the hardest things is just trying and putting in effort to get better at something you’re interested in. giving up before you even try is the real failure. telling yourself it’s not worth the effort is just denying yourself the payoff. set aside any amount of time you want at whatever interval you can manage (30 minutes a day, an hour a week, whatever) and you will only get better over time.
don’t sell yourself short. if you want to do this, you can and the best time to start is now.
Getting to the level of a top-tier pro is hard, sure, but getting decent enough to derive satisfaction from the activity and make images people can enjoy isn’t really all that hard if it’s something you’re actually interested in.
It takes years to get good at anything worth being good at. That’s just life.
If you want to be good at something you’ll find the time. Especially if you like doing that thing.
what you refer to as comics books is one style. I assume you mean DC/marvel…
try not focusing on the end goal, but the steps to get there instead
I could start doing cyanide and happiness art within a week or two with no prior art skills.
“Unless you have hours and hours to give for years, you’ll never be able to draw anything like you see in comic books.” And there it is.
Pizza
As someone who has used AI art and who is learning to draw, I can assure you I know exactly how untalented I am. This hokey nonsense isn’t aimed at me.
but, like, how?
scribble some lines til it looks cool
i worry this will lead to a lot of wasted time and effort if the learning isn’t directed :(
Find something you want to draw, then try and draw it. Remember the coordination from eye to hand is something learned, so nothing will look the same at first.
If you post this drawing, and the original belongs to someone else (photo, comic, movie, other artwork), make sure you credit and say it’s a study of the original.
When you post, it can help to take constructive criticism. Learn how to recognize when it’s actually constructive vs someone being rude. Sometimes they will sound like each other, but what you’re looking for is the stuff that will actually help you grow.
Check out artists on YouTube (some I can think of right now SamDoesArt, pikat, Proko, Scott Christian Sava) many will have good tips. Scott, I, especially, appreciate as he will show how he’s bad with some mediums, or that he messes things up and had to fix things, or just plain never finishes a work.
If it’s people or animals, you want to draw, try gesture drawing, where you draw the form of a figure without the details. I’ve always liked Line of Action’s timed tools.
If you want to draw stylized, find what you like about a work, and try it. Still learn realism to understand form and how to stylize it, but have fun, too.
Understand that everyone learns art differently, what works for someone might not for you. Like drawing daily can be great, but just drawing at all, even better. Maybe tossing down some colour then finding shapes helps, maybe following exact tutorials helps wou learn how to get a specific brush stroke you’re looking for.
Finally, it sucks, but it’s literally. Just. Practice. Practice. Practice. Even when you look at something you’ve done, and it stinks, remember it was a learning opportunity, and no one has to see it. If you can figure out what is wrong, go practice drawing a bunch of different versions of those parts, see how they work, the shapes that make them up.
Sorry if this is long, I, personally, don’t give myself enough time to art anymore, and am not an amazing artist, but I love seeing people get started. Hope everything makes sense
thank you for taking the time! i really appreciate it!
yeah, it can feel daunting coming in new. i know artists SAY it’s just practice, but to me at this point it FEELS like magic. XD
Of course! I hope it helps.
Writing it all out is a reminder to myself, as well. I get that feeling about colours and painting, as a mainly pencil and ink artist. I’m not sure it ever really goes away, there’s always some people further along in their art journey. I try to look at it as inspiration, something to work towards. Still somewhat jealous though haha
Lol the upset people itt are EXACTLY who Superman is talking to
What’s even better is that Superboy Prime knows he’s in a comic book and would 100% be encouraging people to draw.
