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.
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.
First, I think your sketch is great!! I’d encourage you too feel pride in it, because you did it! I bet it’s better than you could do a year ago, and honestly a lot of people could never do that much (including me). So keep running with it.
Second, you said you are genuinely trying to get better at art. So keep putting your efforts where your mouth is by continuing to practice, and not taking any shortcuts to the finish line just to get a finished product. Shortcuts don’t make you better, grinding does.
Finally, is it slop, yes, but I’m a bit more lax on your question about using ai-slop than some others. By example I mean:
- If your goal was simply to make (with a LLM assist) some cool looking desktop background for your own personal use it whatever. Go for it, enjoy! But don’t go sharing it saying ‘look what I did,’ cause you didn’t, fully.
- If your goal is to publish something (& you mentioned ‘your book’), esp to sell it, I personally would take no pride in sharing something a slop-bot was used to get it out the door, nor would I appreciate it being shared with me. And I’d love for you to feel pride in every aspect of your personal projects.
- And if you’ve got a vision for a project, and you’re worried it’ll never happen without help, I get that. But while it could be hard, maybe you could search for another artist whose style you like (there is a LOT of starving ones right now) to partner up with you. Maybe you commission them, maybe you become co-owners of this project, etc, but ultimately it becomes a project two+ people could be proud of! 🥳
- And if you get to that finish line the way a creative should, I’ll honestly be super stoked for you. So let me be first in line to pre-order the fruits of your labor. I believe in you! Keep us posted.
- And if you’ve got a vision for a project, and you’re worried it’ll never happen without help, I get that. But while it could be hard, maybe you could search for another artist whose style you like (there is a LOT of starving ones right now) to partner up with you. Maybe you commission them, maybe you become co-owners of this project, etc, but ultimately it becomes a project two+ people could be proud of! 🥳
All good points and thanks for the validation, its going to help me not get discouraged.
If I ever do actually write the book, what communities should I advertise in?
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.
You can certainly use it as a learning tool, and do your own color and shading over it. It’s likely not perfect, so you might be able to improve on it. I wouldn’t try to sell AI shaded art, though.
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’ll count this as slop, but don’t let that discourage you. This is coming from an absolute untalented bum. That sketch looks really good. I promise you you’ll have fun learning to fill in the colors. The art is not that it looks good, the art is knowing someone went through the time and effort to figure out the best way to finish a piece. AI is not art, but you seriously have talent!
thank you
Who cares what other people think? Do you, unapologetically.
it’s not ‘you’ though is it
I care what people think, because I’m soft and squishy and everything I’ve ever said about not caring was a lie.
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.
Is it wrong though? I won’t buy digital art at all because it’s too assisted already.
But if someone does buy it, isn’t it on them?
I mean all the little errors all the mediocrity of it, why would any one pay for that?
Digital art is not any more assisted than digital writing, do you also refuse to buy ebooks?
I’m talking about the morality of it, whether someone pays for it or not is irrelevant. Child porn is morally wrong, regardless of there being a market for it.
Are you seriously going to use an absurdly extreme example for this discussion? It makes your argument pointless because it is an absurd example to compare this to.
It’s the same argument you’re making, that morality doesn’t matter as long as there are paying customers, if morality doesn’t matter because there are paying customers for AI stolen art, why does it matter for child pornography? Either morality matters or it doesn’t.
No its not. Jaywalking is the same as murder right?
These things are miles apart.
And I don’t believe in ownership of ideas so it can’t be theft. Teaching a system of weights is not stealing. Sorry. Math is math.
The morality would be if they claimed to have drawn all of it without assistance. That is fraud, and lying to your customer is inmoral.
I don’t consider jaywalking immoral, so no, not the same.
Regardless of the seriousness of the immoral act, my point is the same, person A’s immoral act that affects person B doesn’t become OK because person C is willing to pay for it. Which is your argument, I’m pointing out how ridiculous an argument it is by using something you should easily consider immoral, and not in any way suggesting that generating images for profit should be penalized in the same manner or that is equally immoral, just that your logic does not apply to immoral acts.
I strongly suspect you do believe that in the world we live in ideas can be owned, let me ask you, what do you do for a living? Because if ideas can’t be owned, intellectual work shouldn’t be remunerated, as you can simply grab whatever is produced without paying the person and it wouldn’t be theft.
Yes, math is math, no one is claiming to own the math behind LLMs, but that math is applied to training data that does have an owner. You might as well claim you didn’t kill the person you shot, physics and biology did. The immoral act is the stealing of the training data, and any byproduct of that is fruit of the poisoned tree.
person A’s immoral act
What immoral act? Using a computer? The only immoral part is if they claim they hand did the work themselves, because that is fraud.
intellectual work shouldn’t be remunerated
Good, because we learned everything from someone before us. It is immoral to hold back society for remuneration.
no one is claiming to own the math behind LLMs
The companies that are trying to sell it to you are, which is also wrong, it should be public domain.
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?
This probably isn’t the answer you want to hear, but yes, I still consider it slop.
Not everyone is an artist, and that’s okay. Just do your best, and even the worst chicken-scratch doodles are better than what any AI craps out.
Back in the early days of animation, the animation process involved an animator who would draw the scenes frame by frame and then hand them over to a team of colorers to color.
This is not so different. You conceptualised the scene and handed off the colouring to the AI. So it isn’t really slop.
First of all, your skills may not be where you want them yet, but you made art (and it’s pretty good besides; drawing is hard), you are an artist. An artist early in your journey, so think of all the aspiring art students that make just terrible stuff while they learn, and be happy you aren’t doing it for a career while improving. :)
That said, I don’t really see what the AI added to it. Sure it colored it in, but you could have done that too, and it would have been another chance to hide some of the blemishes that you don’t care for, and give it more of your own personality. The personality is the art, as much as the thing that gets made.
It doesn’t have to be perfect to be progress. Keep drawing, keep drawing the sorts of things you want to get good at, and think about how you’d like to color them, and just try it out, use crayons, colored pencils, markers, or maybe a digital image editing program. I’m sure there are some good free open source programs for that. You don’t get good without lots of practice, so train those muscles to do the fine motor skills you want them to do, and train your brain to think about what colors would be best for what you are trying to depict (something AI can never really do for you).
If you like the ai stuff for yourself, enjoy it, but personally I’d be put off by it being used in a book. Even bad art that’s hand made is better than AI, imho.
Unfortunately, yes.
You’re looking at AI upscaling as a shortcut to the end result you want: your book. But from experience, jumping to the end of something robs you of the joy and accomplishment of doing the hard work to get there.
Instead ask if the book really needs illustrations. If it does, wouldn’t taking the time to do them right be better? It would also give you more time to revise the other aspects of it.
If this is something you’re passionate about, don’t douse water on that fire by cheating to the end. If it’s not something you’re passionate about, why do it in your free time to begin with? If you think you’ll somehow make money off it, you’ll have plenty more hurdles to go through that can’t be AI’d away. If it’s just a passion project, use that fucking passion.
I understand the intense desire to just be great at something without putting all the effort in. But there really are no shortcuts to this shit. The main advantage that other people have over you on this is that they started earlier, so they have more time put into it already.
Deleted my other response to you because I was drunk and it was embarrassing. Lots of very good comments here (including yours) telling me exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you.
deleted by creator
No one cares. Have fun, learn to draw.
I care. and I hate my own work the most.
That seems to be a common opinion among artists, I guess because you can see all the flaws in the thing you made and where you wish it were better. Those feelings are real, but they’re not true. Your art was fine before; it didn’t need any improving, enhancing, or upscaling to be art or to be valuable.
One theory of the true nature of art is that it isn’t at all to do with what’s on the canvas or what shape the sculpture comes out being, but that art is fundamentally about who is making it, and how they do it, and why they do it that way.
You’re asking if what you end up with is “slop”, but no one can answer that for you because slop isn’t a natural kind. If you want your art process to be a process where you do some sketching and then run it through a graphics card along with all of art history and a short poem, you can absolutely be the artist who does that process, and what comes out will be genuinely your art.
But it sounds like right now you are an artist who does some sketching, doesn’t really like the result, and taps something they don’t really believe in, instrumentally, for the sake of a more marketable end product. And who then turns to the Internet because actually they feel bad about that process and don’t really stand behind it, looking for some kind of approval or permission they can’t give themselves.
Develop a process consistent with your values, steal as much or as little as you like (as all great artists do), ignore the opinions of people on the Internet, and whatever you end up with will be art. Act against the compass of your own soul, chasing the approval of others, and the result can only be slop.
I was drunk and drunk me was getting depressed. Sober me likes my art a lot more. It felt good to make, and all this external validation is helping me stay motivated to keep getting better.
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.
That isn’t just upscaling, it colored it in too. If it just upscaled it’d be different.
