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.
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.
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.
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
The example you provided isn’t upscaling. Upscaling is the act of interpolating pixels to increase the resolution of a bitmap image. What you’ve done is had the AI color and shade in your sketch.
Frankly, it’s clear from the sketch that you have some great foundational skills. I don’t really understand why you would stop halfway and let a computer steal the learning and practice opportunity from you. It’s like a carpenter building a piece of furniture and just stopping before sanding and painting it.
I used the wrong terminology, but I see what you mean. Also, the more I look at the ai version, the less I like it. It looked great last night when I was drunk though.
I’ve built furniture before, and stopping before sanding and painting is definitely a thing. It’s a lot of work and you literally can only fuck it up while you’re learning. Finishing a piece is a lot of work when you know you are going to spend years apologizing for how badly it sucks. While an unfinished piece is functional for like 1/3 the work and it’s not pretending to be finished so you can’t really be disappointed.
I think the metaphor you chose is apt. It just doesn’t really address the point in quite the way you were thinking.
I was also speaking from experience. I recognize that ‘unfinished’ is definitely a style that some people like. I rocked a desk for the better part of 5 or so years that was literally a stage platform (2x4 framing with a plywood lid) I had made and didn’t want to sand or stain.
That said, it’s also kind of in the name- the sanding and stain/paint are called ‘finishing’ because they are the final steps for a finished end product. I would say the same thing about sketches in that there are scenarios where they are acceptable and stand on their own, but they’re generally not considered a finished product. A sketch is kind of like the rough stage of a carpentry build: it’s the hard part. The stages that come after are a lot of tedium, but the main structure is there and the finish line is in sight.
That was a lot of words to say I generally agree with you but feel that it’s still a reasonable comparison.
Oh it’s a great comparison. Sorry if that didn’t come through clearly.
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?
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.
Nobody’s stuff is being stolen.
An artist’s work is copied without asking or compensating them and then sold as a product.
It’s like piracy, except instead of individuals pirating a corporation’s content (which they can’t actually buy anymore) for their private use, it’s corporations pirating an individual’s content to sell it for profit and drive the individual artist out of the market.So I’d disagree. The images themselves aren’t stolen, but the money that can be made off of them is.
I think the point is the terminology isn’t right for “stolen”, it’s infringement. That’s not to say that it is good or right, just a matter of the right word.
What about self hosted AI image generators or companies who pay royalties to artists for units sold?
I think you have created complicated rules for “piracy I enjoy/condone is good. Copying that I don’t like is bad.”
I don’t see there being a lot of room for to ever defend piracy and also hate AI influenced art
“piracy I enjoy/condone is good. Copying that I don’t like is bad.”
This is all of life. Yes, good things are good, and bad things are bad.
It is not curious or interesting that I dislike murder but support Ukraine fighting back Russia.
I hope that some point all models that are pay to use are like this. I might be on board with free to use models falling under Creative Commons but like, anything business or to be sold as a service based needs compensation no ifs, ands or buts.
Not all models are trained in the same way. Adobe Firefly was trained only with images from Adobe Stock, for instance.
And how sure are we about that?
Adobe would suck the stone try just to fuck with you.
I’d like to interject with my opinion on “piracy” vs “scraping”. In piracy, billion dollar companies are screwed. In scraping, ordinary people are screwed.
I side with the ordinary people.
I also use ai for stuff.
I think I’m cooked, as the young people say.
Personally I think the same argument pirates use with content can be used here. Usage of the art generators != a sale for the artist. I don’t agree with artists not being compensated either piracy is piracy regardless if its a big company or an artist.
However, It was already a stretch to claim that pirating a digital media that is 1:1 is equal to losing a sale, but it’s even even bigger stretch to claim that an image that is generated by a generator using training data of a bunch of artists and images pushed together would equal a sale. In most cases you wouldn’t even be able to identify the artist in the first place(or even know they existed).
As for driving the artists out of the market, I personally don’t believe it ever will manage that, because of how it works. It needs something to train off of, when artists decide to leave the market nothing new will be able to be trained, which will eventually kill off the ability to train them further, which will leave them either to use stale training data, or use existing models to train themselves, which have been pretty spotty in quality in general.
Plus, at the end of the day, art is a profession for many and a personal hobby for even more. I don’t think it’s going anywhere any time soon, regardless of tools available, I think I would say the same with LLM story-wrights as well, for any new field breaking genres or concepts, a humans touch is needed or else it will just piece together what it already knows.
Being said, hopefully some point the fields start actually paying for the content they are using, I expect it will eventually happen, its just legal frameworks are slow. (ignoring the few models out there that do pay for content like others have said such as Adobe)
Honestly my biggest concern is going to be what happens when those AI companies purchase data off of media websites who claim ownership of all data submitted. Usually they operate off a shared copyright where by submitting the content you allow them to use it how they see fit but you as the artist keep ownership. For example Deviantart while claiming they have no ownership also has this in their policy.
DeviantArt does not claim ownership rights in Your Content. For the sole purpose of enabling us to make your Content available through the Service, you grant DeviantArt a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, distribute, re-format, store, prepare derivative works based on, and publicly display and perform Your Content
Which grants royalty free permission to redistribute how they please.
If you’ve ever read through the terms of service/use for most websites that artists like to show off their work on (Instagram, Facebook, DeviantArt, ArtStation, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) you would realize that the work was indeed not stolen.
It was given away freely by artists due to fine print buried in the terms of service with royalty free licenses. Just lookup any Terms of Service and search for the word “royalty”.
If artists should be going after anyone, it’s the companies that either freely gave the artwork away by “sharing it with their partners” or by making a profit off of their work by selling it to any of these companies for training these image generating models.
The root of the problem here is the lack of ownership of our own data when it comes to any sort of online service. Part of that problem is just the nature of posting something in the first place.
DeviantArt
One artist raised the alarm back in 2016 about the licensing at the time: https://www.deviantart.com/dsc-the-artist/journal/DeviantArt-CAN-USE-your-ART-WITHOUT-PERMISSION-616830749
ArtStation
They do allow you to tag your projects now to prohibit them from being sold for use with Generative AI programs, but this option obviously did not exist some years ago.
You additionally grant a royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers) license to Epic limited to using, copying, editing, modifying, inputting, and integrating Your Content into and in connection with the development and testing of Epic’s Safety and Discovery Tools (together with the above license, the “Licenses”).
Instagram
When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). ::
Etc…
How is that functionally different from a human training on freely available Internet artwork and selling the stuff they created by using said training?
They’re using other artists’ work without crediting them.
How is that functionally different from a human training …
It’s that part, right there.
You don’t see it because of the social nihilism you’ve been accumulating.
Idk man maybe try making something yourself and youll instsntly feel the difference
I have, and I personally don’t think AI training is functionally different from the publicly available copyrighted works I used for references to develop the necessary skills to create.
AI is just able to do it much faster than me.
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?
Piracy is considered stealing, duplicating without permission is stealing?
Woah! Piracy is not considered stealing. The MPAA and RIAA made that argument over and over and over again in the 90s and early 2000s and they lost. Thank the gods!
You would download a car!
If piracy was stealing, we’d all be waiting for our chance to watch TV shows in a queue of thousands.
Copyright violations are not theft. They never were and they never will be. Because no one is deprived of anything when something is copied. In theory, there could’ve been a lost sale as a result but study after study has shown that piracy actually improves sales of copyrighted works.
When an AI is trained on images that YOU—the artist—posted to the public Internet for the world to see it will either increment or decrement a floating point value by like 0.01. That’s it! That’s all it does.
How can that be considered “stealing”‽ It’s absurd.
Well to say no one is deprived of anything is not necessarily correct, even though the specific “things” are not lost, out can have revenue impact, especially if it’s just completely accepted.
For example if a company wanted some distinct visual element, they might have commissioned it to be done. Now they just prompt their way to the soulless crap.
Still slop, sorry amigo! (Probably not what you want to hear, but I’m just being real…)
If I sketch something, and have an ai upscale it for me
That’s not an accurate description of what you did, is it?
You didn’t simply “upscale” your drawing. You had AI turn a rough sketch into an inked, colored and shaded but otherwise incomplete piece.
I like to think I poured my heart and soul into it.
Yeah, I’m sure you like to think that…
But in reality you did part 1 of a 4 part process and told a computer to do the rest. I don’t know how long you spent on your initial sketch, but in the end you relied on a gimmicky shortcut (based on the exploitation of other people’s stolen art… stuff that they REALLY poured their heart and soul into before it was unceremoniously ripped off by mega-corporations) to do at least 75% of the work. I’m being brutally honest, but at best you can only really think of it as being 25% yours.
Again, is this slop? I am not an artist. I drive a forklift real good, that’s my skillset.
Am I being too harsh? Why am I telling you this?
Here’s the thing you need to understand…
If you made that original sketch then you ARE an artist. Sure you don’t feel like you’re as good as you want to be (no artist EVER does, by the way), but you are already 10000x more of an artist than someone who writes some text and gets an AI to slop out some generic shit.
The composition and sketch is the hardest part and you already did it. Linework (if that’s your style) is basically just tracing. Coloring is as easy as doing a kids coloring book. Shading can be a puzzle, but you’ll get it in time if you keep the light coming from the same direction.
You spent some time doing the hard part, liked how it looked, and then instead of just cracking on with the next part, you got lazy, turned your brain off and fed it to the instant gratification machine, turning it into slop. Taking your hands off the wheel entirely, you know?
And for what?
Now you have a “pretty picture”, but you didn’t learn a damn thing about taking your art from sketch to lines, or coloring, or shading. And to make matters worse, you can’t even point to the picture and say “hey look at that, I MADE THAT”, like you can with the sketch.
In the end, I’m gonna call it slop. Ethical problems aside, AI generated slop art is a dime a dozen these days. I don’t see any value in it at all. I think you have more talent for art than you know, and I hope that you keep it up and try to approach your work with more pride as a human being making something cool by hand.
It’s not what I wanted to hear, but I think it’s what I needed to hear.
Side question:
How do you pronounce your username?
glitch dee ex
or just glitch is fine.
I thought maybe it rhymes haha
It should be stylized as Glitch-DX but I’ve gotten lazy in recent years.
Why stop at the halfway point and let the machine steal the fun? I mean art is hard and challenging but also fun to make… you are right there; the rendering doesn’t have to be professional level. I encourage you to give it a go.
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.
brother/sister/sibling, that’s a neat sketch. You have potential. People from Uni have started with a similar skill level and are now fucking smashing their artwork. I understand that arts are mentally hard at times, when you feel nothing works and you don’t improve fast enough. Give yourself some credit.
Now you are saying you’ll be using the output for your book. Is it important to you, that it is 100% your work? Is it important to you to not misrepresent your skills? Then declare that and how AI was used. Will you monetize said book? Then there are a few legal things to consider (in Germany for example anything an AI generates for you is per definition not your creation and cannot be copyrighted by you. If you make changes to the image/text/video before publishing you can at least secure some rights on it)
I am not going to rate it as slop or not. If you need an illustration, and you need it now, who am I to tell you that this is not a legit tool, no matter how I myself feel about it.
That isn’t just upscaling, it colored it in too. If it just upscaled it’d be different.
First. You are an artist. You make actual real art and have skills. Your sketch is pretty good as well.
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.
it’s not ‘you’ though is it
Honestly your sketching is quite solid, you’ve obviously got a decent knowledge of anatomy. All you need is some color theory and some practice, which AI will rob you of.
Alternately you could pay a real artist to color and finish your sketches, this is how comics and many other works are traditionally done.
If you use AI, I would definitely disclose that in the description of the book, and as a consumer I would certainly be turned off by that fact. The fact that you’re using it to enhance your own art absolutely makes it better, but the finished product still isn’t really your art any more.
The bad part of using ai responsibly is that every slop “artist” claims to use ai responsibly.
I’ll be honest, your technique makes the half done sketch look better and closer to what I’d consider a finished piece than the AI copy.
It fucked up your lines and made them uninteresting. I like the original better.
I’m neither militantly anti-AI nor an artist, I just think AI is kinda shit at doing things.
The more I look at the ai version, the less I like it. It looked great when I was drunk last night. Also all this external validation is really helping my mental state. I’ll probably be using ai less because of this.
