I would propose that text-to-image AI programs are just another medium. As with all new media, it takes a some time for people to figure out what artistic product is truly unique to that medium. (thereby making it conceptually meaningful)
Some comics, like mine, use 3D models just as an underlay, which I use to draw 2D art on top of. The 3D modeling part of my comics plays a minimal role in the conceptual intent of my end product. But in many other comics, the synthetic quality of the 3D render is an intrinsic part of the visual experience of the end product. It makes full use of the medium.
A comic that uses AI generation algorithms could conceivably be valid if it offers an experience that is only possible to create with the tools contained within that particular medium. Perhaps a hypothetical AI-generated comic could come as a script of all the spoken dialogue. Where there should be a “panel,” there would just be a cluster of verbal prompts specifically tailored to make the AI procedurally generate the appropriate image on the fly. It wouldn’t be exactly the right image, but it would be statistically close. Once you turn the page, the generated image would dissipate back into the cloud until it needs to be regenerated again. Everyone reading the comic would get the same story, but the visual experience would be unique to every reader. Similarly, re-reading the comic would result in a slightly different comic than the one you read before.
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
AI Generated Art (aka we're all out of a job soon)
It could indeed be lame-o, but with a human editor to pick the good stuff you now have a comic generator that requires a lot less person hours to reach a finished result. A creator who writes a lot faster than they can draw, which probably applies to most of us, could get their work out at a much faster pace, even if they still do a lot of 'hand' finishing.
If I had a program that would eat my thumbnails and spit out finished panel versions in my chosen style, until I'm happy with the result, should I really keep on doing it the hard way?
Ironscarf wrote:
If I had a program that would eat my thumbnails and spit out finished panel versions in my chosen style, until I'm happy with the result, should I really keep on doing it the hard way?
Frankly I'd kill for an AI that auto-colors my comics. I don't mind line-art but coloring is the most tedious, repetitive thing in the universe. I wouldn't even care if it looks a little crappier than my usual color job (which is not that great to begin with anyway) if it saved me the hours of sufffering it myself… a bit of quality downgrade would be acceptable.
This is emblematic of the whole AI art fantasy bubble:
FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL PRODUCED ENTIRELY BY AI!!!
https://beincrypto.com/ai-art-worlds-first-bot-generated-graphic-novel-hits-the-market/
Yeahhhh… It's not what you think.
The reality is that it's a 700+ plus page picturebook full of unrelated non-sequential images.
That doesn't put anyone out of a job!
These kinds of books made with copyright free art, or old illustrations that have been licensed, and then had a story added to them loosely linking things are an old concept.
The main difference is that licenced images and copyright free art have far more meaning and can stand alone as artwork, while none of the AI stuff can.- it's also not really copyright free because it's made with digitally scraped stolen art.
Yeah it's been happening, I saw some dude on youtube give a step by step process on how he does comics with Midjourney.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjj6KsPSHZc
He managed to stick to a fairly coherent style, which i find impressive if nothing else. Right now it's still only good for very surreal storytelling. Though i think while comic artists themselves may be able to spot its shortcomings, i'm not sure the average consumer would be able to tell the difference between this and something like Billy Hazelnut. Or the kind of art Charles Burns produces.
It's all still in infancy, but it's moving rapidly… give it a couple more years, and even i may not be able to reliably tell the difference anymore.
Heck, i played a game recently called Death's Gambit, and i swear most of the art could have sprung right out of Midjourney. Guess that just means Death's Gambit has especially generic art (it kinda does) but doesn't that speak volumes for the potential of the AI system? If not for comics then defintiely for videogames, which often requires you to re-use assets like crazy anyway. For smaller dev teams it's a blessing to a point, auto-generated levels have been in use for years. I believe Horizon Zero Dawn, or some other big budget open world game used auto-generation to create at least parts of its open world. Because it would require far too many hours to actually craft every single polygon of every single flower by hand.
That's why i'm fervent about not all being gloom and doom and denouncing AI art as the death of creativity. It's a tool, use for your benefit!
And let me derail this train of thought and get super philosophical for a moment… I get artists being salty, i know it hurts. It hurts to see your hard work reduced to nothing more than an algorithm. But that's kinda what the human brain itself is anyway? An algorithm. Your art doesn't come from nothing, it's a pattern learned from watching other artists do what they do. Which is exactly what AI art imitates. Scouring the web for millions of images and taking the essence of it to create something new. Which is just what your brain does, collecting experiences and re-working them into artistic output. We call that inspiration.
The final argument i keep hearing is that AI art is intellectually & emotionally worthless because AIs aren't self-aware (as far as we know *wink wink*). Well, neuroscience has severly challenged the concept of free will exisiting at all, so… even that argument stands on shaky ground. If free will truly is an illusion, then life itself is nothing more than an algorithm, and by that argument every piece of art ever is no different than AI art.
Ozoneocean wrote:
This is emblematic of the whole AI art fantasy bubble:
FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL PRODUCED ENTIRELY BY AI!!!
https://beincrypto.com/ai-art-worlds-first-bot-generated-graphic-novel-hits-the-market/
“If all you need are skyscrapers or cherry blossoms or a teddy bear, and you don’t need to see those again, it’s great. If you need seventy panels of the same character doing thirty complex actions, you’re never going to get there with AI art, right now.”I was this close to wiping my hard drive and taking up macramé instead of making comics, but this made me pause.
Ask and ye shall receive! The Duck now has it very own AI generated comic, created by the venerable hansrickheit
Wtf is going on in that comic?
It's like 4 different "stories" going on at once. I don't really want to call them stories because it kinda just looks like variations on a single prompt.
All the"art" I've seen produced by ai is creepy. It's like the ai has dementia. There's a series of self portraits done by an artist I can't recall his name, but he did self portraits as his dementia progressed. Etsy I've seen of ai "art" is like the reverse of that. Like the machine is trying to dig itself out of dementia.
But, in the end, it's soulless. It's not art. The machine is not self aware.
lothar wrote:That's beautiful.
Wtf is going on in that comic?
It's like 4 different "stories" going on at once. I don't really want to call them stories because it kinda just looks like variations on a single prompt.
All the"art" I've seen produced by ai is creepy. It's like the ai has dementia. There's a series of self portraits done by an artist I can't recall his name, but he did self portraits as his dementia progressed. Etsy I've seen of ai "art" is like the reverse of that. Like the machine is trying to dig itself out of dementia.
But, in the end, it's soulless. It's not art. The machine is not self aware.
You've out that perfectly.
The comic in question looks like strangely altered stills from 1930s Sci-fi movies and makes no sense :(
I was thinking about the subject the other day- since AI "art" basically ileagaly mines copyrighted works there's going to be a reckoning.
People can say "it's the internet baby, it's all fair game!". Those people are niave and strangely unaware of what has happened to the internet in the last 25 years- it used to be a free for all with music and video and now that's all slowly been reigned. It's even haoow ing with porn, so yes there can be severe restrictions places on AI that uses copyright work.
Ozoneocean wrote:
I was thinking about the subject the other day- since AI "art" basically ileagaly mines copyrighted works there's going to be a reckoning.
People can say "it's the internet baby, it's all fair game!". Those people are niave and strangely unaware of what has happened to the internet in the last 25 years- it used to be a free for all with music and video and now that's all slowly been reigned. It's even haoow ing with porn, so yes there can be severe restrictions places on AI that uses copyright work.
From what I can discern, the companies that own Midjourney and Dall-e also have some sneaky copyright stipulations in their legal agreements. Basically, those companies seem to state that they retain some kind of co-ownership with the user to any images generated by their proprietary AIs. To my layperson's eyes, the legal situation surrounding copyright in this field looks sort of like the wild west at the moment.
fallopiancrusader wrote:Rather than copyright over the generated images I mean copyright of the art they steal from.Ozoneocean wrote:
I was thinking about the subject the other day- since AI "art" basically ileagaly mines copyrighted works there's going to be a reckoning.
People can say "it's the internet baby, it's all fair game!". Those people are niave and strangely unaware of what has happened to the internet in the last 25 years- it used to be a free for all with music and video and now that's all slowly been reigned. It's even haoow ing with porn, so yes there can be severe restrictions places on AI that uses copyright work.
From what I can discern, the companies that own Midjourney and Dall-e also have some sneaky copyright stipulations in their legal agreements. Basically, those companies seem to state that they retain some kind of co-ownership with the user to any images generated by their proprietary AIs. To my layperson's eyes, the legal situation surrounding copyright in this field looks sort of like the wild west at the moment.
The reality is that the AIs don't make art out of thin air or the own versions inspired by something else like a human does, rather they take bits and pieces from art all over the net in a free for all.
It could be argued under Fair Use and the fact that they're all "transformative works" (regarding the finished images), but the fact that they use people's hard work for free as fuel in the function of their program is something else entirely and they deserve to pay for that privilege.
They basically take our art and photos without permission or compensation and process them for use in these programs.
That should piss us all off.
fallopiancrusader wrote:It doesn't seem to make much sense and the intellect rebels against it, but dammit, these are some gorgeous images to look at. I'm checking out his other, non-AI generated works and I'd say it's at least not a whole different realm from the imaginarium of Hans.
Ask and ye shall receive! The Duck now has it very own AI generated comic, created by the venerable hansrickheit
This popped up on my feed. It's movie posters made by ai. Actually kind of funny, like as fever dream.
AI generated movie posters
It's probably how aliens from the 4th dimension see us
lothar wrote:
This popped up on my feed. It's movie posters made by ai. Actually kind of funny, like as fever dream.
AI generated movie posters
It's probably how aliens from the 4th dimension see us
I love number 6, Mmmmmmmmy. Featuring George Takei, presumably.
It's true, I went and posted an A.I. Generated "Comic", although calling it a "comic" is in the loosest possible sense. It does have a narrative , of sorts. Please don't take it too seriously, though.
I had been playing with STABLE DIFFUSION, and found with just the right prompts, I would get some pretty startling images. With the specific prompts that eventually fed into the "Commander Promethian" series, I got these wonderful images that look like film stills of a movie from another dimension. Rather than let them sit in my hard-drive, unseen by anybody, I decided to share them in this peculiar format. Any storyline is whatever the reader chooses to superimpose onto it.
To be clear: Because these are AI Generated pictures, I don't claim any copyright ownership over them.
My thoughts about AI art in general:
As impressive as some of the AI appears, it still very much lacks the spark of human creativity. I think the term "Artificial Intelligence" is a misnomer, as no "thinking" is involved. These pictures are the work of an automaton.
It's much like the "Kaleidoscope Machine" from George Orwell's 1984 that generates random musical patterns. In the book, Winston responds to the music, wondering "how a machine could create something that sounds so beautiful." (Not an exact quote) It's an interesting conundrum, because it requires the human brain to perceive the beauty; a machine does not know the difference.
I think, over time, AI art will be more and more recognizable, because of its inherent shortcomings.
I very much doubt that a computer can create anything original, except by sheer chance. I hope that one side effect is that human artists will strive for more originality in their own work, rather than regurgitating familiar tropes, which is all that a computer can do. (I also need to focus more on my own original ideas, as well.)
I'm not so sure if artist should feel so threatened by losing work to computers. I think anybody who would use a computer-generated image rather than pay a living artist is somebody who is unlikely to treat any rartist with respect or pay them fairly, anyway.
Any artist who has built up a following and has clientele has done so because of their own INIMITABLE abilities. A computer. may mimic, but it cannot replace you.
If you still feel threatened by a computer, you might want to ask yourself why you make art in the first place. Art is not a competition. I presume you might be like me, trying to create something that's personal, expressive, appealing to the senses and exists because you desired it to be.
The pictures in Commander Promethian, to me, are sometimes wonderfully strange and beautiful - other times, hilariously indicative of an electronic "brain" that does not comprehend what it is doing. Facial features sometimes look rubbery and out of place, extra limbs sprout from innapropiate places, etc.
I don't think th genie can be put back in the bottle. Although some people will argue against AI art as phony, people inevitable will use it. Some will use it more effectively than others.
I personally don't care about the methods an artist uses (unless if it involves torture, rape or murder, of course) as longs as the results are good; which is always subjective, isn't it?
It's a simulacrum of "art" (images created with intention). They will eventually master it and create recognisable work 100% of the time- through better coding and more illegal use of copyrighted work to use for "fuel".
—————-
This is by Die Antwoord, it illegally uses copyrighted anime to remix and turn into a commercial music video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq56o0YH3mE
You can easily recognise most of the anime it steals from.
I really like Di Antwoord but this is a great example of the ethical and legal issues of this software that are almost completely ignored or hand-waved away.
Adobe stock is now apparently accepting AI generated art into its stock photo library.
Just when you thought Adobe couldn't get any more evil!
fallopiancrusader wrote:That's a dark day for the creators they make their money from.
Adobe stock is now apparently accepting AI generated art into its stock photo library.
Just when you thought Adobe couldn't get any more evil!
F*** adobe.
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