Enter into a license agreement to use my art in your AI and I'm fine with that. Otherwise it's like, I build chairs and anyone is able to sell my chairs and keep the money.

Don't have talent or art training but want to make a comic? Make a comic!
Comicfury and the Duck aren't going to stop you from posting it.

Don't want to bother drawing foliage in the background? Use that foliage Clip Studio provides that make your backgrounds look like everyone else's.

I want to play for the US team in the next World Cup. Only I want opposing teams to have to hop on one leg to make it fair.

Unka John wrote:
Enter into a license agreement to use my art in your AI and I'm fine with that. Otherwise it's like, I build chairs and anyone is able to sell my chairs and keep the money.

Don't have talent or art training but want to make a comic? Make a comic!
Comicfury and the Duck aren't going to stop you from posting it.

Don't want to bother drawing foliage in the background? Use that foliage Clip Studio provides that make your backgrounds look like everyone else's.

I want to play for the US team in the next World Cup. Only I want opposing teams to have to hop on one leg to make it fair.

If AI products was like 3d assets where templates was used it would be so bad, but instead they just go right to the pirated asset flip.

It's more like someone broke into your store, smashed your register, messed up your tools, stolen all your chairs and wrote some ugly derogatory graffiti on the walls of your store then try to sell the chairs out the trunk of their car.

AI demands, to use your example, the opposing Olympic team to be kneecapped, legs chopped right off even, and at the moment the refs are pretty okay with that.

Well, of course, others should be disadvantaged so I can get what I want.

Unka John wrote:
Well, of course, others should be disadvantaged so I can get what I want.

So you would be okay with these guys stealing from you?

EDIT; Just wanted to add something that will completely collapse this whole empire.

The moment techbros learn they are not going to get 5 figures for their products, getting harassed for free commissions and have to deal with art thieves reposting their Frankenstein work they will abandoned this faster then Square ditched live service servers.

Furwerk studio wrote:

Unka John wrote:
Well, of course, others should be disadvantaged so I can get what I want.

So you would be okay with these guys stealing from you?

EDIT; Just wanted to add something that will completely collapse this whole empire.

The moment techbros learn they are not going to get 5 figures for their products, getting harassed for free commissions and have to deal with art thieves reposting their Frankenstein work they will abandoned this faster then Square ditched live service servers.

Steal??? Sounds retro and somewhat elitist.

It's ummm…. *cough*, sharing, for the um, greater good.
Yeah, that's it *shifts eyes left to right*

Unka John wrote:

Furwerk studio wrote:

Unka John wrote:
Well, of course, others should be disadvantaged so I can get what I want.

So you would be okay with these guys stealing from you?

EDIT; Just wanted to add something that will completely collapse this whole empire.

The moment techbros learn they are not going to get 5 figures for their products, getting harassed for free commissions and have to deal with art thieves reposting their Frankenstein work they will abandoned this faster then Square ditched live service servers.

Steal??? Sounds retro and somewhat elitist.

It's ummm…. *cough*, sharing, for the um, greater good.
Yeah, that's it *shifts eyes left to right*

“It's for the greater good.”

No, just bloody no. Ether you are a parody, or a cult member.

Furwerk studio wrote:

Unka John wrote:

Furwerk studio wrote:

Unka John wrote:
Well, of course, others should be disadvantaged so I can get what I want.

So you would be okay with these guys stealing from you?

EDIT; Just wanted to add something that will completely collapse this whole empire.

The moment techbros learn they are not going to get 5 figures for their products, getting harassed for free commissions and have to deal with art thieves reposting their Frankenstein work they will abandoned this faster then Square ditched live service servers.

Steal??? Sounds retro and somewhat elitist.

It's ummm…. *cough*, sharing, for the um, greater good.
Yeah, that's it *shifts eyes left to right*

“It's for the greater good.”

No, just bloody no. Ether you are a parody, or a cult member.

I tend to avoid cults. Unless, of course, they wear really cool outfits, with like lightning bolts and stuff. And a fez.

You're never going to do it without a fez on.

Hold up Furwerk studio.
Unka John is on the same side as you, he was just using irony to make the point in a funnier way.

Unka John wrote:
Well, of course, others should be disadvantaged so I can get what I want.

Love to have this as a sticker to slap on all the cheap merchandise with high price tags made in the Asian Rim.

Such irony and such truth about modern consumerism.

I am absolutely on Furwerk studio's side here.

I equate the use of AI art programs with competing in online chess games using a chess engine. I don't have to know anything about chess, just use the engine and Yippee! I win.

Oh shit. My opponent is using the same program.

“But Unka John, I can't draw and I don't wanna learn how to do all that other stuff to make my comic”

Look, I get it, you can't draw like Ironscarf. But, you don't have to. Plenty of lesser artists have readers on this site and receive positive comments.

Clip Studio practically makes the comic for you. Choose a premade layout, trace over one of their figure mannequins, copy/paste the provided foliage background and Voila! Of course if you don't know anything about art or visual storytelling it's still gonna show.

The point is you're still going to have to learn something if you want your comic to be effective.

Does Bravo draw his comic? No, he does not. But Bravo still has to know things. He has to make a plethora of decisions requiring specific knowledge. He does NOT just slap that thing together.

Okay, so you have no interest in learning about the craft at all. You just want a program to do everything for you. Just don't do it off my back.

Just because my car is in the same parking lot as yours doesn't mean you can use it without my permission. Nor can you use just a portion of it as in taking a tire off it because you have a flat.

The problem is that this AI art thinking fits right into the lazy internet libertarian socialist idea that we live in a post-copyright world and there IS no ownership of anything on the internet, once your stuff is online it's free to everyone to use how they like.

The idea is that they're not hurting you or taking from you because it's just a copy. They can copy your stuff infinitely so your claim to it is meaningless.

The trouble is that we tried that with music already, we tried that with video, people are still trying it with porn, we tried it with computer code, we tried it with books and essays too, and all that came crashing down.
With all of the above it's easier to get the good versions of it legally- by paying for it and there are usually repressions to stealing.

So none of this is a new frontier. We've all been here before over and over.

What do you think of people deleting their stuff because they don't want the ai to incorporate it into their image blender?

lothar wrote:
What do you think of people deleting their stuff because they don't want the ai to incorporate it into their image blender?

for current AIs I'd just consider it too late and counter productive:
1. They've probably already scraped your art/
2. Now that the original is deleted the AI remixed version has no antecedents, there's is basically all “original” because no earlier copies on the net of that portion can be found anymore.

The person scores a great big own goal.

You'll only maybe stop future AI programs from adding it to their database and even then who says they won't just use the older databases and simply add to them in future rather than starting fresh?

The only way ahead is for regulation of the stuff they steel.

I'm still dabbling with Midnight Cafe on occasion. It's been honestly a tremendous tool to help me visualize stuff that i only have a vague idea how to put on paper.

I wanna draw a cyberpunk shopping district, but i want it from a very specific angle. I could rewatch Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell and hope to find the ref i need there… or i could ask the AI for a “Cyberpunk Shopping District”, and it gave me exactly the refs i needed. What may have taken hours of research and google image trawling was given to me in seconds.

All

Hail

Our

AI

Overlords

I just wanna chime in and reiterate my hatred of ai

It's garbage. It looks like an alien fever dream. It's lazy on par with 8 bit sprite comics of the early 2ooos. Anyone who uses it seriously is a hack.

“No one would ever want machine produced textiles! How could a machine ever reproduce something that was made by real human hands? Surely the common people can recognize the difference between painstakingly thread by thread crafted embroidery done over several weeks and imported from Venice, versus lace crunched out in several minutes by some soulless machine.

We must stop these automated looms at all costs!”

- Some weaver in 1812, probably

TheJagged wrote:
“No one would ever want machine produced textiles! How could a machine ever reproduce something that was made by real human hands? Surely the common people can recognize the difference between painstakingly thread by thread crafted embroidery done over several weeks and imported from Venice, versus lace crunched out in several minutes by some soulless machine.

We must stop these automated looms at all costs!”

- Some weaver in 1812, probably

Weavers had been using machines to make actual fabric and thread for thousands of years by this point. They're called looms and spinning wheels. Both operations could be done totally by hand but it's like why use corded and pinch pottery when you have the wheel?

But embroidery was so labor intensive and in the early 19th century there were millions of soldiers who needed pretty uniforms and there just had to be a way to simplify the process so all the grenadiers could have nice embroidered grenades on their nicely edged turnbacks and so its not a printed piece of cloth slapped on there with a few threads. And machine made lace? Be quiet foolish luddite all the hussars need a full chest full of cording and the Marshall's coat must literally be able to stand up by itself because of all the gold embroidery. So if there's a way to make it faster and cheaper the Emperor will give you a legion d'honuer

bravo1102 wrote:
Weavers had been using machines to make actual fabric and thread for thousands of years by this point. They're called looms and spinning wheels. Both operations could be done totally by hand but it's like why use corded and pinch pottery when you have the wheel?

So like digital art right now? Personally I don't trust any artist who doesn't grind up minerals for pigment. :^)

Seriosuly though, anyone who ever used Gaussian Blur better not be complaining about automated algorithms ruining art. I still say, if i could get an AI to speed up the process of my own art, i would do it in a heartbeat.


The whole “don't steal my art” is a fallacious argument. Anyone could steal your art, as soon as you put it on the web, it's practically already stolen. Whether it's an actual hooman ripping you off or a machine, does that really make that much of a difference? All i need to do is ask my buddy google and presto, i got all the images i could ever want. The only difference is that ai art mashes those thousands of google images together into a bloody, unrecognizable pulp. How would you ever even know that you got stolen from? So instead of feeding the algorithm 100 images from the same artist, you feed it 100 images from 100 different artists, voila, you can't tell who exactly got ripped off anymore.


At what point does it cross the line from inspiration to plagiarism anyway? Like, how much do i have to copy from another artist's style before it becomes morally questionable? 10%, 50%? You think you learned drawing in a vacuum? Your brain is an algorithm. You learn art by copying art from other artists. Copying, tracing, rinse repeat. My 8 year old self copied stills from Sailor Moon, send me to jail! I stole Sailor Moon's art!


I bet if the internet had been a thing in the 80s Ray Harryhausen woulda started a hashtag against CGI. Maybe i'm in a luxury position cause i don't make money off my art (and if you do, well tough titties. Go join the pile of other jobs that got made obsolete by machines. Maybe a typewriter factory is still hiring somewhere.) but thing is, we already lost. AI art isn't going away. So why not embrace it? Figure i'd rather find ways to use it for my own advantage instead of being salty.

Meanwhile, ITT: https://i.imgur.com/fIZ2vND.jpeg

Well.

Don't complain about art thieves that take your work and profit off of it.

Don't whine about a flood of no effort comics that will rival Sprite comics that bury your work.

Don't talk about improving your style or technique.

Don't ever take pride in anything as it has no worth.

Don't innovate, challenge, change, inspire or influence.

Don't even put effort into writing prompts as you got a fucking macro to do that for you with a button press.

Don't bitch about ethical practices any more.

Just consume, consume, consume! No thinking, no wonder or awe. Just open you gob and swallow grey slop.

You guys just made all art worthless and meaningless for the pursuit of praise and money.

The techbros had won here.

TheJagged wrote:

So like digital art right now? Personally I don't trust any artist who doesn't grind up minerals for pigment. :^)

Interesting example to use. Because you know what never happened? The natural mineral and plant based dye industry didn't fight the synthetic dyes. The synthetic dyes only supplemented and complimented the natural not replace.

Even if the artist does not grind his own pigments, someone still does. It's not like it's summoned out of the ether like magical sprites on some sort of board or screen – oh wait.

Yet they still make canvas and paper, now more than ever. Digital prints mimic brush strokes and many are printed on stretched canvas. Things don't go away in the arts. They might in practical usage like pinch pots and the potter's wheel but pinch pots are still made and used( he types looking at the one he made in ceramics class four decades ago.)

I have a feeling this won't be a case of buggy whip manufacturers going out of business because of the horseless carriage but more like Fisher body works shifting from making carriage parts to making automobile parts and there's still a job for the guy doing the custom filigree work by hand.

I just got hired to art direct a table-top RPG rules book, and the authors want all the illustrations to be AI-generated images. I'm currently very busy formulating arguments to convince them that that would be a really bad idea. I think I am in for a white-knuckle ride!

fallopiancrusader wrote:
I just got hired to art direct a table-top RPG rules book, and the authors want all the illustrations to be AI-generated images. I'm currently very busy formulating arguments to convince them that that would be a really bad idea. I think I am in for a white-knuckle ride!

Of course they want it that way, it costs a lot to commission so generating such is practically free. I guess one argument against it could be how owning the rights to it could be really difficult and there's at least one legal precedent from recently where the whole AI thing backfired on the author. There are very talented people who could illustrate such and aren't trying to bag hundreds of dollars, but they probably aren't very conscious about the prices other artists work for either. It's just best to be very clear that they will own the rights, not the artist. Considering how AI generated images might never be recognized as their own and… something tells me they aren't looking to release their game as a free public domain thing, going cheap but not THAT cheap might be their best course of action.

The most important thing about AI and comics we need to remember that comics are form of storytelling. Drawings are only part of what makes a comic. I saw this AI generated comic fallopiancrusader linked and it's just a mess. Unless computers somehow learn to write, people who create their own stories have nothing to fear. And I suspect that final effect of AI writing will be close to crap Hollywood is currently farting out - no originality, just bunch of people checking boxes trying to generate something that they think will sell.

Wildcat Arren wrote:
The most important thing about AI and comics we need to remember that comics are form of storytelling. Drawings are only part of what makes a comic. I saw this AI generated comic fallopiancrusader linked and it's just a mess. Unless computers somehow learn to write, people who create their own stories have nothing to fear. And I suspect that final effect of AI writing will be close to crap Hollywood is currently farting out - no originality, just bunch of people checking boxes trying to generate something that they think will sell.

This reminds me of a singer/songwriter we have in our country and how he writes all these lyrics that sound deep and filled with pathos. So many years ago, someone wrote a code to generate lyrics in his style and it was hilarious, because as it turned out even a website was able to do it and most of the results were pretty similar to his song lyrics. I'll never forget it.

TheJagged wrote:
The whole “don't steal my art” is a fallacious argument. Anyone could steal your art, as soon as you put it on the web, it's practically already stolen. Whether it's an actual hooman ripping you off or a machine, does that really make that much of a difference? All i need to do is ask my buddy google and presto, i got all the images i could ever want. The only difference is that ai art mashes those thousands of google images together into a bloody, unrecognizable pulp. How would you ever even know that you got stolen from? So instead of feeding the algorithm 100 images from the same artist, you feed it 100 images from 100 different artists, voila, you can't tell who exactly got ripped off anymore.

I think you're on the wrong tack here personally.
Just look to the music industry for an analogue about plagiarism, rip-offs, rights etc.

And the comparison with the Luddite movement for weaving is misguided. The popular idea is that the “Luddites” hated technology and wanted to stick to their old ways but the reality was that they were protesting the big corporate mills destroying all their jobs. They were happy to use tech, but they couldn't afford to compete with the ultra rich guys who set up a giant mill and paid their workers almost nothing.

There's a big difference between people getting inspiration from one another and a machine that physically takes you art whole and uses all the data it comprises off to train itself.
The programmers who make these AIs and the companies that own them have illegally made money from millions upon millions of artists by using their art without paying for it. That's horrendous.

I believe that these AI art programs can be great tools if the art they used is ethically sourced or we can just plug in our own art. As it is it's simply all a huge hoax on us right now. It's a pastiche machine copying and pasting people's work wile making money for the greedy companies that own them and absolutely disenfranchising the people they steal from, treating them as shit- when we could be the best users of this tech if we could adapt it to our own work.

Ozoneocean wrote:

I believe that these AI art programs can be great tools if the art they used is ethically sourced or we can just plug in our own art. As it is it's simply all a huge hoax on us right now. It's a pastiche machine copying and pasting people's work wile making money for the greedy companies that own them and absolutely disenfranchising the people they steal from, treating them as shit- when we could be the best users of this tech if we could adapt it to our own work.

That's the key and the way it'll go I think. The genie won't go back in the bottle, so it's up to us as artists to take hold of this technology and find it's potential. The tech bros just don't have the imagination, but the people they think they are replacing will show them how it's done.

It would be totally different if it were some kind of program that you could feed your own artwork into and have it emulate your style without using outside sources. That, I might be interested in using.

With the Stable Diffusion AI, it is theoretically possible for anyone to train their own AI dataset using any input they want. (like maybe all the inputs are your own artwork or photographs that you have taken yourself) It would just take a lot of work and processing power to do something like that.

lothar wrote:
It would be totally different if it were some kind of program that you could feed your own artwork into and have it emulate your style without using outside sources. That, I might be interested in using.

That would be the ideal outcome, and that's what i'm hoping to get out of it in the end. AI art that works kinda the way that auto-tweening works. Heck, i recently learned there's an option in CSP to automate your work process, you bascially create your own step by step program that will automtically generate layers & add effects etc. Enhancing that to be even more automated would be the logical next step.

Furwerk studio wrote:
Just consume, consume, consume! No thinking, no wonder or awe. Just open you gob and swallow grey slop.

You guys just made all art worthless and meaningless for the pursuit of praise and money.

The techbros had won here.

Can't beat em, join em. I demand all my payment be in crypto from now on.

I don't even have it in me to be upset about capitalist BS anymore. Companies will be companies, artists getting screwed over is hardly anything new.

I'm pretty sure i made this argument already, but the kinda art that gets commissioned by companies i would barely consider “art” to begin with. It's marketing approved mass fodder, the more generic the better. The cover art on board games, the art on trading cards, the concpet art behind movies and games… If companies want that to be AI art, i say let them have it. Might save some artists from literally killing themselves in crunch at least.

Just from personal experience, of all the comm art i made for others, i can't recall a single one that i would have done if i hadn't been payed for it. None of that is my art. It was just a job. By all means, anyone feel free to rip that off, re-sell it, etc. It has zero emotional value to me on a personal or artistic level.

Actually, i'm gonna go on a huge philosophical tangent here. Making art your career is bad. What kind of artist enjoys making comm art over working on personal projects? Pretty sure any big buck artist in the industry, working his back off to please Papa Disney, would secretely rather be working on that passion project they had been brewing in the basement for three decades. Maybe, just maybe, it would actually be better if every artist stuck to art as a passion and/or hobby and stopped worrying whether they could make money off their work, or if anyone else is making money off their work without their permission. Cause art shouldn't be work.

And yeah i know, we don't live in a utopian society where everyone has a secured basic income and can slack off to paint all day. Artists gotta eat, i get it. That's why i'm saying stop making art you career. Because money is the antithesis of art. Art should be free.

If you love your profession, you'll never work a day in your life. Getting paid to do something you love isn't work.

My problems weren't the commissions, the problem was my attitude. I was approaching it wrong. Looking back I'd have no problem doing it again because I really did learn a lot doing them.

But then I never was very good so maybe I wasn't a talented enough of an artist to not want to just serve my own grand vision as opposed to getting practical experience doing things I otherwise wouldn't have done. After all I'm no genius and barely ever get recognized for anything no matter how hard I try. It was nice being paid for it and people liking what I turned out. I even realized that I was goofing up on certain things, things I can do better now. Well it's all for people smarter than me to figure these things out and I just do what I love and love what I do and try not to think too hard about it. Think too hard I'll just recognize just how inadequate my work is and cycle into depression and I have plenty of that anyway.