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.

dpat57 wrote:
I was this close to wiping my hard drive and taking up macramé instead of making comics, but this made me pause.

I'm always that close to wiping the memory sticks and just building models.
But all the freaking other stuff I'd have to get rid of.

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:
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.

That's beautiful.
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:

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.

Rather than copyright over the generated images I mean copyright of the art they steal from.

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:
Ask and ye shall receive! The Duck now has it very own AI generated comic, created by the venerable hansrickheit

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.

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.

I started watching that video and got bored. Their other videos are better.

I'm trying to pinpoint what it is about this ai stuff that just feels like a fad. Kinda like rotoscoping.

I like it, but obviously it raises ethical issues. Rotoscoping is a blast though. One of my favorite anime is Aku no hana and most people who dislike it complain about the facial expressions being too “creepy”. It uses rotoscoping and I think it only makes it better.

Anyone else remember how the earlier iterations of ai art generators were plagued with dog faces?

lothar wrote:
Anyone else remember how the earlier iterations of ai art generators were plagued with dog faces?

Yup
They trained it with mainly dog pics so it defaulted to dog faces constantly haha!

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:
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!

That's a dark day for the creators they make their money from.
F*** adobe.

Yeah! To hey with that. I don't actually understand what they are doing but it sounds lazy. I'll stick to my PS6. It works good enough and I don't need it spying on me

The comic book industry is starting to push back. I suspect that others will follow.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
The comic book industry is starting to push back. I suspect that others will follow.

It's great that people are finally starting to get it-
Maybe that will eventually result in their databases being deleted and them having to rebuild them from scratch using truly copyright free art.

This sort of crap wouldn't last a second if they did it to the music industry, but artists don't have that sort of power- or at least publishers couldn't give a crap because they think they can ditch artists and just use the AI copies of their work. Whereas music publishers make more from having music artists signed to them than just music itself.

Sure, you can make AI-generated art. You just won't be able to own it. As this comic book author found out the hard way.

Hahahahaha…. I saw that article. And the one about the comic book executive guy that told the“artist” that submitted ai bullshit art for the cover of the comic: he said he would blacklist anyone that submitted ai art. Normally I'm against blacklisting but I think it's deserved.


I don't think ai will ever be creative. It's like a blender of stolen crap. It's going to take people a while to adjust but eventually they will be able to smell it. It stinks. It's fake, uncanny valley garbage with no soul.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
Sure, you can make AI-generated art. You just won't be able to own it. As this comic book author found out the hard way.

And the article was wrong too in that it says the AI trains in the style of an artist- it doesn't in any way at all “train”, it just samples the artwork and reuses it, mixing and matching, very similar to the way police used to do with a identikit.

People imagine these AI are super clever and interesting in the way they work, but all they do is match words to the imagery that's asked for and then try and fit similar shapes together, resizing and recoloring to make stuff blend. The AI is just using real artist's work to make lego with.
The fact people think that's what real artists do really goes a long way to demonstrate how untrained people misunderstand and utterly devalue art and artists.


The sooner they get those shitty databases wiped the better! They need to fill them with copyright free junk specifically donated for the purpose.

I would like to know one thing.

Why are ai/techbros are such deplorable human beings?

Between them openly talking about how they are going to fully replace artists,how their ai does a superior work, how worthless we artists are, calling us obsolete and how we are luddites to insulting photographers thinking it is just point and shoot when in reality there is a thousands of things like lighting, staging, camera lens and just having a full on meltdown over any kind of criticism.

I remember one person on twitter saying they didn't like how how a bunch of very creepy hyper generic realistic pics had messed up eyes and hands, that poor guy wasn't dogpiled, they were dog carpet bombed to hell and back over it.

Furwerk studio wrote:
I would like to know one thing.

Why are ai/techbros are such deplorable human beings?

Between them openly talking about how they are going to fully replace artists,how their ai does a superior work, how worthless we artists are, calling us obsolete and how we are luddites to insulting photographers thinking it is just point and shoot when in reality there is a thousands of things like lighting, staging, camera lens and just having a full on meltdown over any kind of criticism.

I remember one person on twitter saying they didn't like how how a bunch of very creepy hyper generic realistic pics had messed up eyes and hands, that poor guy wasn't dogpiled, they were dog carpet bombed to hell and back over it.

I've been insulted over and over again for daring to say AI is not necessarily bad by itself but how it's being used to exploit artists. Apparently acknowledging that this is whether we like it or not - happening, that technology aims at practicality and that ignoring the need of people to be recognized as artists without years and decaded of learning, thousands of dollars spent and a life of financial struggle, saying they're fake,(essentially gatekeeping art) is not necessarily going to have the desired effect. But it's a battleground out there now and the loudest of voices are either the ones glorifying AI or the ones who expect anyone to struggle like they did who wants to call themselves an artist. I think the issue is more with the profit-oriented aspect of this. How one cannot afford to spend their time just drawing things and not worrying about whether they get by or not and how big corporations are happy to use your works and turn it into their own profit without your permission. But I didn't come here to argue or get yelled at like over at facebook, so you know… I could be wrong, maybe it is more black and white. I just know that there's a lot of tension and hate around the subject lately.

Sadly, in real life things are rarely pure and perfectly grey. There is black and white.

The black here is ai is stealing images from those hard working artists that spent years learning their craft, and under the flag of “it is for the poor!” With the irony of if someone is that poor how they can afford a computer if they can't afford 2 dollar pencil sets, five dollar paper stacks.

It's ugly greed, a wait of “easy money”. Artists charge because it takes a lot to be able to make those pictures. AIbros are just boardroom investors who don't have the interest, drive or desires to work hard on any front.

Off this topic, I now doubt ai is going to replace anyone because let's look at YouTube algorithm and copyright bots, or Google translate.

Honestly I am waiting for some news that a vast majority of “good” art to be actually done by a human in some kind of scam.

Yeah the discussion has to be taken away from the idea of “artist vs non artist”, gatekeeping, and democritising art because that's the easy battleground designed by the AI proponents to shift the argument in their favour.

They characterise artists as an “elite”, and everyone else as the poor schlubs who're now empowered to create, which is an absolutely silly and false idea.

We need to keep focus on the fact that these programs get their material from theft and that this could be done in other creative industries like music and writing but it isn't because there are penalties for that sort of theft there.

I and many others here aren't against AI generated “art” as a tool, it's the stuff that's plugged into it that's wrong.

Ozoneocean wrote:
Yeah the discussion has to be taken away from the idea of “artist vs non artist”, gatekeeping, and democritising art because that's the easy battleground designed by the AI proponents to shift the argument in their favour.

They characterise artists as an “elite”, and everyone else as the poor schlubs who're now empowered to create, which is an absolutely silly and false idea.

We need to keep focus on the fact that these programs get their material from theft and that this could be done in other creative industries like music and writing but it isn't because there are penalties for that sort of theft there.

I and many others here aren't against AI generated “art” as a tool, it's the stuff that's plugged into it that's wrong.

I completely agree with you that AI generated images aren't inherently evil, but they are being used to do lots of harm to artists as things stand and that they should not be allowed to. It'd be pointless to dismiss that, it's an ethical and possibly legal issue and if you throw ethics out the window, you ignore the very valid concerns of people who work hard to do right by everyone. I just think that having to spend years or decades on perfecting their art and still struggling to get recognized should not be an argument against “let's make it easier for more people” to achieve, it should be an argument against other circumstances that prevent people from create for the sake of creating and enjoying themselves. And the artists that call me an idiot for looking to understand what motivates each side aren't going to make a profit off of me for sure. :D Also, I think the questions of how art is valued by individuals and people collectively is one of the deepest questions out there that could be endlessly explored, it's such a shame that sites took a forceful approach in this and started to threaten the livelyhood of artists, because people are entitled to recognition for their work and yet the lack of recognition for such does not mean exploring new possibilities for easier ways to create should be barred from humanity as a whole.