#art discourse

[funishment-time]

"art is for the TALENTED only TALENTED PEOPLE could do art before and AI artists are HEROES" why do all AI Art Bros sound like Nagito Komaeda

[curioscurio]

how yall look standing next to million dollar paintings in museums

[joyce-stick]

Think it's past time we started calling the "yuri is fetishizing lesbians for cishet men" argument what it is: misogyny. It's misogynist to say that women can't genuinely create or enjoy lesbian fiction

And it's also teetering on the edge of transmisogynist because that argument is like two hairs' breadths removed from "and therefore any trans women who say they like yuri must actually be men"

(also even if it's true and men like looking at lesbians: so what. Who cares. They're allowed to like it)

Just admit that you're homophobic and think porn is evil or whatever

[firecooking]

STOP IT STOP IT PLEASE STOP COVERING UP OLD ART AND DESTROYING YOUR OLD SKETCHBOOKS AND 'FIXING' THEM PLEASE TIK TOK IS WRONG YOU WILL MISS THAT ART SOME DAY AND YOU'LL BE MAD THAT SOMEONE CONVINCED YOU TO HATE YOUR PROGRESS

[deepdreamnights]

Hey there, saw your post re: harassment around artists using gen ai and thought it was great esp with the debunking of data usage myths. Would you share your thoughts regarding concerns that models are being trained to copy specific art styles and thus pose a direct threat to the artists whose art styles are being used?

Well, there's several levels to that.

The main one is that on copyright grounds, styles are explicitly non-copyrightable. Moreover:

No one's style is unique

No one's style is unimitatable by analogue means.

The second point is important, because anyone can go on Fiverr right now and and find someone to replicate any given art style, and every competent draftsperson has to be able to do it to some degree or another. No major animation house, art studio, or comic company has ever hired someone because they couldn't find someone else that could imitate the surface-level aspects of their style.

The first point is just a matter of basic reality. Ex-nihlo creativity either doesn't exist or is so rare as to be a once-in-an-epoch thing. Everyone builds on the influences that they learn from, and if you think someone has a unique style what they really have is a different media diet than you.

For example, Don Bluth. Born 1937, aged 15 in 1952.

Same year Time released this this picture of Burlesque Performer Dale Strong.

Someone made an impression.

Marilyn Monroe was also a national sex symbol when Bluth was a teen, putting some context to most of his other ladies, but especially Goldie Pheasant (or maybe she's more Jayne Mansfield, hard to tell through the bird-ness). His art style has obvious roots with Tex Avery and I would guess he read Mad Magazine a lot as a kid.

And Not to hang the guy out to dry alone, I was a teenager in the 1990s, and most of my sexy fictional ladies are 9/10 some combination of Dana Scully, Peg Bundy, and Rhonda Shear.

The point being that style isn't something you create intentionally so much as an accumulation of influences, drawn from the commons. Attempting to claim ownership of such a thing is by itself an act of theft in my view, and allowing them to be protected under the law would mean a judge being shown exactly how many pieces of prior art the Walt Disney Corporation owns that your work superficially resembles. Why, they'll even run it through a style recognizing AI to make sure they catch them all.

But let's talk about style matching.

It just takes one image now, and doesn't require training.

Which I'm sure sounds frightening, but this has been the situation since February for Midjourney, and it was available in the Stable Diffusion ecosystem long before that. If the threat were as pronounced as feared, we'd have seen the impact by now. And we haven't, and we're unlikely to, for several reasons, several of them listed above.

The largest is that style isn't even close to the be all/end all of what an artist brings to a given project. And the kinds of execs who are making a 'replace 'em with a robot' kinda decision aren't the kinds of people who care about art style beyond how much it looks like the most recent successful thing. And nobody's ever needed a robot to ride coattails.

But the next largest part is that AI style imitations aren't really accurate because the robot doesn't see style in the same way we do. It's all just math to the robot, and it prioritizes what it notices, not what we do.

I'll demonstrate.

Jack Kirby will be my example, for several reasons.

He has a bold and identifiable style, he's arguably the most famous artist in western comics history, and he has many analogue imitators and homagers.

Using Midjourney and prompting "an illustration of dana scully by jack kirby, 1968, in the style of 1960s marvel comics --ar 3:4 --s 15"

Using the base model, on the first roll we get three complete style mismatches and one that's kinda close, though I'd say that's way more Sal Buscema or John Byrne.

Kirby's women had a certain, difficult to describe oddness about their faces that the robot doesn't seem to grok, and it doesn't touch on the kinds of wild patterns and bold black/white swatches that make Jack's work feel 'jack'.

Tom Scioli's take on Kirby is a sort of lovingly flanderized parody, but it captures the spirit of Jack's art much more directly even if a lot of individual details aren't period-accurate. He draws Kirby the way you remember Kirby from your childhood, but I don't question whether the page above is trying to be a Jack Kirby homage or one to Sal Buscema.

But Midjourney has style reference, so we can inject the Kirby right in. Using the picture of Sersei dancing from above with the same prompt, we get:

Well, the work is more convincingly period, but again, we're not terribly close to being on-point. In fact, they're not very consistent between each other. Top left is any 80s marvel fill-in artist. Top right is maybe Kirby-esq. Bottom Left is flat out Jim Lee, bottom right is very Byrne-y.

Using three reference images to give the best shot, I'm also moving to using images of a similar color style, and all with a woman as the central focus. I have included the infamous Crystal pin-up shot because as I said, Kirby women have a certain oddness to them (fondly).

Results (MJ 6.1 on the left, Niji 6 on the right):

It all says 60s-70s Marvel, but I don't think Kirby would be the first guess for any of them. Maaaaaaybe the lower-left Dana in image #2 if you squint.

And that's Jack Kirby. Massively popular and prolific with a career spanning decades. If anyone in the comics space should be impersonatable by this thing, its him.

I'm sure you could train a LORA to get closer, and sure, the tech is only going to get better from here, but by the nature of how the system works no generation pulls just from what is referenced. Every generation is both blended with other concepts and emphasizes only what the machine catalogs as relevant, not what we might.

There's not much to stop someone from imitating your style with a machine, but there was nothing stopping them from doing the same with an underpaid freelancer. The results are likely to miss the mark regardless.

If the client wants you, they'll try and get you. If they just want something kinda like you, they've always had an avenue to that.

Fortunately, you're more than your style, and whatever anyone can do with the machine, you can do better because you've got access to both.

[the-crooked-library]

look i don't know how true this is but i hate hate hate in my bones the way that the recent rise of purity culture has intersected with minimalism and irony poisoning

no sex. no dark themes. no "fetishization." no ornamentation. no "unrealistic" lighting and you can't see a thing. actors don't enunciate for shit. no "purple prose" or "overwriting" (it's just an adverb) or "tumblr prose" or whatever the fuck the newest term will be. sincerity is cringe, ew, why would he say that. no colour grading, because we want the big-screen blockbuster to be "realistic," BUT we will shoot it in a room with fake sunlight and slap the effects onto the scene post-production. moral fiction. moral fanfiction. "omg this is craazyyy was the creator on drugs??!!1????" about any form of creative expression. lists of reasons why this short experimental amateur one-shot is Very Bad Writing, actually. s*x smex spice adult fun time p0rn k!ll grape sewer slide.

everything is boring, nothing is real, i am fucking sick of it

[garlicbreadslice]

“I use gen ai because I want to make art but I’m not good enough at it to make the art I want :(” well friend guess what. You’re still not making art. And you’re still not good at it. So like. What did we learn here.

[lillikoifish]

Theres a lot of discourse on modern art, and its cool to see the conversations happen, but sometimes people get so lost in the sauce that it actually crosses over into just kind of depressing. There’s this piece by Yves Klein making the rounds on tiktok, being thoroughly roasted by 15 yr olds because “It’s just blue on canvas!! That’s not art I could do that!” And there’s tons of people explaining the lore behind the work, he invented that shade of blue, if you think you can do it you gotta invent a color, which no way you can do, liar.

But that to me isn’t the part that really sticks. Honestly let’s take all the lore out, just remove the art from all context and just look at the piece in question.

How long did you look at this art before you read this sentence? A minute? A couple seconds? That’s the art. That’s the real interesting thing. At the end of the day it’s just a shade of blue, and if you like you can enjoy this simple pleasure: you can take in a gorgeous color for as long as you like. How long did you get to let your eyes rest on something pretty, just for the sake of it? Maybe you wanna look again now, because it’s been a long day, you’ve earned some blue.

What these kids fail to realize is that they are denying themselves that. Are you so void of all humanity that you can’t just enjoy the color blue? You need to be impressed by skill, the art has to prove itself worthy, it has to fulfill a need, it can’t just make you happy with a pretty color, and if you can do it yourself, that just speaks to how pointless it is, because anything you yourself make cant have any value, right?

This kind of self hatred is exactly why works like these belong in museums, why they should be in front of your eyes, because a person doesn’t need to have value to exist, you can find whatever joy in this life you like and it doesn’t have to be for any reason at all. You can just be on earth and enjoy your time here.

And hey, maybe you just like the color blue, here, why don’t you look at this canvas a while. I think it’s very pretty. Don’t you?

[yikes-kachowski]

Credit to @hhhopecore on TikTok, Drew Gooden, and Eddy Burback.

Just a reminder that this is an anti AI blog. If you post AI art or AI writing, I can tell. Anyone who actually examines it as art in any form can tell.

Be well all.

[theywhoshantbenamed]

I can’t help but feel like you can prefer someone else art style without putting down another artist?? Like you DO NOT have to say some shit like “so-and-so did it better” everyone’s art has something to offer and there nothing wrong with preferring one. But maybe don’t be a dick about it???

[dyspunktional-leviathan]

I hate that I have to explain this to you because you should genuinely be smart enough to know better. The reason AI stealing is distinct from reference usage or collages or redraws or heavily inspired works is because they are human. Because artists form community, and that involves sharing with and supporting one another. Because references and inspiration are a result of respect for an artist you enjoy, and being inspired by something you loved. A machine feels no love. A machine feels no respect. A machine can only ever take with no genuine way to give back to a community. Ai artists aren't artists. They couldn't tell you even one of the art pieces that went into their AI amalgamation. They couldn't tell you who their ideas are from or why they liked it or why they were inspired. All they do is take. And they don't give back in any meaningful way.

And for the record, because i know you're going to cry ableism despite plenty of disabled people expressing how fucking distasteful all this is. No, I don't think someone has to work or be productive to have a place in society. Sometimes what you "give back" is simply love or enjoyment or respect. None of which a machine can give. None of which an Ai artists who doesn't know where their art comes from can give.

Missed this one. Well I've got bad news for you.

I am literally not even human.

I create derivative art often as a direct and deliberate act of disrespect towards the original creators. Because they disrespected my own and other marginalized groups first. If the disrespect is wrongful, like for example the other way around when marginalized (self-)representation is erased or caricatured, the problem is in that.

What I appreciate about someone's creation, what I get from it, and what I think of the author, are three entirely separate things. Well, the first two often do go together with, like, stories, but when I'm using a reference I am using it, not appreciating it. And appreciating some aspects of a creation will not make me love or respect the creator if they also give me reasons to Not Do That.

Sometimes there is specifically appreciation of the author in my art. That is far from default, and when that happens it does not magically make that art of mine fundamentally philosophically different from all other. I have shared fanfiction fanart with the fics' authors and they loved it and I loved that. Cool! That art was not morally superior to when I'm just making something for myself, and was not the only one that had the right to be called art.

And while I do feel love (which is just that — a feeling), many others don't.

Plenty of disabled people also express how distasteful your shit is. The difference isn't between "lots of disabled people" vs "a few disabled people". The difference is between "disabled people who believe that disabled people still owe to proof their worth and that disabled people below certain levels of ability have no right to accommodate themselves as they see fit" and "disabled people who don't".

No one is obligated to give you love or enjoyment. Respect only as far as not restricting your autonomy, rather than restricting theirs for your comfort which is what you want from them. And many are literally unable to give that love and enjoyment. No. Matter. What. They must still have their needs met if that is included under what you were talking about. You must have your needs met. Restricting someone's access to something is not a need, no matter what it is. It is about restricting their autonomy, not maintaining yours.

My fully self-executed transgender aromantic unretconned-severely-disabled Raistlin Majere fanfiction is art, and someone's AI-executed or -assisted creation is too.

And what the fuck is that "explaining to me when I should know better", maybe stop getting into your heads that people can only disagree with you because they just Don't Know Better? But it's also always that they should have! Maybe I don't and couldn't. Or maybe I just fucking disagree.

[clairertalk]

It's really so sad realizing that a lot of loved artists on various social networks scam people with tracing and stealing art from other creators

This is not just fraud down a moral and economic point of view (they sell as well) but it's actually illegal tracing from a copyrighted image without the owner's consent 😩

There was a time where everyone got mad because random accounts reposted art without permission and credits, now it's allowed tracing from other artists' works🫣

In addition tracing is not really useful for learning so it's not even an excuse, it's just laziness with the certainty of making easy money. And it's evident that those artists are actually good in their part of the work so the fact they trace is just a way to draw faster and be more active. But I bet if they find themselves to create their own artwork (even with the use of some references) they aren't good as much as they (at the first glace) are with the tracing trick

Twitter is one fire right now

[ennui-lvr]

you never realize how little we pay attention to things until you're drawing and you're like 'tf does a bird even look like fr'

[rhinedottirau]

I seriously just had to have this argument with someone so let me just say

Setting the precedent that "No artist needs to use external references" while trying to state the case for how AI is bad for using other images to generate more sets a bad precedent for artists in general and this is a statement worth nitpicking.

For one, equating an artist using a reference to get a pose better to an AI stealing pieces of an image to generate it's own is fucking WILD because that artist is still DRAWING THE THING.

And two, some artists NEED REFERENCES!!! References are GOOD! References HELP! References make what you draw feel more REAL!!!!

Expecting artists not to use them, or treating artists who don't use references as superior or better - HURTS ARTISTS!! And if you refuse to use references your art probably sucks unless you are an abstract artist tbh you are just holding yourself back and being a fucking idiot if you refuse to use references.

[bugsbunnydragqueen]

This is my take on AI "art". Whoever wrote this comment worded it better than I ever could.