wankgate | 245: Tone Death Rapture: Championship Edition : Tournament Edition

i can't prove my credentials anonymously any more than you can. all i can say is i am an artist (digital and painting, no 3d), i have been working for over a decade, and i've had to do my own contracts and watch my back with companies, individual contractors and agents. i don't work in online forums or for fic mags, so i can't and won't try to speak for that, though i have worked covers, feature pages and box illustration for print magazines.

you can call me a manager of whatever you like, but this is honestly getting into the part where i said i was commenting assuming good faith and that people wanted to truly debate this topic that is very relevant to my industry. if all you want is an echo chamber and doomposting, then yeah, i'll bow out. that's not my experience so far, as a result of AI.

print magazine readership and revenue has been on a steady decline for decades. granted it will be a long time before, say, the new yorker starts doing AI illustrations. for everyone else, the future is already here.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230308235551/https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2023/02/14/ai-in-illustration/

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a40314356/dall-e-2-artificial-intelligence-cover/

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23363073/ai-art-generator-illustrator-news-site-the-bulwark

young artists will not be able to follow in your footsteps. the connections are not going to be there. the contracts are not going to be there. good for you that youre successful, but the world that made you is dead now. maybe people are mad because youre dancing on top of a ladder that's being pulled up, and youre saying the people left behind are getting left behind because they wont "diversify."

like the dying print mags are gonna start commissioning statues now that illustration is so easy?!

that's a slightly malicious read, anon. i never said you're getting left behind because you won't diversify, i said, that's one way to try to escape this. it's what i had to do too. i started with completely traditional art and fought the shift to digital for as long as i could, and now most of my paid work is digital. i need to figure out a way to diversify into 3d too, because there is a good amount of money i am leaving on the table too.

we, as an industry, will have to evolve, yes. but thinking there is no space left for human originality, service and ability to shape vision is imo pessimistic. art has always been a luxury product. chanel hasn't gone out of business because you can 3d print or fake a bag.

"art is about human originality and vision"

"art has always been a luxury product"

ah jeez buddy looks like you spilled a bunch of capitalism into the wellspring of the muses, and the predictable results are forthcoming. the non-"luxury product" end of art is going away, and with it, thousands of artists are going to have to do non-art day jobs. we build a future where only independently wealthy individuals will be able to afford not just the luxury of having art made for them, but the luxury of spending any significant amount of time making art. we will all be aesthetically poorer for it.

comparing yourself to chanel is not doing you a lot of favors on the "your experience doesnt generalize well" front, either.

as a purchase, yes, art has always been a luxury product. buyers will buy bread and pay rent before buying a print or a painting, that's always been the case. art isn't a necessity. i'm self aware enough about what i produce to know that, and that it means tougher times for me during periods of economic decline, when people tighten their purses. notably though, not everyone does. there are people with more money than i can ever dream of, who can still afford art services even during a recession. the gaming and film industry still needs concept art.

i don't think these clients will be best served by AI, because they're fundamentally very picky and at onve indecisive. many clients don't know what they want in detail - you have to help them figure it out. this might seem unusual for people who are thinking of how they commission, because you're doing it as a rare occurrence. but for frequent contractors, they often know they want 'something along the lines of a guy looking meaningfully at the sky while a rocket flies by, here are the size and dpi requirements, get it done by Tue,' and you have to help them figure out what that means, because they don't know what they want, but they know what they don't want when they see it. an AI can't do that.

also back in the day, artists used to be fostered by patrons, the richest people of a region. it doesn't make leonardo's work any less artistic. admitting art is a commercial product too doesn't poison the well.

maybe you ARE really an artist, because youre very bad at logical thinking and generalization.

youve also decided to ignore my point, supported with sources, that tomorrow's artists are not going to have the opportunities to get the clients you are currently working with. midjourney is going to have those clients, my dear. midjourney is already taking that prompt and spitting out things, and people are delighted to tweak what they want to accommodate what midjourney can give them. you can sit in the discord and watch it happen. the key advantage of AI generation is that it has a very low technical skill bar for the end user.

its true, rich people have paid for great art! but also, it took a few hundred years for the concepts of art and greatness to coalesce around that. it is a type of market logic. meanwhile you, purportedly an artist, arent talking about anything lower than chanel and da vinci - startlingly ahistorical and uneducated. here are three things you can think about by yourself because im not talking to you stupid ass any further.

1. what is the difference between easy replication of a single, human-created piece of art, and the easy replication of a style or type of art? ukiyoe prints hang in museums. should a pure AI generation?

2. an artist uses openai for $10 to analyze her own body of work and produce similar images. assumed the artist, when paying for the openai service, ticked a little box that said "do not use my work in your data set." openai subsequently uses the artist's uploaded body of work in its own data sets anyway. how would the artist prove this or get openai to disgorge the data?

3. the patron model of art provides some dinks, like you, with a living wage. does it confer upon you any power to determine art's future? for example, could you, or would you, ask your clients to agree not to use AI-generated art in their productions as a condition of using yours?

i think where we're not meeting on common ground is we are thinking of different types of different clients. irl companies are not using midjourney for service. i don't personally think they will because of all the stuff i previously mentioned, but fair, i can't read the future.

i'm giving big name examples to make a point, sure. apparently that makes me a stupid ass for not making obscure references. got it.

1. what is the difference between easy replication of a single, human-created piece of art, and the easy replication of a style or type of art?

AI could not create, for instance, impressionism until it has seen it. it cannot create cubism, it cannot create specific types of color palette-led art. not until a human mind that it can mimic does.

2. i don't think the artist should do that, personally. you would potentially run into legal trouble trying to sell pieces that are artificially made based on your work, in case they resemble too much the work that you sold to another client. Openai is still using your past work as reference, that danger is too big. so from get go, i can't answer that for you, because it's not a situation i'd say you should put yourself in. contracts are a major issue.

3. why would i want prerogative over what my client uses? they are open to use whatever kind of competing art they want. if you are worried about a client using your art in openai and putting it on that database - there are typically 2 types of contracts: the most common one, where you make an image for a client and sell it to the client for explicit uses (let's say, to print as is on 1,000 tshirts). then there are much more expensive contracts where you sell the image in its totality, they can use it for whatever and edit it as they please. if you sell art on this second basis, you are giving them full rights over the picture, and yes, they can put it up anywhere. however, you take that risk and are much better compensated for it.

all this aside, if we're down to namecalling, it doesn't seem as if this conversation is about genuinely talking things out, so i'll bow out too. don't think it does much good to fill both our days with negativity.

i already told you i was done with you, idiot. my god youre so proud of how good you follow orders, and this is the quality of your work?

much like how you cannot control whether or not a rando on anon comms replies to you after you say "i'm done," technology will continue to march on and change the landscape of your field regardless of what you have to say about it

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

"fuck you, i got mine, you need to diversify"

"but youre misrepresenting the systemic problem and viable solutions"

"gotcha, i knew it was a systemic problem all along and theres nothing you can do about it. now if you will excuse me i need to suck sam altmans dick so hard when he cums it enpuddings my brain stem."

sorry bud

i'm the artist anon. the anon you are responding to isn't me.

you guys are done talking with each other, remember?

driveby anon but man, you sound like you've never actually worked with creative clients in your life, or at least very few of them

and no I'm not going to tell you which parts of your comment make me think that. if you worked a client-facing creative job you would already know

i'm sure they do, but unfortunately the level at which they debate makes it sound like they're getting heated about losing their livelihood from Twitter and Tumblr commishes

+1

As another professional artist: lol.

the work i do involves seeing clients adjust what they want when they see it iteratively produced. today's creative clients, when they have money and time, are picky in ways AI can't presently meet. what i'm trying to tell you is that the clients are going to get less of that kind of picky when they have more power to create something Good Enough without having to work with you. the tech will also get better at meeting those needs anyway.

they are going to accept the 80% match for their vision if they can do it themselves by yelling at a computer. art anon was quite right that chanel types will continue to request chanel levels of personal service, but this is not going to be the majority of the work done.

AI cant replace truly creative work, but it can replace illustration products, and it will, and the clients you think wont accept it today are going to adjust their demands and expectations when they can get most of what they had in mind for a fraction of the cost and time. ive watched it happen, ive been at the table.

> when they have a lot of money and time

lol. lmao. There is no way you interact with real humans in a creative job in any capacity

actually the same anon that opened up this whole thing, but i think the professional level pricepoint is a fair observation. illustration at a (highstakes) professional level does require a lot of human communication at a level ai currently can't compete with, and that time and energy is (usually) compensated fairly.

i do suppose that on one hand, automated phone menus never fully put human customers out of business, but on the other, i've worked at an automated phone menu farm (because that shit isn't actually automated lmao), so i know how the people behind this technology are paid (directly). for ai, i'm distinctly less sure, so i'd much rather futureproof with ai that starts with the artist community in mind. that means a product that guarantees my information stays with me. again, not a lot of ai technology is marketed widely in that way, probably because it's a bit of a taboo topic in the artist community in the first place and it will take a LOT to regain that trust - look at the csp one-two debacle, and the only thing they did wrong was have an overly complicated pricing chart. still, helping us meet deadlines would be a step in the right direction.

for what it's worth, i think the anon i just replied to has a fair point regarding artists trying to get past hobby level. hobby level illustrators are never going to see the kind of money spoken about here. i'm genuinely a little annoyed by holdouts in the "but i just want to draw 5$ comms for my friends while also opening commissions for the literally thousands of people following me" argument, especially now that we're working with a competitor who can create a similar product for the low, low price of free... but that's a separate argument and i actually refuse to engage, whether the argument is nuanced or not. sorry, i've lost enough hair over it.

this is all true

just as it's been true for many non-creative industries over the years

the entire point is creative industries don't work on the same principles, this is what you don't seem to be getting

AI can't mimic creativity

you dont seem to be getting that your industry is about to change its mind about that.

especially if your business is spot illustrations and greeting cards. the accountants are coming for your ass like they came for music and perfume. if it can be done kind of as good for 1/10th the price, that is how it's going to be.