digital painting – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

Replied to

As I said before, I don't subscribe to mantras that say 'art is dead' or 'all pro illustrators are screwed', BUT yes, all of our livelihoods as working artists are in grave danger. The viable market for working visual creators is about to have a massive contraction. 2/

— John Picacio (On Deadline Hiatus) (@JohnPicacio) August 26, 2022

The problems of relying on AI art

AI leads towards visual convergence when trained on generic material not unique to different cultures or styles, always going to come up with the go-to visual and nothing unique unless instructed by a human. Will continue to allow the current visual paradigm to dominate. Sometimes the archetypical rendering is fine, the unique elements are somewhere else, but relying only on that will not create new visions of the future for sci-fi renderings.

The computer is limited by the input it receives, and cannot make estimations outside of 1) what it is given 2) what the scientist-academic nudges it to do 3) the scope of the project…

It cannot adequately have the dataset to make everything, because it’s limited to who can give it that data and how that data is acquired. So much of what artists are inspired by come from non-digital, non-archived sources: stories from our ancestors, inherited cultural modes, language (which affects our metaphors and perceptions of time and philosophies), animals wandering around, sensory experiences, memes, etc…

Basically, what I am saying is that just like humans, the AI is limited by its inability to access information it doesn’t have.

— Reimena Yee, The Rise of the Bots; The Ascension of the Human

I recently had a last minute gig come in. Client was running behind because things hadn’t worked out with their previous artist.
The previous artist was DALL-E.

— Kenny Keil (@kennykeil) August 17, 2022

Will good enough win when it comes to art? If it’s between free and paid, the free version may be good enough for a lot of commercial uses…

Is convergence enough to stop “good enough”?

https://twitter.com/matthewdowsmith/status/1563872755182981122

AI may not be the end of art. It *will* be the end of many, many livelihoods. Entire portions of industry & work gone. Devastating. Culturechanging. But for those of us that overcome — an audience's belief that 'good enough' is sufficient will be the killer we can't survive. 7/

— John Picacio (On Deadline Hiatus) (@JohnPicacio) August 26, 2022

but because the audience settles for accepting the mass convenience of 'good enough', drowning the memory of quality. Audiences cherish convenience over quality. It's what drives our ethos, at least here in the US. No reason to believe people are suddenly going to change. 13/

— John Picacio (On Deadline Hiatus) (@JohnPicacio) August 26, 2022

I think it already is replacing artists and will continue to do so because the majority of those who pay for the art are okay with accepting the results of the A.I.-generated images if they are ‘good enough’ for whatever purpose they suit.

— Kyle T Webster (@kyletwebster) August 28, 2022

it makes me sad that these look good or human-made to anyone. there are so many obvious AI tells to me. the main ones being incoherent vanishing point perspective and uncanny human faces. i suppose they'll only iron that out more in subsequent models though.

— SYNTHEISM (@eprombeats) August 16, 2022

In other creative fields, art is already converging to homogeneous looks and sounds:

To minimize risk, movie studios are sticking with tried and true IP, and simply adding onto or remaking existing works.

Will illustration and the visual arts follow the same trend? For some commercial art needs, the purpose is to fit a tight-fit visual niche — think romance book covers, or organic food packaging, where the goal is to communicate quickly what category of product it is.

But, some art — like magazine covers — does need to stand out. Distinctiveness is part of the goal. This is where creative work can persist despite “good enough” in other areas.

Will AI-created artwork achieve its goals?

Example: cover illustration

The art on these covers is pretty enough but the type is bad:

A creative author is using Midjourney to create covers for their books. Typography added separately. pic.twitter.com/8rAcIyaFrV

— Alex MacCaw (@maccaw) August 24, 2022

If you just need a placeholder cover these seem fine, but I’m curious whether these are enticing enough to sell books. Probably something you could use for a lead magnet, something you’re not selling but just want to have a cover in the Kindle library.

Example: comics

A comic book. pic.twitter.com/x7g9DfCfiD

— Alex MacCaw (@maccaw) August 22, 2022

Some fine vibe-setting panels for a comic, but not super useful for storytelling, the panels are too similar, and how good will it be at action? I can’t imagine it will naturally generate unique poses and dynamic angles to keep scenes visually interesting. Just a few pages of this feels slow-paced.

If this is the only kind of art it can produce, it will only be useful for indie literary type comics. I think what’s going on is that grand vistas look impressive and are hard to draw, but the AI’s problems are also more apparent at closer scales, where it adds weird distortions or things don’t align we’ll. Our brains can ignore or fix the problems in a vista, but they’re impossible to ignore when they’re the focal point.

If I had to gaze into a crystal ball? I think we will DEFINITELY see a rise in AI comics, probably webcomics, by small creators. I think most of them will be terrible.

I think, in short, AI art will lead to Sprite Comics 2.0.

— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) August 28, 2022

I would guess, like Ursula Vernon, AI will be a tool to reduce workload for artists needing to draw complex environment panels, and an asset library for rendering environments. In current state Vernon found it needed a lot of post processing.

This art style looks beautiful now, kinda Monstress – esque / movie concept art, but I suspect that the more people use it, the more generic it will feel and people will value art that’s clearly created by a human / has its own visual style.

I'm personally not too fussed about it re: comics. I can see AI being a springboard for more intentional, more human ideas. I would find it exhausting to read a long-form narrative full of prompt-generated panels. That's not a comic. I'm most concerned for editorial illustrators.

— Trung Lê Capecchi-Nguyễn (only kind of around) (@Trungles) August 28, 2022

Implications for the industry

As I said before, I don't subscribe to mantras that say 'art is dead' or 'all pro illustrators are screwed', BUT yes, all of our livelihoods as working artists are in grave danger. The viable market for working visual creators is about to have a massive contraction. 2/

— John Picacio (On Deadline Hiatus) (@JohnPicacio) August 26, 2022

This tech could push down editorial illustration prices so only newbies who live on starvation wages will be able to compete with AI, plus high end artists who can retain boutique clients that value uniqueness and want to signal that they are a luxury publication / brand, so the middle career folks will disappear. Or, will only high end creators with distinctive appeal be able to keep working and all junior creatives fade out?

If you’re a creator, you either have a style or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re simply a gig worker. And if you have a style, there’s a computer program that’s going to not only encourage people to copy your style, but expand it.

For some, this is going to lead to enormous opportunities in speed, creativity and possibility. For others, it’s a significant threat.

— Seth Godin, Unprepared as Always

Not yet, but…

I’d say AI is not good enough *yet* for most use cases, but it will get better over time. In the long run there will be less work for creatives actually producing their own renderings (linework, painting, photoshoots) and more the art direction angle of knowing what prompts to give the AI to get what you want, plus correction of obvious rendering errors.

https://twitter.com/kyletwebster/status/1563969905380179971

At the low end of the scale, a broader range of fields will be impacted (logo design, basic graphic design) — will enough small scale jobs be accessible to early career folks that the industry won’t collapse in 20 years, because no one was able to get the experience?