I think trying to find a middle ground when confronting AI and people who are in favor of it, by understanding their point of view and really trying to think what could be the solution that benefits both sides, is like trying to be ameanable when you're being mugged at knife point, the middle ground for them is you giving up.
Amen. It’s a legal war, and we gotta win it. People think it’s just for the benefit of “pretentious artists,” but their ignorance obscures the dark future they’re driving us towards.
Amen. It’s a legal battle and we gotta win it. TH-cam deleted my comment to protect AI. Tells you everything. People who don’t understand Art think that people who oppose AI are for “pretentious artists.” Their ignorance hides the dark future they are driving us towards.
I find it hilarious when they tell people to ‘give up’, they would have no ability to create anything other than hyper realistic images from photos if humans didn’t create all the art they feed into it in the first place, they come off as being jealous of people that have stuck to the learning process. They also go around calling themselves gods but begs the question, can they draw a good stick figure without a computer? That just makes them come off as having a certain complex .
I go to a creative workshops thing online. One of the recent ones was hosted by a musician and he was endlessly promoting Midjourney because “without it it would be impossible for him to share his music” aka he doesn’t want to pay or work with artists to create visuals for him. Then within the same workshop he was saying about how difficult it is to make money on Spotify. I don’t think some of our fellow creatives are hearing themselves. Creativity is being devalued even by our fellow creatives, so no wonder the corporations are taking advantage of us all.
Not every one has half a brain sadly, Americans love fighting against there own interests, that’s why the sooner we can get fair laws in acted the better
@@Inkwell he is Canadian 👀 Some users of AI are talking about some AIs claiming they only use "Ethnically Sourced" data sets. I have my doubts about this ever being "ethnically sourced". All a website or app has to do is slap in their Terms and Conditions that uploading your work means you agree for your data to be used in AI data sets - then it is suddenly "ethnically sourced". I hope that definition gets cleared up. Have you used or tried out NightShade?
An actual animation student here who also studied Game design before: I can remember the first sign of AI art or AI photos 1-2 years ago and I find them quiet amusing back them while doing my BA project but with time the moral problems and dangers came through, especially when I started animation. We even got an evening workshop who promotes AI-generated content for doing our at the moment project which I after 5 minutes of watching I left the classroom just because I am absolutely against using AI for animation or art. For visual art there might be SOME use on maybe algorithms so mathematical stuff but using stolen artworks or massfeeding a machine is no good and destroys the fun of making something with our hands. We all agree. Ah. es there was once an argument with my father who thought for a while AI art should be embraced but he has no real connection to art or design or anything behind that and I absolutely talked him down.
I personaly use AI for reference generating. I dont copy it, just to save time on reference gathering which some times took me several hours and I still didnt find what I was looking for and dishartened just gave up on the whole painting. But to take AI prompt and post it as “my creative artwork” is realy beyond my levels of understanding. And these people will tell you tah AI is a tool. No, in this case it is not, you gave the machine few key words and předseda a button bunch of times. Tool is not supposed to do all the work for you. Then it is not your work.
@@theodorsik I feel as though references for art are existing elements that you seek to implement in a piece. Be it other artists' work for a specific element you'd like to emulate, photography to see how the item itself looks like. In any case, you cannot ask AI to make up details as convincing as they may be, that is your job to do as the artist and the AI in this case is taking away that aspect of the creative process. Do you get what I mean? Its great that you're already spending the hours and hours rendering it by hand, but I feel as though the final product can be so much more exciting and fulfulling when you do most of the work, instead of copying what a machine has interpreted. That's all, thanks for listening to my ted talk.
From what ive seen xp pen is a decent choice for drawing tablets and theyve spoken up against ai before and when it slipped into their marketing So far i think the only thing stopping half these big companies is the fact that AI "art" cant be copyrighted Remember artists protect your work, Nightshade then Glaze
@@artbyinky glaze is a program that scrambles the pixels making whatever is created unrecognizable essentially. My fiance glazes the artwork I make for her stiff, but she is likely going to start nightshading them too. Neither of us agree with the art theft and I for one don't want someone benefitting off of my own hard work that can take hours if not days to complete.
@@artbyinky what houndgirl said, it's made by the same group that made nightshade, they are working on making a combined version of it but till then they recommended using nightshade first then glazing the art for a double dose of protection
Completely agree! I gave up my Cintiq for iPad 2 years ago. They haven’t innovated and procreate takes care of 99% of my commercial illustration needs 💁🏻♀️ this company won’t last.
Awesome video, really enjoyed it. Just a small thing, when people talk about training the AI on your own work the process they're describing is fine tuning. The base model is still trained on the ill-gotten datasets, you're just adding another layer on top. Output creation would still utilise those other images, in addition to your own artwork or the work for which you had permission to use.
Yeah, that seems to be the case. I know that was a big issue with the artist that made Linkin Park's music video for Lost. Idk that it is possible to use this technology and come up with anything remotely comprehensible without the stolen data it currently seats on.
@@adosdiaz Yeah, I know of one person training their own model from scratch, with thousands of their own photographs of gravel, dirt and similar textures, with the intent of making a (very limited) texture generator. Even such highly specialised models require soooo much training data it's a huge undertaking. The rest just depend on various fine-tuning processes, based on Stable Diffusion as that's the one open source model right now.
Great video, thanks for discussing this. With AI and the recent massive sweeps of creative layoffs in the gaming industry it's been a real tough start to the year for creatives. Here's hoping the lawsuits work out.
I'm amused that companies all of a sudden say "oh, it was a 3rd party vendor" - as if there wasn't multiple people involved in seeing the final images before they print the ad. Also, do none of these "3rd party vendors" provide sketches anymore? I don't know about anyone else, but I have to send a bunch of sketches to clients for anything before I start going into color. AI is such a mess...ugh.
This isn't even the first time Adobe has "oops it was a 3rd party". It's kind of baffling that they think we don't know how this shit works since we... work in the industry lol. NOTHING gets done without 1000 levels of approvals like... It's one thing for Balenciaga to pull it on the general public with that weird ad fiasco back in 2022 but like Adobe come on sis...
I agree with all you said, Dustin. It is tearing me apart seing artistic friends of mine working alongside AI just because they don't know how to say NO, they are afraid of not finding new job, not having energy to have an argument or simply not being informed enough. In addition, almost every non-artist colleague (whole corporation) and friends saying that it is just a tool, be "open-minded", so artists without any proper support start to believe that.
I seriously doubt that those non-artist colleagues and friends will be saying that, "It's just a tool.", and be, "open-minded" when a form of AI and or robot takes over THEIR jobs as office worker, salesperson, marketing department, sound/music department, or mid-level manager, etc. People do love to complain and hate on the life-sucking jobs many of us have had while pursuing our dream jobs or building our own businesses on the side. But if those jobs disappear too, there will be a LOT of people without work of any kind. It seems like it should be even easier to train AI to do the simple and non-creative and repetitive jobs by feeding in all parameters and potential incoming and out-going info and protocol for certain jobs so human interaction would become unnecessary. And then musicians will also have to start worrying about AI "training" off of their music.
Alex' point about the human element in art is so important. We should focus on what makes us unique as artists, because that's what AI can never replicate. Can't replicate what hasn't been done before, after all. If you generate movie scripts, storyboards, concept art with AI, you would never get a parasite, a spider verse, an everything everywhere all at once, no matter how good AI would get. The unfortunate reality is that many of us, especially at the start of our career, make our money doing jobs we're not that passionate about, work that isn't unique in any way. And that's the work that's being taken away by AI now. How many artists are never going to get a fair shot in this industry because the entry-level work is being outsourced to machines?
I don't buy that the argument "Ai is getting better and faster" is relevant. This is what happened with 3D graphics and photography, yet people still crave practical effects, 2D animation and professional photos from a high end camera. Same with traditional art, despite digital existing. There's lots of examples. Most people underestimate that the brain can adapt pretty fast when it's over exposed to something. Then there's the right to own your own artwork. I'd rather make my own artwork as much as I can from scratch so I own what I make. "You'll own nothing and be happy" is a thing.
That's the exact problem though people are making their own artwork and these bots are scraping them. It's completely relevant and no gaslighting from the corps should never be quoted in a positive light! I will own my own stuff and they can suck it! There is a creative war going on for a reason and yes people's styles that are unique to them are being stolen to train AI and yes it very much is messed up/ not okay.
Make original traditional art. There will still be people who value hand made work - make your own IPs and worlds. Don’t get too absorbed in the ai, it’s moving so fast, but even laypeople are getting sick of it (I’ve noticed in comments). Get some paint, pencils etc and go for it :)
The problem is even that might not be safe given time saying style mimicry. It's not so simple to just say "do pen and paper" when this is effecting everyone not just digital artists. Frankly it's like saying "give up the war" when no we should keep creating hostile anti AI software that destroys/obliterates their wells. They want to steal fine it comes with major consequences if taken without consent.
@@houndgirl7365did I say stop creating anti ai software? Nope. Yes ai can mimic the look of some trad media, but it can’t paint an original - yet. I’m saying at least if you have some traditional work you can actually sell that as an original thing. Ai affecting us artists is the least of our worries as it is swiftly being able to make near perfect ‘photos’ of things that don’t exist. We are in dire straits from Ai from all angles, it is frightening. The law can’t move fast enough.
Thanks for doing this video - in particular, the section where you discuss that your art output has drastically reduced in the past year or so as you grapple with all the stuff going on right now. I wish that wasn't the case, because I love your work, but it was good to hear someone else struggling with similar feelings to my own (especially as I spent the pandemic retraining to pivot into the game industry, and well... y'know how well that's going right now). I know intrinsically that the only way to keep going through this - other than collective action - is to keep making art any way I can, by sheer spite if nothing else. But geez it's hard some days
They really thought lets make AI for art and thought it was a good idea. All I can think of long term is I'm sticking to traditional art. Cause I have that physical piece in my hand. It sucks tho cause I do have a tablet to draw but I just can't anymore.
@@artbyinky this if people want that style of work one could attempt to get that style of work. This effects everyone as is yes some people get the physical original, but most artists will do copies of the original and sell them. I don't think traditional artists are taking this serious enough. Some doing what digital artists did in the beginning which was go "yeah that's not going to effect me" now as it's gotten better its effecting people.
I’m in an artist alley discord server and we were just talking about this! It’s wild to me how these companies support ai art, yet we’re solely the reason they’re in business!! Also, have I been pronouncing wacom wrong? I’ve always said way-com. Wanted to add too regarding Adobe, in their recent updates they have this privacy feature turned on that allows for machine learning and to gather what you’re doing and making…. You can turn that off in account privacy settings. It’s so gross and greedy of these companies.
Feeling that AI depression, especially seeing inspirational artists becoming basically "Midjourney Jesus" to 'prompt engineers' on Reddit... like, it's nice they feel secure enough in their own body of work to fuel AI use, but nice going selling out less-established artists in favour of some tech-bro power fantasy. (Your videos are fantastic, keep it up!)
Fine artist working all analog here, but I want to address the question about whether students in school now or entering school soon should consider studying art with the idea of getting into the freelance/commercial/concept/illustration/animation fields. My advice, as an older person with a very specific life experience: Crunch the numbers before making any decisions! Do your research! I was in school decades ago, when it was still relatively affordable (sometimes). I studied to get into this industry - your industries. Illustration, graphic design, advertising - that was my focus. When I was in school, the tech was still all or mostly analog. Literally, the year after I graduated, the entire industry went 100% digital. In school, we got no warning of this shift. (This was before the internet and before internships were a big thing, so industry changes were much less transparent than now.) Guess what I had zero training in. I seriously walked out of school with obsolete skills. Guess how much it would have cost me to get the training the industry was actually demanding. That's right - thousands of dollars and another two+ years worth of retraining. Guess what I couldn't afford. Plus, along with the tech and the work flows, the industry itself had changed. The relationship between agencies/publishers and artists/writers had changed fundamentally. Job security, always shaky, was gone altogether. Establishing a style was dropped and replaced with following metrics based on behavioral studies for what would influence consumers (this was in advertising). The payoffs, both monetary and personal, for going into that cut-throat business were crumbling rapidly - and my motivation with it. I opted voluntarily to throw away 4 years of study and work and expense and take my life in a different direction. It was a huge loss in a lot of ways, but looking back, it was the right decision for me personally, even though it cost so much. Now, when making your own decisions for your own lives, consider how much education costs today. And consider how fast the tech is changing. And consider how exploitative corporate business has become. Can you absorb the costs of an obsolete education and the continuous training you'll have to do to keep up? Can you build stable enough income to cover the higher cost of working in this industry as a freelancer? Will staff jobs still exist, and will you be able to live on them? And what if the employers and clients keep changing their minds? Or what if you do all the work to adapt to that environment and then, finally, legislation changes the whole landscape again? Young people who want to do this kind of work are looking at living their lives on a rollercoaster with really shaky (AI-generated?) engineering - and paying a lot of money just to get on board. I advise all the young artists coming up to do some really hard thinking about what they want to do with their skills and talents. How much do they value their self-expression? How much do they want to pin their futures on any industry run by giant media corporations or on any technology still in development and under legal scrutiny? How much do they want to spend for their education and what do they want to spend it on - a foundation they can apply to anything, or industry training that promises a job in an industry that might be entirely different by graduation day? I'm not saying don't do this work. I'm just saying plan your life in defense of your own best interests and trust nobody who comes with promises of what they'll do for you or what you can get out of working with them. I know because I've been through it. Good luck.
AI has no place in areas where it is not used to make significant improvements to human civilization. Art, for example, is a process that brings joy once you have start to overcome hurdles and acquired skills. It's about the personal paths, what you do with your own creativity. If soulless machines now take over this to save time and money, then this is no longer the same way of art that has been developed over centuries. It is also incomparable to any other development in this area that has ever been applied. You still have to be able to do real art with the 'normal' functions of Photoshop etc. to make good art with it. With AI I could simply skip what I'm missing and suddenly create elite works without having learned it myself, which I can't do, but have honestly my place through my range of skills. Now if every simpleton takes great looking pictures, which is extremely easy, I tested myself some tools we all heard about the last two years (I don't show these pictures to anyone). Now you just need the correct marketing. He/she is a businessman and not an artist, since no equivalent work went into it, no artistic mentality was used, only commerce and industrialization. This destroys the idea of art per se and the principle of efficiency and the reward for it. The ideal of developing one's own styles, and hard work on creative paths is now done through technical achievements and no longer through creativity and artistry. The word artist now has a different meaning for most people. Now you immediately think of mid-journey and cheaters etc. and all honest creative people are swept away by this wave of devaluation and that is a meanness, unfair and morally from the bottom drawer and should never supported by companies which create tools for real artists. These are examples for the meaning of a traitor.
@@Inkwellit’s like the same thing that happened with Bud Lite Beer when they had a trans person do a commercial for them. It’s like tell me you don’t understand your target audience without telling me you don’t understand your target audience.
To anyone who read this and want to get a screen tablet, I would strongly recommend to get a Xp-pen. Had been using my Xp-pen artist 16 (2nd gen) everyday for a year so far. Its an excellent 16 inch tablet with a fraction of Wacom's price (its like 400$ on sale and they do sale very frequent), the screen displayed is stunning with high accuracy color, very smooth line work, their pen is feel so good to hold, i cant hold a Cintiq's pen anymore. My only complain is the protective screen that come with tablet get wear out after a while and you had to replace it every 6 months, its like 25$ on the official websites, do note that im a heavy user (6 -8 hours / day since art is my job) so depend how you using it, i think its will take longer before you need to change it.
Man, some time ago i followed an artist on istagram, about 2000 followers back then, just under 5000 now, looked normal, even had process videos, but when i looked at them closer they were faked, turns out they use ai, delete comments saying it's ai, deleted the process and the most ai looking images when they got called out, and now they are doing collabs and being friends with other artists that don't know they use ai
Started looking at prompters like I look at people who overuse emojis. Same principle except the people using emojis never claim the images as their own... The work is soulless. I say we reenforce the negative stigma so that it remains black market. Make people lose severely when it gets revealed that they scraped others' work to get ahead. Make the lawyers drool trying to cash in big on copyright law. Embarrass the companies who promote it and drag the studios who tried to hide it into the spotlight. Let's make everyone defending AI Art draw irl and admit the program has more creativity than they do by plugging their work into Midjourney and have it generate based on their drawings. See how it feels to them.
I don't see any ethical way to use this technology at the moment. It's my understanding that these things take thousands and thousands of images to train on, so for most artists training it on their work wouldn't even be feasible.
My combo is CSP with my Huion (tied to the desktop) and XP-pen (smaller and transportable, connected to my laptop) and both have been leagues above in feel to Wacom + PS.
I took up AI just to see how green the grass is on the other side. At first it was exciting, even addicting. But just like any open world map, you eventually start hitting boundaries and the diminishing returns hit hard. After about 1.5 years of using AI in its various forms, I still do occasional prompts for quick checks out of mild curiosity (especially if there's some breakthrough), but it has fallen off on me almost completely already. Just remember: Humans are extremely good at pattern recognition and not even AI will ever escape the eternal struggle of keeping things interesting for HUMANS. AI is only as good as the effort humans put into it, or the effort they take from others. On the other hand, it did inspire me to improve my art rendering game.
Until watching this video I was blissfully unaware of the existence of those evil "Third party vendors" and the havoc they are causing. Talk about a scapegoat!
I love my 13" xp pen. It can flip to a left handed model. Or the iPad 11 or 12?" Pro from 2019 is still kicking. Just don't upgrade past Apple pencil2.
I've had a really hard time trying to explain to people who aren't artists and are pro-AI, how AI is damaging. As much time as I spend explaining how AI works from stolen art, someone will say, "but human artists also use existing art as inspiration, how is it any different?". It can very quickly become a philosophical debate that tends to lose its grip on the tangible negative effects it has on the art world. Also, if you think an algorithm mashing a bunch of images together is the same as a creative thought process, I sincerely don't know what to tell you. (I am so, so tired.)
On the Wacom topic. I've had probably 4 or 5 cintiqs now and multiple Intuos. I tried to pick up an iPad and a competing tablet and both I just couldn't get into and had to go back to a cintiq because the feel of it was just marginally better and I couldn't deal with the differences. The problem was, I hated that the difference equaled such a big jump in price. I've since put down my pen but I only ever say people go to ipads if they've never touched a cintiq.
I'm a freshman right now and I've always wanted to do storyboard for animation 😭 do any current members of the animation industry see storyboarders being replaced by AI in the future?
Idk about anyone else but as it is right now, without looking at the details I can just tell if something is AI art on an almost subconscious level. It all just has a certain look regardless of its style
So... I feel that Midjourney is an amazing tool that is being used in completely the wrong way. A person could Google Image search reference pictures to practice from, research, or use for inspiration. Or generate an image with Midjourney that scraped the same information, but for those so reasons of Practice, Research, Inspiration, or even just spitball ideas or style blending. Or even explore all the Punk / Core genres like CyberPunk, DieselPunk, RayPunk. I think it could be a powerful research and self education asset. Yes, it uses others Art, but so does Google Image search.
Ok I'm only in the middle part, but the truth for now is that if you want to do the industry standard you should look at what tech the people you want to work with use. And that, for 2d is Photoshop 90% of the time. I know that there are artists out there that make incredible art with other software but most of the times those people are already deeply integrated in the industry and people pay them because of the name. Photoshop is suggested simply because it's standard.
That standard is very quickly shifting, as someone who works with these people ever day, over the last few years I would say about half of the industry has switched to other software when able, everyone still has photoshop most just for color editing, but not everyone is using it,however vector work is a little different, adobe still seems to be leading for that work flow, but for most part but raster based images they are losing the lead
It just feels WRONNNGGG!! So many of our jobs in the industry are being taken by clip art, stock images, and ai art. It is a skill and cannot be replicated, but with the literally STEALING of images to be meshed in ai people are trying 😭 Ig it can make hand makers and original artists hold more integrity, but now that the industry is using it…. I can’t help to feel like ai art is becoming credible like oh yea x company uses it so it’s okay BROO NOOOOOO BOOOO 😭 it better stawp 😫
A lot of my friends in graphic design say they just willy nilly use ai and stock stuff 😭😭 like that could’ve been an illustrators job but convenience is the death to time and skill. It’s such a disappointment!!!
I think of AI like clip art. It's cheap and easy for now, eventually, it won't be cheap. The only real benefit I see for AI is the ability to edit faster especially in the realm of photoshop and collages. However, I haven't used photoshop due to the crazy price tag these days. I mean the idea of having access to all the adobe software isn't a bad price per month but I don't need the majority of the features in my illustrations, just the ability for basic editing and layers of photo resources so there are much cheaper alternatives. Does all of this make art careers more accessible to people without art training? Absolutely. Is that better? Yes and no.
As an artist, AI for shitposting doesn’t bother me and AI for pose reference doesn’t bother me. I also think ai has some accessibility elements. I have aphantasia, for example. It’s a slippery slope though.
We’re visual communicators. To communicate effectively we need to consider and direct as much of the outcome as possible. That’s the value we add. If you don’t have as much agency over the outcome, you’re of lesser value
AI will destroy the work of digital artists, as well as 80% of human professions. Architecture, engineering, law, clinical medicine, administration, teaching, programming, etc., etc. If humanity accepts a little AI in these professions, everyone will be demoted to mere “reviewers” and “inspectors”. And the systems won't need many inspectors. Fight it now emphatically, or give up completely, there is no middle ground.
No taxation without rappresentation . Artist should sop paying taxes and create multiple unions to support them in the short term future, the industry is downsizing to prepare for an inverse strike on his workers.
I think talking to artist who use more tech, would be a little bit more balanced. 3d artist have been working alongside different versions of a.i. in software for years.
AI is completely ethical, you're simply wrong. You're not a victim because an art student has studied from your artworks, neither you are a victim if a software does the same. That's just begging for priviledges, to point the guns at things you dislike in the name of ethics bruh The market will choose what's acceptable AI use, and that will most likely be determined by added value, not anything else
You CAN look at the art and just enjoy it, but artists now feel the need to judge and criticize everything. Big companies know how to pivot with the times. Maybe it’s time to learn some AI skills. I don’t know.
I respect your opinion, but i think for me the difference is that ai art is taking another person's work while digital art you still take hours to complete an illustration. Also i just draw because it feels good, and art for me is telling a compelling story through drawing. Making characters or painting a feeling or circumstance that the person can relate to is why i enjoy it.
@angelbaby1811 theft is theft AI works is a glorified commissioner accept you never pay the actual artist it stole from. Yes times are changing, but that doesn't okay stealing. Glad that in the court case the court ruled against works being unethically taken by people who scrape. On top of that there are programs like Nightshade and Glaze. Yea times are changing, but we will squish this as well. You want this resource? Fine pay actual artists for the references to put in the giant grinder to create those images and gain their permission.
I just don’t care about Ai anymore, it’s not taking anymore of my energy. I will keep making, I’m not stoping creating art period.
I think trying to find a middle ground when confronting AI and people who are in favor of it, by understanding their point of view and really trying to think what could be the solution that benefits both sides, is like trying to be ameanable when you're being mugged at knife point, the middle ground for them is you giving up.
Amen. It’s a legal war, and we gotta win it. People think it’s just for the benefit of “pretentious artists,” but their ignorance obscures the dark future they’re driving us towards.
Amen. It’s a legal battle and we gotta win it. TH-cam deleted my comment to protect AI. Tells you everything. People who don’t understand Art think that people who oppose AI are for “pretentious artists.” Their ignorance hides the dark future they are driving us towards.
what middle ground when it's free 99 ?
I find it hilarious when they tell people to ‘give up’, they would have no ability to create anything other than hyper realistic images from photos if humans didn’t create all the art they feed into it in the first place, they come off as being jealous of people that have stuck to the learning process. They also go around calling themselves gods but begs the question, can they draw a good stick figure without a computer? That just makes them come off as having a certain complex .
@@CousinPaddy try reading the comment next time, make sure to use the one dying braincell in your head!
I go to a creative workshops thing online. One of the recent ones was hosted by a musician and he was endlessly promoting Midjourney because “without it it would be impossible for him to share his music” aka he doesn’t want to pay or work with artists to create visuals for him. Then within the same workshop he was saying about how difficult it is to make money on Spotify. I don’t think some of our fellow creatives are hearing themselves. Creativity is being devalued even by our fellow creatives, so no wonder the corporations are taking advantage of us all.
Not every one has half a brain sadly, Americans love fighting against there own interests, that’s why the sooner we can get fair laws in acted the better
So the visual artists can guarantee sales for him?
@@Inkwell he is Canadian 👀 Some users of AI are talking about some AIs claiming they only use "Ethnically Sourced" data sets. I have my doubts about this ever being "ethnically sourced". All a website or app has to do is slap in their Terms and Conditions that uploading your work means you agree for your data to be used in AI data sets - then it is suddenly "ethnically sourced". I hope that definition gets cleared up.
Have you used or tried out NightShade?
An actual animation student here who also studied Game design before: I can remember the first sign of AI art or AI photos 1-2 years ago and I find them quiet amusing back them while doing my BA project but with time the moral problems and dangers came through, especially when I started animation. We even got an evening workshop who promotes AI-generated content for doing our at the moment project which I after 5 minutes of watching I left the classroom just because I am absolutely against using AI for animation or art. For visual art there might be SOME use on maybe algorithms so mathematical stuff but using stolen artworks or massfeeding a machine is no good and destroys the fun of making something with our hands.
We all agree.
Ah. es there was once an argument with my father who thought for a while AI art should be embraced but he has no real connection to art or design or anything behind that and I absolutely talked him down.
I personaly use AI for reference generating. I dont copy it, just to save time on reference gathering which some times took me several hours and I still didnt find what I was looking for and dishartened just gave up on the whole painting.
But to take AI prompt and post it as “my creative artwork” is realy beyond my levels of understanding. And these people will tell you tah AI is a tool. No, in this case it is not, you gave the machine few key words and předseda a button bunch of times. Tool is not supposed to do all the work for you. Then it is not your work.
the game I am working on I will market it as being handmade, ai free.
@@theodorsik I feel as though references for art are existing elements that you seek to implement in a piece.
Be it other artists' work for a specific element you'd like to emulate, photography to see how the item itself looks like. In any case, you cannot ask AI to make up details as convincing as they may be, that is your job to do as the artist and the AI in this case is taking away that aspect of the creative process. Do you get what I mean?
Its great that you're already spending the hours and hours rendering it by hand, but I feel as though the final product can be so much more exciting and fulfulling when you do most of the work, instead of copying what a machine has interpreted.
That's all, thanks for listening to my ted talk.
Good video/convo! You can really get a feel for what's going on and the scale of the situation seeing all these cases in one video.
Thanks for watching!
@@Inkwell keep doing your thing, enjoying the videos!
From what ive seen xp pen is a decent choice for drawing tablets and theyve spoken up against ai before and when it slipped into their marketing
So far i think the only thing stopping half these big companies is the fact that AI "art" cant be copyrighted
Remember artists protect your work, Nightshade then Glaze
I have a xp pen tablet and it’s been great!
And I know what nightshade is but what’s glaze?
@@artbyinky glaze is a program that scrambles the pixels making whatever is created unrecognizable essentially. My fiance glazes the artwork I make for her stiff, but she is likely going to start nightshading them too. Neither of us agree with the art theft and I for one don't want someone benefitting off of my own hard work that can take hours if not days to complete.
@@artbyinky what houndgirl said, it's made by the same group that made nightshade, they are working on making a combined version of it but till then they recommended using nightshade first then glazing the art for a double dose of protection
@@houndgirl7365 remember, nightshade first, then glaze after
Completely agree! I gave up my Cintiq for iPad 2 years ago. They haven’t innovated and procreate takes care of 99% of my commercial illustration needs 💁🏻♀️ this company won’t last.
Awesome video, really enjoyed it. Just a small thing, when people talk about training the AI on your own work the process they're describing is fine tuning. The base model is still trained on the ill-gotten datasets, you're just adding another layer on top. Output creation would still utilise those other images, in addition to your own artwork or the work for which you had permission to use.
I wasn't aware of that, good to know, guess it makes since
Yeah, that seems to be the case. I know that was a big issue with the artist that made Linkin Park's music video for Lost. Idk that it is possible to use this technology and come up with anything remotely comprehensible without the stolen data it currently seats on.
@@adosdiaz Yeah, I know of one person training their own model from scratch, with thousands of their own photographs of gravel, dirt and similar textures, with the intent of making a (very limited) texture generator. Even such highly specialised models require soooo much training data it's a huge undertaking. The rest just depend on various fine-tuning processes, based on Stable Diffusion as that's the one open source model right now.
@@katriaraden I think the lack of transparency from their part and the process doesn't help either.
Great video, thanks for discussing this. With AI and the recent massive sweeps of creative layoffs in the gaming industry it's been a real tough start to the year for creatives. Here's hoping the lawsuits work out.
I'm amused that companies all of a sudden say "oh, it was a 3rd party vendor" - as if there wasn't multiple people involved in seeing the final images before they print the ad. Also, do none of these "3rd party vendors" provide sketches anymore? I don't know about anyone else, but I have to send a bunch of sketches to clients for anything before I start going into color. AI is such a mess...ugh.
This isn't even the first time Adobe has "oops it was a 3rd party". It's kind of baffling that they think we don't know how this shit works since we... work in the industry lol. NOTHING gets done without 1000 levels of approvals like... It's one thing for Balenciaga to pull it on the general public with that weird ad fiasco back in 2022 but like Adobe come on sis...
It’s wild truly
I agree with all you said, Dustin. It is tearing me apart seing artistic friends of mine working alongside AI just because they don't know how to say NO, they are afraid of not finding new job, not having energy to have an argument or simply not being informed enough. In addition, almost every non-artist colleague (whole corporation) and friends saying that it is just a tool, be "open-minded", so artists without any proper support start to believe that.
I seriously doubt that those non-artist colleagues and friends will be saying that, "It's just a tool.", and be, "open-minded" when a form of AI and or robot takes over THEIR jobs as office worker, salesperson, marketing department, sound/music department, or mid-level manager, etc.
People do love to complain and hate on the life-sucking jobs many of us have had while pursuing our dream jobs or building our own businesses on the side.
But if those jobs disappear too, there will be a LOT of people without work of any kind.
It seems like it should be even easier to train AI to do the simple and non-creative and repetitive jobs by feeding in all parameters and potential incoming and out-going info and protocol for certain jobs so human interaction would become unnecessary.
And then musicians will also have to start worrying about AI "training" off of their music.
Alex' point about the human element in art is so important. We should focus on what makes us unique as artists, because that's what AI can never replicate. Can't replicate what hasn't been done before, after all. If you generate movie scripts, storyboards, concept art with AI, you would never get a parasite, a spider verse, an everything everywhere all at once, no matter how good AI would get.
The unfortunate reality is that many of us, especially at the start of our career, make our money doing jobs we're not that passionate about, work that isn't unique in any way. And that's the work that's being taken away by AI now. How many artists are never going to get a fair shot in this industry because the entry-level work is being outsourced to machines?
It's taken over Pinterest.
yeah i stopped using pinterest because of that, it makes me vomit
I don't buy that the argument "Ai is getting better and faster" is relevant. This is what happened with 3D graphics and photography, yet people still crave practical effects, 2D animation and professional photos from a high end camera. Same with traditional art, despite digital existing. There's lots of examples.
Most people underestimate that the brain can adapt pretty fast when it's over exposed to something.
Then there's the right to own your own artwork. I'd rather make my own artwork as much as I can from scratch so I own what I make. "You'll own nothing and be happy" is a thing.
That's the exact problem though people are making their own artwork and these bots are scraping them. It's completely relevant and no gaslighting from the corps should never be quoted in a positive light!
I will own my own stuff and they can suck it! There is a creative war going on for a reason and yes people's styles that are unique to them are being stolen to train AI and yes it very much is messed up/ not okay.
Make original traditional art. There will still be people who value hand made work - make your own IPs and worlds. Don’t get too absorbed in the ai, it’s moving so fast, but even laypeople are getting sick of it (I’ve noticed in comments). Get some paint, pencils etc and go for it :)
Or make whatever you want. If your work is good people will like your work.
The problem is even that might not be safe given time saying style mimicry. It's not so simple to just say "do pen and paper" when this is effecting everyone not just digital artists. Frankly it's like saying "give up the war" when no we should keep creating hostile anti AI software that destroys/obliterates their wells. They want to steal fine it comes with major consequences if taken without consent.
@@houndgirl7365did I say stop creating anti ai software? Nope. Yes ai can mimic the look of some trad media, but it can’t paint an original - yet. I’m saying at least if you have some traditional work you can actually sell that as an original thing. Ai affecting us artists is the least of our worries as it is swiftly being able to make near perfect ‘photos’ of things that don’t exist. We are in dire straits from Ai from all angles, it is frightening. The law can’t move fast enough.
Stumbled on this video on my homepage and watched the entire thing. Very interesting to hear.
thanks for watching
Thank you for this
Thanks for watching
Thanks for doing this video - in particular, the section where you discuss that your art output has drastically reduced in the past year or so as you grapple with all the stuff going on right now. I wish that wasn't the case, because I love your work, but it was good to hear someone else struggling with similar feelings to my own (especially as I spent the pandemic retraining to pivot into the game industry, and well... y'know how well that's going right now). I know intrinsically that the only way to keep going through this - other than collective action - is to keep making art any way I can, by sheer spite if nothing else. But geez it's hard some days
They really thought lets make AI for art and thought it was a good idea. All I can think of long term is I'm sticking to traditional art. Cause I have that physical piece in my hand. It sucks tho cause I do have a tablet to draw but I just can't anymore.
I always joke that we will have to stamp our work with our fingerprints and blood to prove it’s human made or something in the future lol.
@@artbyinky this if people want that style of work one could attempt to get that style of work. This effects everyone as is yes some people get the physical original, but most artists will do copies of the original and sell them. I don't think traditional artists are taking this serious enough. Some doing what digital artists did in the beginning which was go "yeah that's not going to effect me" now as it's gotten better its effecting people.
This whole thing just makes me want to get better at traditional art.
I’m in an artist alley discord server and we were just talking about this! It’s wild to me how these companies support ai art, yet we’re solely the reason they’re in business!!
Also, have I been pronouncing wacom wrong? I’ve always said way-com.
Wanted to add too regarding Adobe, in their recent updates they have this privacy feature turned on that allows for machine learning and to gather what you’re doing and making…. You can turn that off in account privacy settings. It’s so gross and greedy of these companies.
Literally the dumbest thing they could of done.
And maybe Ive just been saying it wrong idk
@@Inkwell honestly, I prefer how you say it!
Feeling that AI depression, especially seeing inspirational artists becoming basically "Midjourney Jesus" to 'prompt engineers' on Reddit... like, it's nice they feel secure enough in their own body of work to fuel AI use, but nice going selling out less-established artists in favour of some tech-bro power fantasy.
(Your videos are fantastic, keep it up!)
What a world. At any rate, love hearing you guys get into it, much love
Thanks for watching Victor!
Fine artist working all analog here, but I want to address the question about whether students in school now or entering school soon should consider studying art with the idea of getting into the freelance/commercial/concept/illustration/animation fields. My advice, as an older person with a very specific life experience: Crunch the numbers before making any decisions! Do your research!
I was in school decades ago, when it was still relatively affordable (sometimes). I studied to get into this industry - your industries. Illustration, graphic design, advertising - that was my focus. When I was in school, the tech was still all or mostly analog. Literally, the year after I graduated, the entire industry went 100% digital. In school, we got no warning of this shift. (This was before the internet and before internships were a big thing, so industry changes were much less transparent than now.) Guess what I had zero training in. I seriously walked out of school with obsolete skills. Guess how much it would have cost me to get the training the industry was actually demanding. That's right - thousands of dollars and another two+ years worth of retraining. Guess what I couldn't afford.
Plus, along with the tech and the work flows, the industry itself had changed. The relationship between agencies/publishers and artists/writers had changed fundamentally. Job security, always shaky, was gone altogether. Establishing a style was dropped and replaced with following metrics based on behavioral studies for what would influence consumers (this was in advertising). The payoffs, both monetary and personal, for going into that cut-throat business were crumbling rapidly - and my motivation with it.
I opted voluntarily to throw away 4 years of study and work and expense and take my life in a different direction. It was a huge loss in a lot of ways, but looking back, it was the right decision for me personally, even though it cost so much.
Now, when making your own decisions for your own lives, consider how much education costs today. And consider how fast the tech is changing. And consider how exploitative corporate business has become. Can you absorb the costs of an obsolete education and the continuous training you'll have to do to keep up? Can you build stable enough income to cover the higher cost of working in this industry as a freelancer? Will staff jobs still exist, and will you be able to live on them? And what if the employers and clients keep changing their minds? Or what if you do all the work to adapt to that environment and then, finally, legislation changes the whole landscape again?
Young people who want to do this kind of work are looking at living their lives on a rollercoaster with really shaky (AI-generated?) engineering - and paying a lot of money just to get on board. I advise all the young artists coming up to do some really hard thinking about what they want to do with their skills and talents. How much do they value their self-expression? How much do they want to pin their futures on any industry run by giant media corporations or on any technology still in development and under legal scrutiny? How much do they want to spend for their education and what do they want to spend it on - a foundation they can apply to anything, or industry training that promises a job in an industry that might be entirely different by graduation day?
I'm not saying don't do this work. I'm just saying plan your life in defense of your own best interests and trust nobody who comes with promises of what they'll do for you or what you can get out of working with them. I know because I've been through it.
Good luck.
Would you say fine arts/ painting is now a better option than digital illustrations?
Good discussion! Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
fantastic video, I love it ☺☺☺
Thanks for watching!
Thank you for talking about such an important topic!
AI has no place in areas where it is not used to make significant improvements to human civilization.
Art, for example, is a process that brings joy once you have start to overcome hurdles and acquired skills. It's about the personal paths, what you do with your own creativity.
If soulless machines now take over this to save time and money, then this is no longer the same way of art that has been developed over centuries.
It is also incomparable to any other development in this area that has ever been applied. You still have to be able to do real art with the 'normal' functions of Photoshop etc. to make good art with it.
With AI I could simply skip what I'm missing and suddenly create elite works without having learned it myself, which I can't do, but have honestly my place through my range of skills.
Now if every simpleton takes great looking pictures, which is extremely easy, I tested myself some tools we all heard about the last two years (I don't show these pictures to anyone). Now you just need the correct marketing. He/she is a businessman and not an artist, since no equivalent work went into it, no artistic mentality was used, only commerce and industrialization.
This destroys the idea of art per se and the principle of efficiency and the reward for it.
The ideal of developing one's own styles, and hard work on creative paths is now done through technical achievements and no longer through creativity and artistry.
The word artist now has a different meaning for most people.
Now you immediately think of mid-journey and cheaters etc. and all honest creative people are swept away by this wave of devaluation and that is a meanness, unfair and morally from the bottom drawer and should never supported by companies which create tools for real artists. These are examples for the meaning of a traitor.
Generative AI cancels out the need for drawing tablets, like Wacom, how'd you let this happen?!?!
tell me you have idiots running the company without telling me
@@Inkwellit’s like the same thing that happened with Bud Lite Beer when they had a trans person do a commercial for them. It’s like tell me you don’t understand your target audience without telling me you don’t understand your target audience.
To anyone who read this and want to get a screen tablet, I would strongly recommend to get a Xp-pen. Had been using my Xp-pen artist 16 (2nd gen) everyday for a year so far. Its an excellent 16 inch tablet with a fraction of Wacom's price (its like 400$ on sale and they do sale very frequent), the screen displayed is stunning with high accuracy color, very smooth line work, their pen is feel so good to hold, i cant hold a Cintiq's pen anymore.
My only complain is the protective screen that come with tablet get wear out after a while and you had to replace it every 6 months, its like 25$ on the official websites, do note that im a heavy user (6 -8 hours / day since art is my job) so depend how you using it, i think its will take longer before you need to change it.
The intro was great.
Thanks!
I love how that Ezio looks like he's starring in Pixar's Assassins' Creed.
🤣
Man, some time ago i followed an artist on istagram, about 2000 followers back then, just under 5000 now, looked normal, even had process videos, but when i looked at them closer they were faked, turns out they use ai, delete comments saying it's ai, deleted the process and the most ai looking images when they got called out, and now they are doing collabs and being friends with other artists that don't know they use ai
the bigger they get the harder the fall will be, most professional artists will be able to tell pretty quickly
@@Inkwell yes, they are bound to fail at some point, but right now they are doing better than many great artists, but it is what it is
Started looking at prompters like I look at people who overuse emojis. Same principle except the people using emojis never claim the images as their own... The work is soulless. I say we reenforce the negative stigma so that it remains black market. Make people lose severely when it gets revealed that they scraped others' work to get ahead. Make the lawyers drool trying to cash in big on copyright law. Embarrass the companies who promote it and drag the studios who tried to hide it into the spotlight. Let's make everyone defending AI Art draw irl and admit the program has more creativity than they do by plugging their work into Midjourney and have it generate based on their drawings. See how it feels to them.
Yes. Scorched earth!!!
That sounds so satisfying; the lawyers and corpos get their money while prompters get a taste of their own medicine lmao
I don't see any ethical way to use this technology at the moment. It's my understanding that these things take thousands and thousands of images to train on, so for most artists training it on their work wouldn't even be feasible.
My combo is CSP with my Huion (tied to the desktop) and XP-pen (smaller and transportable, connected to my laptop) and both have been leagues above in feel to Wacom + PS.
Traditional art by human hands says hello 😮💛
I took up AI just to see how green the grass is on the other side. At first it was exciting, even addicting. But just like any open world map, you eventually start hitting boundaries and the diminishing returns hit hard. After about 1.5 years of using AI in its various forms, I still do occasional prompts for quick checks out of mild curiosity (especially if there's some breakthrough), but it has fallen off on me almost completely already. Just remember: Humans are extremely good at pattern recognition and not even AI will ever escape the eternal struggle of keeping things interesting for HUMANS. AI is only as good as the effort humans put into it, or the effort they take from others.
On the other hand, it did inspire me to improve my art rendering game.
Just wanted to throw it out there but the background music was too distracting, I keep hearing the trills and I had to playback a few times
Until watching this video I was blissfully unaware of the existence of those evil "Third party vendors" and the havoc they are causing. Talk about a scapegoat!
Well, I WAS going to buy a new Wacom…
happy to help 😈
opt for HUION. In my opinion it's best than Wacom with what you are spending
XP pen is better
I love my 13" xp pen. It can flip to a left handed model. Or the iPad 11 or 12?" Pro from 2019 is still kicking. Just don't upgrade past Apple pencil2.
I've had a really hard time trying to explain to people who aren't artists and are pro-AI, how AI is damaging. As much time as I spend explaining how AI works from stolen art, someone will say, "but human artists also use existing art as inspiration, how is it any different?". It can very quickly become a philosophical debate that tends to lose its grip on the tangible negative effects it has on the art world.
Also, if you think an algorithm mashing a bunch of images together is the same as a creative thought process, I sincerely don't know what to tell you. (I am so, so tired.)
On the Wacom topic. I've had probably 4 or 5 cintiqs now and multiple Intuos. I tried to pick up an iPad and a competing tablet and both I just couldn't get into and had to go back to a cintiq because the feel of it was just marginally better and I couldn't deal with the differences. The problem was, I hated that the difference equaled such a big jump in price.
I've since put down my pen but I only ever say people go to ipads if they've never touched a cintiq.
Alex , please change the batteries on that clock , I'm losing my mind over here xD !
"...should I pivot to animation...", well, as someone whose been in the animation industry for over 25 years, I got some REAL bad news for you...
What happened? Give explanation please.
A.I. is convoluted crap. Glad I could be the voice of reason here.
I'm a freshman right now and I've always wanted to do storyboard for animation 😭 do any current members of the animation industry see storyboarders being replaced by AI in the future?
@@MugiHours whelp shit 😭
Drinking game while watching the video: A shot every time one of the two guys said : " YOU KNOW..."
Convenient that it's always the third party vendors fault.
Idk about anyone else but as it is right now, without looking at the details I can just tell if something is AI art on an almost subconscious level. It all just has a certain look regardless of its style
So... I feel that Midjourney is an amazing tool that is being used in completely the wrong way. A person could Google Image search reference pictures to practice from, research, or use for inspiration. Or generate an image with Midjourney that scraped the same information, but for those so reasons of Practice, Research, Inspiration, or even just spitball ideas or style blending. Or even explore all the Punk / Core genres like CyberPunk, DieselPunk, RayPunk. I think it could be a powerful research and self education asset. Yes, it uses others Art, but so does Google Image search.
Ok I'm only in the middle part, but the truth for now is that if you want to do the industry standard you should look at what tech the people you want to work with use. And that, for 2d is Photoshop 90% of the time. I know that there are artists out there that make incredible art with other software but most of the times those people are already deeply integrated in the industry and people pay them because of the name. Photoshop is suggested simply because it's standard.
That standard is very quickly shifting, as someone who works with these people ever day, over the last few years I would say about half of the industry has switched to other software when able, everyone still has photoshop most just for color editing, but not everyone is using it,however vector work is a little different, adobe still seems to be leading for that work flow, but for most part but raster based images they are losing the lead
It just feels WRONNNGGG!! So many of our jobs in the industry are being taken by clip art, stock images, and ai art. It is a skill and cannot be replicated, but with the literally STEALING of images to be meshed in ai people are trying 😭 Ig it can make hand makers and original artists hold more integrity, but now that the industry is using it…. I can’t help to feel like ai art is becoming credible like oh yea x company uses it so it’s okay BROO NOOOOOO BOOOO 😭 it better stawp 😫
A lot of my friends in graphic design say they just willy nilly use ai and stock stuff 😭😭 like that could’ve been an illustrators job but convenience is the death to time and skill. It’s such a disappointment!!!
You might need new friends, they sound like low skill Ass hats.
I think of AI like clip art. It's cheap and easy for now, eventually, it won't be cheap. The only real benefit I see for AI is the ability to edit faster especially in the realm of photoshop and collages. However, I haven't used photoshop due to the crazy price tag these days. I mean the idea of having access to all the adobe software isn't a bad price per month but I don't need the majority of the features in my illustrations, just the ability for basic editing and layers of photo resources so there are much cheaper alternatives. Does all of this make art careers more accessible to people without art training? Absolutely. Is that better? Yes and no.
lmfaaooo not wacom itself how embarrassing
As an artist, AI for shitposting doesn’t bother me and AI for pose reference doesn’t bother me.
I also think ai has some accessibility elements. I have aphantasia, for example.
It’s a slippery slope though.
I guess I'm not using Wacom anymore.
Wacom's drivers and their software is the worst. Also if they promote AI, less people will be likely to draw which means less tablets sold.
We’re visual communicators.
To communicate effectively we need to consider and direct as much of the outcome as possible.
That’s the value we add.
If you don’t have as much agency over the outcome, you’re of lesser value
AI will destroy the work of digital artists, as well as 80% of human professions. Architecture, engineering, law, clinical medicine, administration, teaching, programming, etc., etc. If humanity accepts a little AI in these professions, everyone will be demoted to mere “reviewers” and “inspectors”. And the systems won't need many inspectors. Fight it now emphatically, or give up completely, there is no middle ground.
No taxation without rappresentation .
Artist should sop paying taxes and create multiple unions to support them in the short term future,
the industry is downsizing to prepare for an inverse strike on his workers.
THIS IS WHAT IVE BEEN SAYING!! the writers strike worked! Artists should strike against ai!!
Yeah but those that have Money and fame are too coward to do anything , they prefer to lose everything a bit slower
Artist by definition are a small group and a single injury by. Apoliceman can fck your whole career either Eye , hand
WTF Is this words limite, Jesus Freedom of speech my dick Google !
We should protest but include the pubblic that love us , organizing Major events of signature and sale .
This is disheartening. I will have to consider other options.
MTG was the biggest disappointment imo
Our best bet, and this isn't even a joke, is to convince Evangelicals that AI is Satanic, or demonically influenced and then turn them loose on it.
As someone who was excited about the idea of ai art when it first came out....I'm so done and bored with the whole thing.
I think talking to artist who use more tech, would be a little bit more balanced. 3d artist have been working alongside different versions of a.i. in software for years.
concept art and illustration is dead. sucks.
no sympathy. sucks.
AI is completely ethical, you're simply wrong. You're not a victim because an art student has studied from your artworks, neither you are a victim if a software does the same. That's just begging for priviledges, to point the guns at things you dislike in the name of ethics bruh
The market will choose what's acceptable AI use, and that will most likely be determined by added value, not anything else
You CAN look at the art and just enjoy it, but artists now feel the need to judge and criticize everything. Big companies know how to pivot with the times. Maybe it’s time to learn some AI skills. I don’t know.
Remember when traditional artists said the same thing about digital artists? Times and technology changes.
I respect your opinion, but i think for me the difference is that ai art is taking another person's work while digital art you still take hours to complete an illustration. Also i just draw because it feels good, and art for me is telling a compelling story through drawing. Making characters or painting a feeling or circumstance that the person can relate to is why i enjoy it.
@angelbaby1811 theft is theft AI works is a glorified commissioner accept you never pay the actual artist it stole from.
Yes times are changing, but that doesn't okay stealing. Glad that in the court case the court ruled against works being unethically taken by people who scrape. On top of that there are programs like Nightshade and Glaze. Yea times are changing, but we will squish this as well. You want this resource? Fine pay actual artists for the references to put in the giant grinder to create those images and gain their permission.