I am genuinely trying to get better at art. I’m not there yet (likely never will be), the lying machine is still better than me.
The context:
This is my sketch.
And this is what the ai output.
I like to think I poured my heart and soul into it. I know there are people who will tell me that I’m terrible for using ai at all. I’m also sorry if this is the wrong community to ask this question (ask reddit would delete my post instantly if I tried to post there).
Again, is this slop? I am not an artist. I drive a forklift real good, that’s my skillset. So if I were to use the ai upscaled version for my book, well, I’m asking for opinions.
First, I think your sketch is great!! I’d encourage you too feel pride in it, because you did it! I bet it’s better than you could do a year ago, and honestly a lot of people could never do that much (including me). So keep running with it.
Second, you said you are genuinely trying to get better at art. So keep putting your efforts where your mouth is by continuing to practice, and not taking any shortcuts to the finish line just to get a finished product. Shortcuts don’t make you better, grinding does.
Finally, is it slop, yes, but I’m a bit more lax on your question about using ai-slop than some others. By example I mean:
- If your goal was simply to make (with a LLM assist) some cool looking desktop background for your own personal use it whatever. Go for it, enjoy! But don’t go sharing it saying ‘look what I did,’ cause you didn’t, fully.
- If your goal is to publish something (& you mentioned ‘your book’), esp to sell it, I personally would take no pride in sharing something a slop-bot was used to get it out the door, nor would I appreciate it being shared with me. And I’d love for you to feel pride in every aspect of your personal projects.
- And if you’ve got a vision for a project, and you’re worried it’ll never happen without help, I get that. But while it could be hard, maybe you could search for another artist whose style you like (there is a LOT of starving ones right now) to partner up with you. Maybe you commission them, maybe you become co-owners of this project, etc, but ultimately it becomes a project two+ people could be proud of! 🥳
- And if you get to that finish line the way a creative should, I’ll honestly be super stoked for you. So let me be first in line to pre-order the fruits of your labor. I believe in you! Keep us posted.
- And if you’ve got a vision for a project, and you’re worried it’ll never happen without help, I get that. But while it could be hard, maybe you could search for another artist whose style you like (there is a LOT of starving ones right now) to partner up with you. Maybe you commission them, maybe you become co-owners of this project, etc, but ultimately it becomes a project two+ people could be proud of! 🥳
Still slop, sorry amigo! (Probably not what you want to hear, but I’m just being real…)
If I sketch something, and have an ai upscale it for me
That’s not an accurate description of what you did, is it?
You didn’t simply “upscale” your drawing. You had AI turn a rough sketch into an inked, colored and shaded but otherwise incomplete piece.
I like to think I poured my heart and soul into it.
Yeah, I’m sure you like to think that…
But in reality you did part 1 of a 4 part process and told a computer to do the rest. I don’t know how long you spent on your initial sketch, but in the end you relied on a gimmicky shortcut (based on the exploitation of other people’s stolen art… stuff that they REALLY poured their heart and soul into before it was unceremoniously ripped off by mega-corporations) to do at least 75% of the work. I’m being brutally honest, but at best you can only really think of it as being 25% yours.
Again, is this slop? I am not an artist. I drive a forklift real good, that’s my skillset.
Am I being too harsh? Why am I telling you this?
Here’s the thing you need to understand…
If you made that original sketch then you ARE an artist. Sure you don’t feel like you’re as good as you want to be (no artist EVER does, by the way), but you are already 10000x more of an artist than someone who writes some text and gets an AI to slop out some generic shit.
The composition and sketch is the hardest part and you already did it. Linework (if that’s your style) is basically just tracing. Coloring is as easy as doing a kids coloring book. Shading can be a puzzle, but you’ll get it in time if you keep the light coming from the same direction.
You spent some time doing the hard part, liked how it looked, and then instead of just cracking on with the next part, you got lazy, turned your brain off and fed it to the instant gratification machine, turning it into slop. Taking your hands off the wheel entirely, you know?
And for what?
Now you have a “pretty picture”, but you didn’t learn a damn thing about taking your art from sketch to lines, or coloring, or shading. And to make matters worse, you can’t even point to the picture and say “hey look at that, I MADE THAT”, like you can with the sketch.
In the end, I’m gonna call it slop. Ethical problems aside, AI generated slop art is a dime a dozen these days. I don’t see any value in it at all. I think you have more talent for art than you know, and I hope that you keep it up and try to approach your work with more pride as a human being making something cool by hand.
The first image is your artwork.
It represents your slow but steady progress in your hobby. It may not be what you want yet, but it is still a stepping stone on your journey.
The second image is a compilation of your artwork and the stolen efforts of millions of unpaid artists, their works unceremoniously ripped away from them and sold as a tech company’s product without any compensation to them for aiding building such a machine. It isn’t art.
Keep at it, yo. Art is a frustrating hobby at times, but enjoy the learning.
Don’t say, “stolen”. It’s the wrong word. “Copied” is closer but really, “trained an AI model with images freely available on the Internet” is more accurate but doesn’t sound sinister.
When you steal something, the original owner doesn’t have it anymore. AIs aren’t stealing anything. They’re sort of copying things but again, not really. At the heart of every AI LLM or image model is a random number generator. They aren’t really capable of copying things exactly unless the source material somehow gets a ridiculously high “score” when training. Such as a really popular book that gets quoted in a million places on the Internet and in other literature (and news articles, magazines, etc… anything that was used to train the AI).
Someone figured out that there’s so much Harry Potter quotes and copies in OpenAI’s training set that you could trick it into outputting something like 70% of the first book, one very long and specific prompt at a time (thousand of times). That’s because of how the scoring works, not because of any sort of malicious intent to violate copyright on the part of OpenAI.
Nobody’s stuff is being stolen.
Nobody’s stuff is being stolen.
An artist’s work is copied without asking or compensating them and then sold as a product.
It’s like piracy, except instead of individuals pirating a corporation’s content (which they can’t actually buy anymore) for their private use, it’s corporations pirating an individual’s content to sell it for profit and drive the individual artist out of the market.So I’d disagree. The images themselves aren’t stolen, but the money that can be made off of them is.
Yeah, it generated everything that wasn’t the monochrome silhouette. That is AI generated
If you can do a rough sketch this good then yes you are an artist.
Just finish your own art. You already did the hard part.
The example you provided isn’t upscaling. Upscaling is the act of interpolating pixels to increase the resolution of a bitmap image. What you’ve done is had the AI color and shade in your sketch.
Frankly, it’s clear from the sketch that you have some great foundational skills. I don’t really understand why you would stop halfway and let a computer steal the learning and practice opportunity from you. It’s like a carpenter building a piece of furniture and just stopping before sanding and painting it.
I’ve built furniture before, and stopping before sanding and painting is definitely a thing. It’s a lot of work and you literally can only fuck it up while you’re learning. Finishing a piece is a lot of work when you know you are going to spend years apologizing for how badly it sucks. While an unfinished piece is functional for like 1/3 the work and it’s not pretending to be finished so you can’t really be disappointed.
I think the metaphor you chose is apt. It just doesn’t really address the point in quite the way you were thinking.
I was also speaking from experience. I recognize that ‘unfinished’ is definitely a style that some people like. I rocked a desk for the better part of 5 or so years that was literally a stage platform (2x4 framing with a plywood lid) I had made and didn’t want to sand or stain.
That said, it’s also kind of in the name- the sanding and stain/paint are called ‘finishing’ because they are the final steps for a finished end product. I would say the same thing about sketches in that there are scenarios where they are acceptable and stand on their own, but they’re generally not considered a finished product. A sketch is kind of like the rough stage of a carpentry build: it’s the hard part. The stages that come after are a lot of tedium, but the main structure is there and the finish line is in sight.
That was a lot of words to say I generally agree with you but feel that it’s still a reasonable comparison.
Oh it’s a great comparison. Sorry if that didn’t come through clearly.
