The future comes

In contrast to a lot of people your reaction is very calm. I really respect that despite your worries, you are not straight up rejecting the new technology, but you try to understand it. Also good luck with learning animation!

AI generated pictures is a product. Fast, efficient, good enough product. I would gladly accept it as a tool for something like concept art, or contextual illustrations. But your art is much more than just an image. Your art is you, the person who shares love for something valuable to me. Who feel what I feel, and who spends part of his life creating something that will bring joy to a stranger. And I'm glad that there's someone like you) AI can approximate your style perfectly, but I don't care... I still want you

I was contemplating the same thing when ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Mid Journey and other stuff came out -- This will severely impact everyone working in creative fields... Being artists, copywriters, programmers,... you name it. After talking to several people, it made me realize something: "AI" doesn't have imagination, it just blindly slaps things together... That's why there was a lawsuit where AI slapped a "Getty images" watermark on a generated image. And my stance on it as it is right now is: AI can be a great helper, for beginners as well as pros as it can spark ideas / get creative juices flowing... BUT I don't consider people that click "regenerate" button 5 times as "artists", regardless how hard they try to present themselves as such. If you're afraid about your position as an artist - don't be... Just because this past year everyone jumped on AI bandwagon doesn't mean artists are obsolete... It's a fad. Just like metaverse was all the rage last year, NFTs a year before and so on and so forth. 3D was supposed to be death of 2D. Didn't happen. Digital art was supposed to be the death of traditional art. Didn't happen. Consoles were supposed to be the death of PCs. Didn't happen. Every technological leap that we take is supposed to "kill", whatever it's replacing, but nothing ever happened. Just look how many "iPhone killer" phones are out there, and iphones are still standing and more expensive than ever. As said before (by someone else), people pledging here aren't here just for the pretty pictures, but are here for the artist as well.

Only sketches are fine, even your sketches are really high quality. A few AI generated or AI assisted images from you are ok, but definitely label them as such, and remember that everyone supporting you here is here to support you, specifically, and likes to see your art - not art generated by some thing that produces similar results. We support not just for the art, but the person behind it.

This a particularly difficult technology to come to terms with for an artist at your level. As someone able to produce popular artwork of a very high production level, it's your stylistic technique an AI is likely to copy disproportionately, and, unlike a more amateur artist, you have relatively little to learn or gain from investigating a model. It's as if you built and worked on a bike in order to travel the distance for your art, and then someone came along and built a train going most of the way there. There's a few good reasons that I'm choosing a train to represent AI in this analogy. The art 'destinations' that it can go to are very fixed. In fact, besides it's continued inability to effectively capture transitions, the other persistent indicator which still separates AI art from manual art is its 'commonness'. Generally, pieces created by AI models look like a polished piece that someone thought about for less than two seconds before making, tend to contain very few surprising elements, and look similar to what you might expect from the top 10 pieces from a Google image search. Your mobility in the art space given your training is still much higher than someone new, even if they have a model take them places. Another reason that AI is a train here is its complexity and the relative expense of establishing a rail line. While you may understand the process involved in biking easily enough, it's unlikely that you will be able to easily understand the train. Most people taking and building trains have a fairly limited understanding of their inner workings. They pay for tickets or material, and don't get a better understanding of going places by themselves. Considering some of the significant shortfalls of AI art generation, which are unlikely to be fully resolved for years, your stark humility in the face of it is a little incongruous. There's no doubt that a rail line built into hinterlands that previously only you and a few others could come to depreciates the value of your skill at least a little, but there's a lot of value in being able to go that extra distance and deliver results which are still inaccessible through AI and will continue to be so for at least the next decade or so. It would be very ironic if you were to abandon your art completely because it was popular enough that people wanted to replicate it. If you do want to experiment with AI, you're unlikely to be able to fully integrate it into your process, it just doesn't have that level of flexibility yet. I would recommend retraining a model using your own art and/or artwork that inspires you, and then using that as a base to work off of. Essentially, you'd be taking the train to somewhere near your destination and then biking the rest of the way, instead of upgrading your bike to a motorbike or car. Editing the AI image in simple ways might help you fit it into your process, for example grayscaling the image and working from that or just borrowing textural components or colors. Using AI could also be a helpful way to explore a drastically different style, if you are inclined to do so. If you want help trying to use AI or work it into your process, let me know and I'll do my best to aid you. Although I haven't played around with the latest models too much I've been working with generative adversarial networks since 2016 and have some knowledge of computer vision tools as well. P.S. 1. Writers are also having a rough time here, as large language models give someone the ability to approximate the results of decades of working with a language in a few minutes. 2. To answer your questions, I don't really care if you shift to sketches or want to use AI in your art. However, I'm a bit skeptical that AI will significantly help your process or allow you to achieve superior results, at least without some more work. 3. Sorry for the long post or if you thought the bicycle/train metaphor was strained or confusing. I do think I'm qualified to talk about this, so let me know if you would like any more explanation!

The most important thing an artist contributes to art is the concept. An AI, no matter how fancy, will sit there and do nothing until someone tells it what to draw. If you use AI to assist your art, any value in the final result would still come from your mind.

Go take yourself a nice vacation dude, a stay in the country sounds like the perfect remedy for a gloomy heart. You've always put out good work for us here, so I don't think anyone minds you slowing down for a bit. As for the AI art, I understand that its weighing heavy on your mind. I hear the same thing from a lot of artists. It's frustrating to see so many people using it, and to see it garner a lot of attention, and even make money. But I have zero respect for AI generated art, and I suspect that a lot of people feel the same. Sure it looks nice, and its fun to browse through once in a while, but that's it. There's no soul behind a machine generated picture, and no reason to passionately support someone who operates that machine then claims the art as their own. Because literally anyone can type text into a prompt and press enter, but only you can create new and unique pictures that come from your mind. I guess my advice is to not let this stuff get you down, remember that your skill and hard work gives your art a value that AI doesn't have. And if you still feel like you have to dabble in it to keep up with the landscape, then do what you gotta do, but I'd rather see your authentic work than some computer trying to mimic you.

In programming, we were quick to adopt AI assistants. They do a lot of the boring work, like a real assistant, but they make mistakes. You need a human before telling them what to do, and after to clean up their mistakes. I have also messed around with AI art, stable diffusion, with a similar result. The "beautiful" art is not every time. You have to tweak the prompt for hours, and then generate 1000 images for many more hours to get one without terrible anatomy or composition mistakes. There's a lot of potential for it also to be an assistant, if artists learn how to use it. It can fill in the details of a sketch pretty well, but a human has to clean it up afterwards.

I'm sorry to hear that you are going through this mental strain. I think you should take whatever time you need, after all your health is more important than us receiving consistent artwork from you. When I first took notice of AI generated art, I thought it was a cool thing to do just for fun. But people have taken it too far. "Creating" art through AI generation isn't really making art yourself. After all, the AI generation is "stealing" from artists all over to create what it does. AI "art" couldn't exist without all the years of real art people made. And most of the time, the user isn't doing anything special in creating these AI pieces. They shouldn't feel any pride in it, and they certainly shouldn't be trying to pass themselves off as artists. For the most part I'm still able to tell AI apart from the real deal. And I can still recognize my favorite artist's works at a glance. (Like yours!) Though I can admit this AI revolution still scares me, especially as a writer. It really doesn't seem fair that these bots should profit off all our work. I seriously hope there's some laws placed against their use, but in the meantime I will continue to hope humanity will rise above and recognize the effort the already underappreciated creatives go through to make our work. Hang in there! Stay safe. And I hope you enjoy the country! <3

I understand how you feel, and you point of view, I remember when I saw Ai Artwork in the beginning and was something bad, you can have a lot of mistakes in details like hands. But Ai have the ability to learn , you can teach it, and if you do it right and with patience, the Ai can do much better, and if you are an artist already can use it for many stuff, and just fix the little details the Ai do. I saw multiples artwork that it's hard to know if it's Ai or not, because some artists know how to use it. For what I know it's not an easy as you think in the beginning, requirement a lot of reading and knowledge to do it right and teach the Ai to do a good job, and after that take some extra time for the computer generated it. I'm against people using Ai to sell artwork using others peoples arts, but the idea and system be able to learn, and you are able to teach it it's amazing!!!. Take your time and think, if you ever need some feedback, please let me know and I will be glad to listen to you and talk more about it. Enjoy your time in the country, not many people are able to do something like this, and if you can, do it and relax enjoying your time, sometime I wish I would be able to do it as well, but sadly I can't. Learning animation sound amazing!!!, enjoy it, take your time and always remember, the most important is you enjoy and have fun in the stuff you are doing. I know you will do an amazing work!!!! Be in a couples of months just doing sketchers, it's not bad, like you can read, many are ok with this. About the last question? actually I don't know, I'm still amaze for the idea of a system be able to learn stuff and getting better while you are teaching it, it's really futuristic, but I think if you draw, and use the Ai for finish stuff, or even do half of the work, well will be interest to see

I second the other comments: Take all the time you need to heal. These are troubling times in so many ways. As for AI images—no matter how technically brilliant they might be or become, they will never have the soul and spark of inspiration a real artist infuses into their artwork. The imperfections in real art aren’t faults, they are the spice that differentiates it from the bland, empty, generated images. I think it’s fine to use it as a tool—for inspiration, reference, or to fill backgrounds (like photo bashing). Completely generated images not only do not interest me, I tend to outright block people who (knowingly) share them. I think that’s a kick to the groin of all the artists whose works were illegitimately used to train those networks.

It's perfectly fine if you create only sketches in the upcoming weeks. Anything that makes you feel comfortable is fine with me. :) The AI thing, however... It's a very slippery slope, to be honest. You have a very unique art style that I fell in love with many years ago. Each time I see a picture done by you, it's 100% you. It has a human touch. Letting the AI run rampant on any of your images makes my flesh crawl. At this current state of AI, which feels like a Wild West situation, I'd suggest you start using AI with the simplest of things like backgrounds and lighting. You know, the mundane things. However, I'd keep the characters you draw under your control, no matter how much work it takes to complete them. Bottom line, please make sure that your future art pieces still reflect your style. I'm so devastated that talentless hack f*cks run amok among the art community, claiming to be "artists" when they are not. Admittedly, this technology won't go away and implementing AI in some way or another is a must at this point. (Unless you're a traditional artist.) But like I said, I would do baby steps first and wouldn't touch a thing about how you draw your characters. I hope this helps. Stay strong and remember: we're all here to support you.

First question: I'd be fine with it personally, though I would like to see the exclusives continue Second and third: I'm not sure if this is the right choice Maybe to help with the drawing but I wouldn't rely on it as it get onto a copyrightable grey zone very quickly as you can't copyright AI generated pictures unless you do significant work to them, but all of that is still within legal limbo and I'd hate for you to lose the rights to claim your drawings as yours

You once told me you know Shuxer. Let's say an AI can create a 3D model visually indistinguishable from his clay sculptures. You can 3D print it, make a mold maybe. But is it really the same? Is aspect the only thing that matters? What about the thought, the time, the failures and retries, the years spent practising, the love. Are these things really worthless? You are an artist, one that everyone knows and love. You spent years to achieve this and every time you draw something you put your love and your life in your art. This is something that no AI "artist" can do by just writing a description. You, like Shuxer, create something unique every single time, something that grew up in your mind for days before becoming art in a process that can last weeks. You may say it's difficult to tell apart human and AI made art. I disagree. You, as an artist, are on a level so high that I can assure you we all can tell at first glance if an art piece is yours. There is something so calming and soothing in your style that it's impossibile to not tell apart. This is also one of the reason you will always be my favourite artist. What does AI do? Create a completely different image every single time you input a different word? That is not art, that is a product. You are an artist, you are on a completely different level, not even in the same league. You create art, your works are unique. AI is just an industrial production line.

I'm fine with sketches, I hope you fine yourself in a better frame of mind soon.

AI art is an abomination against humanity. AI can be used to help us in certain applications, but to use AI to generate art and call it your own is to admit defeat. It's like there is no confidence in one's own abilities and creativity.

You take as long a break as you need. Sketches are more than fine. I'm here for all your artwork. As for AI art, I honestly view it as cheating. Typing a few parameters does not make an artist. It's copyright infringement and theft. You keep doing YOUR art.

I think if you wanted to do sketches for a couple months, that would be fine. Eventually it would be an issue, but not immediately. On the subject of artists using AI to fill detail and lighting and such... I don't think it really matters what anyone thinks. It's here, it's here to stay, and artists who *do* use it will put out high quality products faster than artists who do not. I do not like that this is true, but I also can't see any compelling reason it won't be. The niche for "100% produced by hand" is going to be very small. With that in mind, I have no objections to you employing the new technologies. My only concern would be that the finished product still look like the art and style we've all come to know and love over the years.

I entirely understand if there will be only sketches, that's fine. I have absolutely zero interest in ai generated pictures, and using them in drawings is very iffy at best. At most for randomized backgrounds.