Why Be An Artist When There's AI? - Draftsmen S4E01

CHAPTERS:

0:00 - Intro
0:33 - Revisiting AI
2:05 - Nobody cared, until now.
4:08 - Drawing Basics Course Launch
7:38 - What's the point of drawing by hand if a machine can do it?
10:56 - How can a professional artist compete with AI?
12:18 - Dave McKean
14:30 - Recent Progression and the work of Kirsten Zirngibl
16:31 - Ethical considerations
22:08 - Using artists’ names in prompts
26:45 - What is the difference between art parents influencing human minds and AI?
32:34 - Art of the Prompt
35:28 - Potential Benefit to Non-Visual Artists
38:10 - Flipping the Hypothetical
42:16 - What paradigm should we use to talk about AI art going forward?
44:26 - Stan’s AI experiences and projects
51:43 - Is AI art?
55:17 - Will AI learn taste and be able to make decisions based on that?
58:17 - A prediction
1:00:38 - What other professions will be impacted by AI?
1:03:24 - The future and growing pains
1:08:43 - Humans still want content made by other humans
1:14:35 - Don’t hide behind your art. Be a personality.

SHOW LINKS (some contain affiliate links):

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CREDITS:

Editing - Charlie Nicholson
Music Used with Permission Intro - The Freak Fandango Orchestra

[Draftsmen]

What are some of your concerns or hopes for the future of AI art?

[Dexter]

The day someone asks me "Why do you still draw by hand when AI generated images exist?" I will just reply "Why have a walk in the park when we have cars?"

[dungeontales]

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Frank Herbert,  Dune

The future is a terrifying prospect. Finding where I fit in as the machine gods are born is my daily anxiety.

[StevenZapataArt]

I think you should definitely have Karla Ortiz on to discuss further! And maybe me too or whatever...

[Kostk]

Since Draftsmen has ended, I can only assume this entire episode has been generated by AI.

[Yatukih_]

I´m gonna be an artist whether or not there is an AI, and nobody can tell me otherwise.Thanks for your video man! Regards from Ásgeir in Iceland.

[themsuicjunkies]

Artist should protect their stuff as fiercely as the music industry does

[stinkypete]

It's sad that "Don't hide behind your art, be a personality" is a thing we'll have to do now, because that was one of the worst parts about the online scene for art. I guess the days of drawing nice things to get by are well and truly gone. Wish I was born 10 years earlier or something. Cities are gutted, travel feels hollow, world feels homogenized, and now my one hidey hole is now taken over by this.

I've already had artist friends find loads of their stuff in "have I been trained" some literally have fallen into a deep depression seeing their work in the data base, work they spent years doing and did to escape horrible lives. Really can't see how anyone can justify that in their head that that's fair, considering some of these images were on personal websites (unless they were copied over by third parties)

[xizorx]

All the talks about ethics, morals, authenticity, the "human touch" or potential uses as a tool miss out on one very simple fact - a huge percentage of clients and corporations won't care about any of that and the "good enough" factor.


If they can pay 25$ per month and generate hundreds of images on a given topic *daily*, they won't give a crap about paying an artist hundreds of dollars to produce one such image in a few weeks or more. One of those hundreds of images will be Good Enough™ and that's what matters.


Most artists who say not to worry and that it won't affect as much as it seems are already successful and established. Yeah, they won't be affected much. But I think that sadly a lot of low- and mid-level jobs will be reduced SEVERELY by AI creating "good enough" images for clients who, to be blunt, often lack any sort of finer taste or knowledge of the nuanced points of art or the process of creation.


In terms of creating art for personal enjoyment, growth or as a hobby - sure, it's a tool. But in terms of doing paid commissions as a mid-level artist that's in rather considerable danger.

[mf--]

As emphasized by Steven Zapata mentioned in his video regarding AI, the developers are implementing copyrighted works in an image generating AI because they know visual artists will not defend themselves. The music version does not incorporate copyrighted works because the music industry has a stronger history of defending itself. The AI generators are denoising tools taken to the extreme. They can only come into focus by tracing existing works. It might be many or one image but it can only trace.

[bjpainter]

“The biggest threat to mankind is when Artificial Intelligence begins to self design”— Stephen Hawking

[thaumana]

As someone who mainly makes a living of anime-stylized art commissions for a while now and always felt on the existential edge already, it naturally makes me feel quite anxious to see this development. I wasn't one of those artists who were completely nihilistic towards the whole AI subject, but I can completely sympathize with those who shared their concerns and fears when they can already see the trend to an oversaturation on the art field and market.

The issues are pretty multilayered and not something people can simplify and damp down to technological angst and anti-progressive behavior or abstract art purist viewpoints. If anything, the discussions revolving to this new development and many commentaries from the distant by non-artists mostly show once again how pretty misunderstood the art profession as a whole is. It's probably not the majority, but it can be pretty heart-breaking to read all those comments on reddit and forums where people express their enthusiasm with a certain degree of Schadenfreude because in their eyes this will finally "throw off many too pricey arrogant artists from their high horses".

When I started my freelance career a few years ago after a long tedious decade of disorientation on the job market, it was quite a hard decision to jump in at the deep end, since also everyone around me including friends and family were telling me constantly why I shouldn't do it considering all the financial uncertainty and non-promising prospects that came with it. But I didn't regret it, if anything it was my happiest and best choice I made in my life, being able to finally get acknowledged and paid for the thing you thought you could do best. In my position as still somewhat small artists it is difficult to establish "a fair high price", I'm glad enough I reached the point of a regular customer base that wouldn't be put off by my rates that can at least cover my livelihood. I'm still far far away from making earnest profit - And now with automatically generated images a new big competitor enters the field that is superior in productivity and speed, while already improving thanks to its endless harvesting and exploitation of other people's intellectual property. It's a weird, devastating feeling of unfairness and constant feeling of being misunderstood.

Like all those apple and orange comparisons in this debate... I always find that comparison with "artists who 'also' got inspired by other artists" rather strange - when the generator copies almost the exact same silhouette, pose and even sometimes the signature from other artist's work, would you really consider it an "inspiration"? Surely not.

It is the same feeling of unfairness I tend to feel when I see all the repost accounts on Instagram in their top 10 recommendation lists that are able to generate content for every hour just by gathering and collecting the art images from other artists without work and no effort, while they are additionally getting benefitted by the algorithm through constant likes and shares by their consumers and on top of that even generating profit by offering smaller artists exposure and promotion slots for fees due to their high reach, profit that they solely got through stealing other people's work. It is already hard enough to get your work visible in the internet void, it's just getting constantly harder now that art sites get flooded by AI images.


I spent much time to sort out my mind the last few weeks and reflected about the reasons behind my creative activities and my whole profession a lot. I also read through many different opinions and also asked my regular clients on that matter what they thought about it, to set things more into perspective. Most of my clients made it clear that they value the human artist and human interaction behind their commissions. Some other artists say that most people who will use this tool to save a buck weren't interested in commissioning artists to begin with. I still feel conflicted about the potential of misuse, since there were a few cases already where the tools were used to cause some trouble for genuine artists, like that one individual who sniped the artist's drawing stream and put the tool-generated "end version" of this screenshot on their own twitter account, followed by torpedoing the actual original artist for seemingly stealing their art. It's utterly disgusting and breaks my heart to see that hostility. I'm aware that this won't be the majority of people who make use of those tools, but the potential to cause a stir is there, and it's easy and cheap to cause such troubles on the expenses of the other artists's energy and mental health. We mostly want to share our joy and passion with others, and if possible make a living of our work, some of us still earn less than a minimum wage, not because we wanted to but because of our strong urge for expressing ourselves/something and telling a story through our visuals which is the dominating drive above anything else, and we naturally hope and work for a better prospect and future while staying true to our artistic vision and beliefs. Therefore, it will remain alien to me and many other fellow artists where the hostility and twisted image of arrogance is coming from.

I'm not an art purist who think art and creating art is something exclusive. If anything I learned during my studies and art history seminars is that you can actually determine a lot of things as art since every group, institution or collectives define art individually on different legitimate objective and subjective basics. My big takeaway from many discussions was that for me, art can be anything, as soon as it has a certain reception, as soon as people are committed to discuss it if it can be considered art or not.
Another thing is that the perception of things that can be considered art can change over time. Take the content of a museum, for example: Some exhibitions feature historic art pieces and relics that were initially nothing more than working tools for daily life needs and purposes from ancient times. That alone shows how variable and dynamic our perception of art can be. It is not the first and will not be the last time that new technology and production mechanisms lead to a new discussion about what is considered art and what is not.

What is often forgotten or dismissed is that for some artists it is also about the vision and the process, and that of course it is discouraging to see a potential development where imagination takes shape at the push of a button in a wink and the process of creation and craft becomes maybe obsolete and insignificant. But I would like to hope and believe that there will be no future where this appreciation for craft is dead.


A short off-topic anecdote that comes into mind regarding automatized media generators:
There was an interesting situation where my former roommate felt the urge to try out music software and some randomized melody generators, so he bought a good chunk of tools, played around with it for a few days and quickly lost interest in it. He wasn't into music before, he was an established, well-paid software engineer, whose lifestyle couldn't be more different from mine - and one day he shared his rambles about how he guessed that it couldn't be that hard to create compelling music he is listening to by himself and just felt like giving those generating tools a try for once (which was totally legitimate to try out), and concluded after getting bored with it that he expected composing and creating music would be way more fun. It was a moment where I became more aware of the fact that the experience of the whole creation process as a whole, the process of creating itself was an essential part of the whole artistic drive and motivation, "part of the whole fun", and skipping those steps by generating some automatically randomized content would not give you the same fulfilling joy imo. That's what I genuinely think when people are enthusiastic about being able to skip the creation process in the future, I never consider that creation process an issue that needed to be fixed by any AI, it is the one most defining part that impacts the rewarding feeling for getting the final result done and the recognition for the hard work by other peoples for me.

[Turn-the-Page]

Some people that are neither an artist nor a writer will be perfectly able to have “their own” graphic novel. Only it won’t matter at all. Art will be completely meaneless. Congrats, human kind!

[Agiranto]

when the world needed them most they came back

[MapEffects]

If anyone believes artists will stop creating art because of AI, they don’t understand artists.

[nateg]

With regards to the portion about prompting as a skill: As Steven mentions in his video and elsewhere, AI prompting as a "skill" is likely going to top out very quickly. I had a logic teacher in high school who lamented that Google had streamlined boolean operators out of the search engine (basically the logical language and syntax for refining searches). This meant that his skill in formal logic no longer benefitted him as a Google user - and unskilled users no longer needed to learn anything to pull up what they wanted. I think that is where AI image and art generation will go - increasingly automating the prompting process to refine results with minimal input. In other words the goal of these products will be to lower the skill ceiling and reduce the barrier of entry. You could imagine that rather than specific prompts, you might only need to offer a few general prompts and just get a slider tool to adjust how stylized a piece is along a number of spectrums.

[aeoligarlic]

My pet peeve with the art community is that we're not as solid and stern as the music industry

[Cheerfuljochan]

The most dangerous thing with Ai is to call it a tool. This thing isn’t designed or developed to be a tool, its being developed to be our replacement. Sure it can currently be used as a tool and that is what the ai COMPANIES are telling us the artists but look at what they are telling to the genera public, they don’t mention artists or mention how great of a tool it will be for us.

This is basically the machine arm replacing most of the human workers in the auto mobile industry to just automate processes for quantity over quality.

As Proko and Marshal also brought up this wont only affect art it will affect EVERYTHING we know of in the world.

[gorxela]

I think that all A.I. products (not only art) sould have a watermark of sorts that says "This product was made with A.I." This watermark should be included in the source code of the A.I. like Azimov's Laws.

[NINJABDUDE]

I think the NFT craze pointed out an issue that has been growing in the art world, being the industrialization of art. Creating art just for it to exist or to be sold. And I think AI might lead people to long for the story behind the art and not necessarily the art itself. Because now if you don’t care about the story, the art that you’re looking for will be easy to create (maybe not right now). But if it’s meaning or story, something deeper, that you’re wanting then it might be harder to find.