Comic Strips

There are difficult 'AI' tools.

Look up controlnet workflows or VACE, just to start, much less little niches in vapoursynth pipelines or image editing layers. You could spend days training them, messing with the implementation, then doing the manual work of carefully and deliberately applying them. This has, in fact, has been happening in film production for awhile, just in disguise.

Same with, say, LLMs used in game mods where appropriate, like the Rimworld mod. That's careful creative expression.

...As usual, it's tech bros fucking everything up by dumbing it down to zero-option prompt box and then shoving that in front of as many people as possible to try and monopolize their attention.

In other words, I agree with the author that what I hate about 'AI art' is the low effort 'sloppiness.' It's gross, like rotten fast food. It makes me sad. And that's 99.999% of all AI art.

...But it doesn't have to be like that.

It's like saying the concept of the the fediverse sucks because Twitter/Facebook suck, even if 99.999% of what folks see is the slop of the later. It's not fair to the techniques, and it's not holding the jerks behind mass slop proliferation accountable.

I feel like some promises were broken 😂

I find this li'l guy hilarious for some reason.

tl;dr - "art" generated by LLMs is ultimately lame and uninspiring. It's probably never going to inspire people very much. It's a parlor trick and everyone intrinsically recognizes it. Don't expect to be taken seriously as a creator if this is your primary tool.

Art is beautiful not because economic value has been captured and skewered into aesthetics. It is a part of being human.

The Oatmeal! 😍😍 I haven’t been to that site in so long, I’m so glad they’re still around! Thanks for sharing!

Walther Benjamin examines this point extensively in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which should be required reading for everyone, but especially anyone who thinks that AI art is the same as human art. The crux is that an authentic work (you can think of it as the “original”) has some… thing , some Je ne sais quoi that he calls the Aura. It’s a feeling you get from the real authentic thing. It’s the reason people line up at the Louvre to see the tiny Mona Lisa behind thick plate glass instead of just looking at a poster. Or why NFTs tried to be a thing and basically failed after the meme of it all died out.

Pregnant Mario lactating Jamba juice all over Blanka from street fighter, indeed.

I think that there is AI "art" that goes beyond typing a few words into chat gpt and waiting for a result.

I don't know how popular this is today but about two years ago I watched lots of people go wild with stable diffusion workflows. It was a whole palette of tools: Control net, Inpainting, sketches with img2img for the composition, corrections in Photoshop and so on. It took hours or days of manual work until people "generated" the image that they initially imagined. I would say that this would count as art... Writing one prompt into your favourite llm and take what you get: not so much.

One example for reference: https://youtu.be/K0ldxCh3cnI

Unexpected mention of Allie Brosh in the thanks at the end. Genuinely nice to be able to confirm she's still out there, alive and kicking, doing whatever it is she's doing now.

AI art is great, because now I can make artsy pictures in my presentations. AI art can never replace real artists though, it's just not that good. There will always be a place for real artists, AI art is only for amateurs that would never pay for real art anyways.

Growing up my mother had (still has come to think of it) a book about Wyeth at the Kuerner family farm. The Wyeth picture in the Oatmeal story is not part of the larger collection of works all from that farm, but it still has the feeling. I can't reccomend people looking into Wyeth and his art high enough

this reminded me that old Chuck Jones comic in which he encourages young artists to find what works for them instead of trying to fit in.