A Rant About AI

Hey guys. As you probably can tell I haven't been very active lately art-wise.

Just like many other artists I've been going through a sort of existential crisis regarding the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) made art and how this changes everything for the art community.

So I thought I would make this post to voice my opinion and vent out some of my frustrations,worries and hopes with this new technology.

As someone who has devoted most of their life to learning the principles of art, spending time and money on courses and degrees to hone their skills and grow in my career on choice, it's been pretty upsetting to see the insane amount of "artist" profiles propping up all over the web that consist of daily posts containing multiple images, each one as beautiful as the next and all made in a manner of minutes with the only skill needed would be to type the coolest and most specific prompts to get what they want.

These people don't need to worry about form, color, composition, lighting, anatomy, etc. They just generate and post content on a daily basis and the likes and follows come in and many of them feel comfortable enough already to call themselves artists producing images where there's not a single brush stroke made by them.

The sad/worrying part about this for me is how many people will suddenly grow up making art without learning the basics.

It's both hilarious and sad for me to see all these beautiful painting with people who have HORRIBLE hands and I just sit there thinking, "they could fix those hands if they knew how to do it". But I bet AI will learn to draw hands in a matter of months.

Add to all that the fact that everything is generated by using artwork from many other real artists without their consent and suddenly AI starts to feel very dirty to me.

I dabbled a bit with AI when it came out, and I always modified the paintings to fit my vision, but I always felt a little weird inside, like I was cheating or like I didn't get the same feeling of accomplishment that I usually get when I take my time in making something from scratch. I can see the allure of saving hours of time in creating something from 0 and just skip making backgrounds/portraits etc with the click of a button, but in all honesty it's just not the same.

The other worrisome part is how this will diminish the amount of jobs/commission work for artists in all kinds of areas. Why pay 40-80 dlrs for a portrait commission when you can pay 10 to generate all the portraits you want in 1 month?

Little by little I've been pondering my fears with this new inevitable technology and I think that no matter how much artists don't like it, it's here to stay. It sucks because it's an amazing technology that wasn't born to solve any actual problems.

My main takeaways from all this right now are these.

- AI isn't going anywhere. So I might as well get comfortable interacting with it.

- All AI (for now) looks very similar to one another. Since everyone is generating stuff from the same sources there's like a general vibe to things.

- Most of the focus on AI art is fueled by the need to generate and post "content" which has been slowly poisoning the artworld since the boom of social media.

- I should focus much more on creating things that I love and feel proud of instead of competing with the machine or just making things for the likes and follows.

-Try not to close myself to a new technology and learn to use it responsibly when needed.

- Make art not content.

I really hope that AI and non AI artwork can learn to coexist without damaging too much the art-world ecosystem and that instead of being a replacement for artists it turns into a powerful tool to use for our advantage.

If you made it all the way here I just want to thank you for your continuous support, for sticking with me all this time and for taking the time to read this wall of text.

I appreciate each and every one of you and I'm forever grateful to you for being here with me and I wish you all very happy holidays!

Thank you <3

-J