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---
schema_type: DigitalDocument
title: On AI Art
date: 2022-09-30
last_update: 2022-11-13
references:
- label: "2022-09-30 -- Reply to my original post"
url: https://merveilles.town/@jbauer/109088036845654325
- label: "2022-09-30 -- My Response"
url: https://mk.vulpes.one/notes/95s8h9ajtp
- label: "2022-11-13"
url: https://mk.vulpes.one/notes/97i33e337z
- label: "2022-11-13 -- Update 1"
url: https://mk.vulpes.one/notes/97ists0630
- label: "2022-11-14"
url: https://mk.vulpes.one/notes/97k2fry860
---
## 2022-09-30 -- Artists Weren't Happy When Photography Was Invented, Too
::: alert
I posted the title on fedi. Someone replied and I elaborated on my views with the following post.
:::
The primary reason AI art is widely getting banned is because a lot of people are wowed by the novelty of this technology and post their shitty results. But there are also people who spend a lot of time on tuning their prompts, running the results through img2img several times and touching things up manually in Photoshop. They're spending real effort on getting good results.
AI is making good art a lot more accessible for everyone, including artists. I could run a drawing of mine through it to see what lighting or background works well, without having to spend hours on doing it myself and still not getting close to the quality of ""real"" artists.
People who have amazing ideas but lack the skills to draw them themselves finally have a tool that works for them.
Also regarding sentience, this topic is so complex I don't even know where to begin, but I've made an interesting observation: The way this AI works isn't actually much different from us humans.
Artists often use references and look up to other artists and adapt qualities from them in their own art. The way artist A draws scenery, the shading technique from B and C, and character designs from D -- of course not straight up copied and with clear boundaries, it all flows together as they see more art and feel inspired to adopt some qualities from it. This statement is true for me as well.
Stable Diffusion was trained by looking at art as well. It doesn't have a database of every single picture. Instead it recognizes various concepts and puts them in some N-dimensional space -- it's memories. So one point in this space captures one concept it has seen in many different pictures. The prompt simply determines which of these concepts the AI will try to use (up to 75 with SD).
Do you see the parallels? At least from my limited understanding, this doesn't seem much different from humans looking at pictures and recognizing shading, lighting, painting,... techniques and selectively using them in their own art.
## 2022-11-13 -- The Concept of "Lost Commissions"
An argument I hear often is that using an AI means I can get a piece in an artist's style when it should've been a commission. This doesn't really work for my situation because I don't copy an individual artist's style in my generated art -- it's a remix of things from both the original data and the data I added. I don't think commissioning ~10 artists at once is even possible, and if it was you'd better have lots of money.
> Then commission an artist whose style is close enough
Sure, I guess I could do that.\
But this is where the second problem comes in: The way this usually goes with good artists (who are usually also popular) is that commissions are closed, the queues are full for the next 3 years, they never respond, and/or you have to keep track of them on Twitter for those 5 nanoseconds they're open before 10 billion followers snatch all slots.\
I went through it all and I hated it. I won't even try commissioning an artist anymore if I notice any of these things because this is too stressful.
And now there is AI that allows me to create good art of my random ideas. It's art that otherwise never would've existed because without the instantaneous feedback of AI I wouldn't even know if the idea worked or if I liked the implementation.\
On the flip side, with ideas that proved to be good such as the fox-corvid-gryphon, I am now considering creating more art of it with my own abilities and maybe commission someone if there ever is a chance. So if anything, AI has *increased* my willingness to buy commissions.
This whole situation is strikingly similar to the music/video/gaming industry, piracy and the concept of "lost sales". Food for thought.
### Update 1
One more thing I got to experience when commissioning an artist: getting pushed back in the queue. 2 months turned into 2 years, and the sad thing is others have made even worse experiences (not necessarily with the same artist).
There were probably things happening in the artist's life, or they possibly ran out of motivation which is something I can strongly relate to, or maybe they just suck at time management. I don't know. But it's undeniable that all these conditions are barriers.
## 2022-11-14 -- AI is a Tool, not an Artist
The mistake a lot of people make in this debate is that they're giving the AI the role of an artist rather than a tool. Stable Diffusion only works in conjunction with a human who operates it, and ultimately it is the human who decides which concepts to use and how via a prompt or more advanced techniques. It is still the human who brings in the "beyond" you were talking about.
It would be strange to apply standards of creativity to a pen or Photoshop, wouldn't it?
Like any tool, AI can be used and abused. I can take Photoshop and plagiarize an existing work, and I can take an AI and plagiarize existing work.
In fact, people had the same concerns with the rise of digital art and later Photoshop because they made creating art so much easier. Yet here we are, digital art is common and Photoshop is an integral part of many artist's workflow. This is just another round of the same old debate.
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