Accessible_irl (Art by Igdoods)
Accessible_irl (Art by Igdoods)
cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/24295950
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It makes it more accessible to the lazy and talentless.
As someone with the fine motor control of someone made of all elbows, who couldn’t hope to ever draw anything and who leaves that up to people with talent and work ethic for money, all of the cool things in my head that die there because they’re better in my imagination than I could ever express through words or art.
I feel seen.
Give digital art programs a try. There's plenty of free alternatives to the big subscription model vultures out there, there's GIMP for image editing, Krita for drawing, Blender for 3D, DaVinci Resolve for video editing, Audacity and Pro Tools Free for sound recording and editing, you can even make modular synths using VCV Rack. And if you like rum and eye patches theres versions of the big players out there too.
I am absolutely shit at drawing, but professionally I make 3d animations, having drawing skills helps, but it's not necessary to learn any one of these.
I am even more terrible at those than I am with physical media.
Everyone is terrible when they start. You can get better if you practice over time.
You might not ever draw the next big masterpiece, but if you practice you will get better.
All it takes is 15-30 minutes a day.
I'm 47. I have tried. My problem isn't inputting pixels, I can do that. I've done drafting with paper and pencil and with CAD tools (I'm an engineer). My problem is knowing where to put the pixels/lines for the thing I want to create (which I can do for a schematic, but not for anything that is to have any realism. I've never had a problem with schematics. I can make a drawing that is very clear in terms of all functional aspects).
I have ideas, I am simply not good at implementation. AI tools allow me to express my ideas. And if you think I'm less than for that, you can bite my shiny metal ass, because I'm not creating for you. I'm creating for me, and sometimes for people I'm close to (usually to make them laugh).
It really is just persistence and accepting a certain amount of "I'm so bad at art" for eternity. Just make something, draw, paint or whatever. Look for things that motivate you to make stuff and learn to do it anyway, sucking is the first step to being kinda good at something.
A class or two can help. The feedback from an instructor can help you figure out where you are going wrong.
It’s also 100% accepting that you will be terrible. It just has to be fun even when it’s terrible.
Yeah, self-critique is important but you can never see everything
You're not alone. Sorry all these pricks think you just haven't tried.
I wish to formally apologize for offering friendly advice on the internet, maybe I should have been even more of an apparent prick than I apparently was and told op to give up forever on their desire to be more creative and told op to eat shit and die.
Or you could not think less of someone for using a tool that you don't need to express their creativity.
I don't think less of OP, if I did, I wouldn't be be giving suggestions for freely accessible digital art programs of all different kinds and not even limiting myself to just visual mediums.
All I want to do is offer words of encouragement to go and try some of these. They're free programs, what's the harm in encouraging someone to give them a try?
Sorry, I assumed you were one of the people who doesn't think using AI tools is a valid way to express one's self. In hindsight, you never said things to that effect.
You aren't one of the pricks I was referring to, I should have checked before replying to your comment. But you gotta admit, there are a lot of people who think anyone who uses AI tools is a loser, and will say all kinds of things to invalidate those who use AI.
Honestly if you as tamman2000 uses AI, eh whatever, it's out there, most likely you're not some rich asshole ceo pushing this to replace workers. I'll still be over like "hey there are a ton of great free programs out there with great communities around them and great learning resources." And yeah using non-ai tools isn't always easy, it takes time and practice to get decent, I still say that time spent learning how to make it is worth it.
That said, I have less of a problem with the concept of AI itself, at the end of the day it's just some college level mathematical theory thats been aroind since the 60s and 70s. For me, the big problems with it, is the widespread pilfering of everything on the internet to train these models, it's the huge energy expenditure to train the models and to generate with these models, it's the owner class using AI to replace human beings and knowing full well the environment is being torn apart to support AI, it's the shoving of AI into every little thing whether or not it even makes sense in the first place, it's the acceleration of enshitification, it's the absolute flood of AI generated spam everywhere online. My problem is not strictly with AI but basically capitalism ruining this and turning it into the most asinine profit extracting bs.
Have you considered collage? You just need some mod podge, a few foam brushes, and magazines/random print material. There’s still lots of room for skill and exploration, but there’s not a technical barrier to entry.
I never realized it, but isn't a collage basically the analog version of AI art, except in this case it's using the literal other art of people rather than learning from it and blending to make something new? Literally using other pictures to make a picture.
The art and challenge of collage is changing the context. Consider how the Avalanches work is entirely samples - but there’s something there that was not in the constituent parts.
Or video collage. YouTube Poops are another example of that kind of finding something new in what was already there - what about Robotnik’s PINGAS.
I posted a project on c/artshare which is chunks of a Christian courtship manual which I drowned in paint and then chopped out the most fucked up parts from. I don’t think that is something AI would do trained on a model of pop Christian literature - that’s something I a person with context and reactions to that literature would do. An AI can create pictures that might look nice, but they don’t have meaning. Art for me prioritizes meaning. - but I’m the kind of weirdo that burst into tears when I saw the replica of Fountain at the Tate.
But you were talking specifically about a static medium, not video or music, which are not static mediums. We were also discussing image gen AI, not video gen etc.
Most people also don't consider video or music edits collage either, and call them something else. Because they use different skills and are different mediums.
Also, you do realize we're still talking about current AI generation right? There doesn't exist an AI that executes processes on it's own (maybe) yet. So your whole thing wasn't relevant either, really, in any way more than saying a piece of paper will spontaneously draw something on itself.
That said, you can, using prompts, training, guidance steps, etc, actually do exactly what you did in a digital format, using a diffusion image generation AI. You can get more specific by using it + Gimp.
Edit: and I mean, you still are using someone else's art to create what you made.
I guess - ultimately, as a pragmatic/materialist person, I’d like to see something material. An example of good AI art. Something creative, something unique, something conveying some kind of deeper idea. Something like Hannah Höch?
Here’s a current collage project of mine that is maybe 25% done. The design of the coloring pages, the Lisa Frank stickers, the patterns on the paper - these are all not mine in design. But I think they have been demonstrably altered in a way that make them different.
I guess the old adage in literary endeavors is “show, don’t tell.” I want to see someone really use AI as an art form, but I’m just not seeing things that really come across as having much thought in them.
I (and my actual artist wife, whose opinion on this I value more) view AI image generators as a tool.
I'd say akin to a camera. Photography is still an art form today, but you see MANY pictures that aren't art too. Because it's now accessable and easy to use.
AI image generators is much the same, in that it's very accessable, and so you do see a lot of actual slop.
But I've seen some techniques that are either only possible with AI (functional QR code art) or use AI as only part of a process (fractals mixed in with perhaps Photoshop/Krita/Gimp and then hand printed or such).
Of course most importantly, I think, is that an AI image generator doesn't stop people from making art. You are free to do draw, make collage, create sculptures, etc. People who use it purely to make a thing they want to see, are nearly always, if not always, people who wouldn't have wanted to make it themselves in the first place (or can't). Much like how you might get a craving for a pizza but might just get a cheap frozen one rather than making one yourself from scratch (which can be very expensive too).
Unlike the example, if you want a picture of a painting, a piece of paper and a free pencil won't achieve that - you still do need the acrylics (assuming you're not wanting something that has specific colors outside of acrylic paints like tempera), canvas, a stand, and of course, months to years of skill depending on natural talent. Much like it you want a pizza from true scratch, you need to know not only how to proof dough and bake, but grow wheat, husking and milling it, grow tomatoes, turn milk into cheese, cure meat, etc.
Or you can but a frozen pizza created by a machine. It won't be as good, but it'll be pizza and takes a fraction of the time.
Oh, and he's an example of the QR code AI art I mentioned which a human can't do by hand:
It def takes some practice to get into these programs but many of them have really good tutorial series geared toward beginners. As far as my experience, in Blender you have the Donut Series put out by Blender Guru that takes you from "I've never even heard of blender" to "I've made a really good looking donut." By the end of the series.
I'm bad at visual art also (always was into audio) but for me the best thing is to take a couple pictures, and start modifying them with gimp. This is a lot easier than starting from nothing. I make all my album covers this way, usually from A few irl pictures I took and then added effects to. They often end up pretty sweet
When these programs were new, "real" artists viewed them in the same way that AI is viewed now.
And these tools ended up aiding artists rather than replacing them and these tools still require human competency and creativity to use. I don't type "make me picture of trump of trump as a sith lord" and some ugly collage of stolen artwork gets spit out without any human interaction or intention. Instead I have to actually make that or figure out how to make it work as a collage.
Art is not about the destination. It's about the journey. Deaf compositors made music knowing they would never hear it.
Didn't Beethoven use little wires hooked up to his head connected to a part of the piano so he could kinda "feel" the music as he played it when he went deaf?
There are a bunch of things that I want to put into this reply, but I know that it will just be read as defensive.
I'm more interested to hear why you think, what you wrote, is important to this conversation, because you had a point and masked it in a question.
I just have a tendency to do that. I'm a history nerd who like random history facts.
That's pretty much it.
Isn’t creating art despite those obstacles meaningful though? Art is always going to be an imperfect copy of what is in our head and absolutely nothing about generative AI can possibly change that. But artists have intent and all their experience in every line they make - that’s part of the joy and tragedy of it and what makes it so human.
Have you tried pixel art?
It's why it's so so so popular with conservatives (and fascist now). There is something about having skill in art that makes you a lot less likely to be conservative. It's about the material circumstances that lead people to become artists, I'd guess.
So now all these Nazis can make Trump memes by typing something stupid into a prompt. It's ugly. It's not intelligent or creative but it's just enough to spread their hateful propaganda. AI art is awful. But it's 100x better than what these fascist could ever hope to create.
Seriously. I feel like the only real use case for AI art right now is making awful fascist propaganda. At least it's the only area of "art" that is actually seeing "improvement" from it.
Which tells you a lot about how these fascist idiots complain about "culture" so much but have actually no culture or art of their own.
If you need a gross example just search for the AI Trump Gaza video. The purpose isn't art. But it's still serving the role that art plays in propaganda.
I don't feel like that's actually an argument against it. Why would everyone need to learn to draw? Why if I need some random background asset or prop should I spend months or years learning to do something I don't enjoy? The alternative is to pay an artist, but in many cases it literally doesn't make sense to waste that kind of money on a trivial thing. It can have its uses.
should I spend months or years learning to do something I don't enjoy?
Okay. If you don't even like drawing, why should I care to see it, then?
Is this like when casual acquaintances who don't like each other pretend to make weekend plans they both know they're going to cancel if either one of them ever brings it up again?
Okay. If you don't even like drawing, why should I care to see it, then?
You shouldn't care, you're right!
Yet here we are in a community that's all about b*thing about it.
I'm not saying this is something that should be used to crank out slop to sell as posters or paintings or idk. I'm saying it can help e.g. indie devs, people making random powerpoints, making a customised meme, stuff where the art isn't the main point but is sometimes still necessary.
Yes, but what I'm asking about is why you feel an indie game needs that. People generally find the effort made by someone less skilled way more charming than they do a technically proficient AI-thing, anyway.
Like, you're describing background assets as if they were a handshake the two of us are required by social contact to perform as part of our greeting ritual—why is it necessary? If you've got shaky hands, we could just... not do it. You know?
Is that for your D&D campaign?
IDK. I don't like AI for commercial applications. But for frivolous things? That's it's critical application. I'm not taking food from the mouth of any artist if I post some AI meme image I generate onto a social media site. There is no universe where I'm paying an actual professional artist to make meme images for me to post to social media. I'll sometimes use AI slop, but only in slopworthy applications. Screwing around on fediverse and other sites is such a slopworthy application.
I feel like this is what people don't see.
Yeah, I view AI slop images like I would any copy-pasted meme image from years past. Technically, we were all violating copyright when we screenshotted images from random sites and news events and turned them into memes. Some photographer took those shots, and we stole them and used them for cheap laughs. And no one cared, because again, no one was going to pay to license a photo for a random internet forum or social. No photographer was going hungry because of meme images.