Consequences

I have no problem with people selling AI art, it's just.... Tell people that's what you're doing.

Finding cool images and printing them off to sell to people is a thing people do. Print services have been selling the same thing, more or less. They're printing the images and that's worth something.

But don't lie to me about it. Be upfront about what's going on, and let the buyer decide. Also, be aware of your surroundings. Don't go to an art expo and try to sell AI slop. That's just disrespectful. Maybe do it on a street corner or something idk. Set up a kiosk at the mall.

Context matters.

I mean, I wouldn't pay for a print of AI slop, but I imagine there are people who see cool pictures and just want to pick them up... That's not me, but I'm sure that's someone.

They don't want to disclose that's AI art because people won't buy it or at least not for the same price as art made by people. AI "artists" mislead for a reason.
- I agree, and the picture in the original post is the outcome of that.
  If they charge printing fees plus a modest markup, and disclose that it's AI generated, they'd make fewer sales per hour and less money per sale, but they would be able to operate for more hours and likely go home with more money.
  The math on this isn't hard, but it requires thinking more long term/economically than I've ever seen from selfish/capitalistic people who would do this kind of thing.
- There's also the knee jerk reactions. There's indie games that are being called AI slop.
  Theres one game thats $1.50 but getting ripped because the dev admitted to using AI to create the cut scenes. That's all it was.
it’s just… Tell people that’s what you’re doing.
and sell at the appropriate TEMU pricing.
- Eh. They can try selling at whatever price they want. As long as they disclose its AI art then people should be able to make the evaluation for themselves. I'm not convinced selling at lower prices makes things any better. If anything that might backfire and people expect real artists to compete with the ai low prices.
Perhaps don't call it "art" either since it's just the result of one's and zeros spewing out data.... those people are not "artists" just talentless hacks....
- if a banana taped to a wall is art than processing millions of images, finding correlation between said images and their captions and using the vectors to find those patterns in noise is art too
- It is sadly, not far removed from how a lot of photography works, especially now.
  Take thousands of pictures, pick the few that look good. Even bad photographers get lucky often enough.
  I'm not saying it's the same, there are obvious differences. But it's not a huge leap.
- I do so much art printing pages upon pages of /dev/urandom, please buy some. Computer made it artfully in art form.
I mean Thomas Kinkade built an empire on basically the same bullshit so like, a lot of people will do it. Although at one point he was selling his own brand of slop as an investment.
My local hardware store has been selling cheap random "art" like this here for as long as I can remember. It's copy-pasted low-quality slop since way before AI existed. I don't see any more or less artistic value in a mass-produced print like that versus an AI generated image.
In that context, I really couldn't care less whether that slop has been made in 5 minutes in paint by some underpaid intern or in 5 minutes using ChatGPT.
But if you go to an art expo with undisclosed AI "art"... well.
I'm with you, btw.
- I like this point. Thanks.
It's possible for 'AI art' to not be crap.
One can use sophisticated tools, like depth maps and controlnet, to compose an image/video in all sorts of ways. One can spend hours touching up a generation in photoshop, like, you know, an artist that actually cares about what they're presenting. One can use models that don't feed blood sucking corporations. And like you said, one can disclose the whole process, upfront.
It's just that the vast majority is crap from a few keywords mashed into ChatGPT, with zero deliberate thought in the work and that full 'tech bro quick scam' vibe.
So I guess what I'm saying is this:
Tell people that’s what you’re doing.
Is an unlikely scenario.
"AI artists" seem to be scammers. They will lie about their process. That's who will attend things like this.
Meanwhile, the few hobbyist artists with diffusion in their creative pipeline would never dare show up to a place like this, because of the scammers ruining any hope of a civil reception.
- It's also important to remember these models are trained by sampling (imitating aspects of) images they don't have the rights to use directly. I think it's justified being angry about someone using your work -insignificantly mashed together with millions of other people's work- without your permission, even if it's to extend a background by 10 pixels lol
I mean, you can spend days refining a prompt while looking at a trillion variations of the same possible image. Then trying to upscale it while improving important details instead of losing them. Then checking textures and backgrounds on photoshop to clean up hallucinations.
Or indeed you can just save a cool image from the midjourney feed and print it. There's no real moral dillema yet because most people aren't trying to do art with difusion models.
- No moral dilemma, but also no legal issue since AI doesn't get copyright protection.
I have half a mind to print this whole lemmy thread and try to sell it.

apparently people cheered as they were escorted out

Holy shit, this brought a big smile to my face today, thank you! 😄

This one too, I love the "look how easy it is to make real art" sign lol
- images should be "shit"
This is really tame! Dragon Con has a tendency to make shrines and altars all over the place, it's a huge part of the culture. Like putting googly eyes on things and leaving trinkets around.

This reminds me so much of the HDR photo craze. I remember seeing booths just like this!
Going to local restaurants/attractions and seeing shitty "art" with price tags starting over $200. They were all bad digital photos, taken with no comprehension or awareness of lighting, perspective, composition, etc. Cloddishly fiddle with various sliders, maybe delete the entire green color channel for some reason, hey I discovered this filter called Posterize, hit print.
A third of them were angle shots of the photo-takers modded Subaru. I'm trying to paint a picture here, don't take it literally.
I am sincerely hoping, despite my positions against AI for most applications, that there will be some positive effects in the end from this AIArt baloney.
I think the same-y-ness of what the visual generators are outputting will wear so thin on people, so quickly. Because in a broad sense they're all drawing from the same "averaging out". And maybe there will be a bit of a cultural backlash, if you will, where people unconsciously become attracted back to hand made things. I don't think we as a huge collective blob of humanity will be able to stand hearing the same note over and over.
Maybe I'm deluding myself, hell I probably am to a degree.

This reminds me of an old story I heard about how a very talented pottery artist got a lifetime ban from the handcraft fair for selling molded products (pottery made with molds, not by hand).

It was interesting because his quality items actually were handcrafted, he just had molded basic stuff on the side that I guess was selling decently well.

Would be funny if an AI booth did the same.

Can't even run cons at cons anymore. What's the world coming to?

It's dragoncon, the con needs to be ran by a dragon
- Kevin O'Leary?
- I bet this guy was selling AI images of a dragon playing the 3-cup-game with another dragon pretending to be in on it to build hype.
of course not, you don't want to mess with recursions in production
They should throw a con at the main source of cons: the constitution!

You love to see it!

Now penalize all corporations for using it and boycott any you catch doing so. Its nearly impossible. But we can try. Fuck the theft of art and humanity.

Whoever thinks they could get away with such tripe at Dragon Con, full of the most rabid fans of the characters they’re “arting”. Not to mention the copyright issues.

I am an artist who works exclusively in the medium of gummy

bears?
- Venus de Milos

Damn, I wish I had seen that in person. (I barely visited that part of the con -- I made a beeline to Bil Holbrook's booth to congratulate him on 30 years of Kevin and Kell, and then left again because I was in a hurry to get to a panel.)

That is a name I hadn't thought of for awhile. I should go read it again, got a decade to catch up on!
- I'll be honest: I hadn't thought of it in a while either, until I ran across this post the other day. I used to read it in the newspaper, but quit subscribing and neglected to add it to my webcomic bookmarks, so I need to catch up too!

I like the coffee stain there. Makes it seem more like he got black bagged than asked forcefully to leave.

I saw something about the cops being called on them or another vendor selling ai art, which is as hilarious as it is maybe a bit overkill.

From what I've read, it was because they refused to leave.
- Yeah that makes sense.
Apparently, it was a regular artist who got the booth (you have to send images to the organizers of what you're going to sell), but her boyfriend did some AI art and swapped it in on the second day.
- I haven't seen any mention of that, the person knew they were selling ai slop and were arrogant about it.
- swapped it in
  With the knowledge of the girlfriend? That's scummy. Without? Pretty fucked up.
Not that cops even care. Nor they should i don't want them involved for a nothingburger.

I get that it might be "obvious" in this case, but how do they actually prove it?

There are lots of artists that get called AI because theiir style is the kind that AI uses. So how do they make sure they dont kick one of those people out.

There are many tells for AI art.
My favourites are:
Look for a long thing that is briefly interrupted by something covering it. A good one is, say, the button line of a shirt that has a crossing shoulder belt or the like. Another is a long branch that goes behind another object like a person. Yet another is a walking stick that goes behind a cloak or sword or something. Almost invariably the line does not match on each side of the interrupting object. Often it doesn't even continue at all. So with the buttons, you'll see the line of buttons, the belt ... and then just fabric. Or the buttons have jumped to the left by half a torso. Or some other such artifact.
Talking of buttons, look for buttons that don't do anything. Like a line of buttons on what looks like a sweatshirt or the like: i.e. no gap that needs buttoning. Or buttons that look like they're buttoning the shirt into the jacket. Or buttons that parallel the main, legit button line temporarily for no reason. (And no, I don't mean double-breasted jackets!) Or buttons that change styles for no reason. Slopmongers have a very hard time making buttons consistent.
Text. 'Nuff said. Even the newer models still fuck this up, usually either by having gibberish that only resembles writing if you flash over it quickly with your eyes, or by having text with terrible spelling, weird artifacts that has the text growing into or out of other things, or text that sounds like it was robotically generated.
Appendages. It's amazing to me that after all this time and money was spent, you still can't get consistent numbers of fingers, thumbs, toes, or even primary limbs. We all know the finger thing, but how may times have you noticed the phantom extra hand or two?
Eyes. Eyes are usually well drawn, actually, but they tend to look everywhere and anywhere but where it might make sense.
All of these flaws (and many, many more) are a result of the slopmaker not having any kind of model of what it's making. Lines stop or shift for no reason because it doesn't know that the line on one side of an obstacle is the same as the line on the other. Eyes don't look at sensible things because it has no idea what the picture is of and thus no idea where eyes would naturally be directed. In general look for things that require a coherent mental model to do right and you'll spot the AI in no time flat.
- All these can be touched up if the maker is actually trying to put any effort into it.
  But if they're just using diffusion as a stencil or editor, and they disclose the process... That's fine, really. That's more akin to extensively using photoshop.
- Not long before we see a lot of art that is created manually to look like AI slop, where they intentionally do that stuff.
Just like speed running, artists will now have to video tape their process if done digitally. I think Photoshop documents as well as other formats can track version history.
- Artists have been doing exactly that for decades. I used to run a larger art community around 2016-2018 and providing several in-progress sketches or a video was a minimum requirement for being featured on the homepage. It made sure that people didn't just literally download someone else's work and put their signature on it.
I fail to see the difficulty, if the style isn't obvious enough, the organisers can just ask them to draw/sketch something on the spot or check their previous work on social media (bonus points if they have VODs drawing while streaming).
- I dibt think artist shoukd have to prove that though. Abd while im sure its pretty uncommon this would stop an artist sending someone else to a con to sell their works if they cant make it themselves.
  Or would be fairly easy to spoof, maybe the guy selling AI can actually draw well enough to put a rough sketch down, or can pull someone elses vod as proof.

I'm getting into some anime art. I never really liked the art style of a lot of it but I've found a couple artist that do really beautiful works. What's a good source for finding artist that are similar to artist you like already?

One thing that bothers me about most of anime art is that it's just filled with drawings of female characters with balloons on their chest.

I don't even mind artist doing nudity or "sexy" artwork. My favorite artist I found primarily does that. But it's so hard to find good art even if it's not AI. I feel like most of it is just drawn by 30 year old virgins that have never seen a women's body before.

Edit: Soranamae is my favorite artist I've found. Most is NSFW stuff. I wish they had more variety or did different characters more because their art is beautiful. The saddest thing I found was some AI model trained specifically to mimic their art style. Made me upset.

Pixiv is a site that was made for japanese artists, though it's technically open to anyone.
An unconventional way is to look for artists from yearly releases. I have 2022 of this one:
https://united-states.kinokuniya.com/bw/9784046848000
And you can even find regional artists from similar artbooks
https://www.tcb.tw/en/news/596
Edit: I forgot to mention but you don't have to purchase the physical book, you can find the features artists like so:
https://www.pixiv.net/special/artbook/tw2/
- Pixiv is what I've been using. I guess I should research Japanese tags better. I really wish there was a "no balloons" or just a "natural looking" tag to filter it. I will definitely look at the artists other artists interact or follow though. That's a good idea.
- Another note is that if you use any social media with following:followers, popular artists usually have their mutual artist circle as followed, so you can bounce around artists just by looking at who they follow.

I walked through the vendor hall on Sunday and I was skeptical of a few of the tables. I think that's more due to AI being trained on these types of artists.

The time stamp of this was Monday but not sure I would even remember the artist if you showed me

I haven't been to Dragon Con in a number of years, and the only prints I bought I'm sure someone would think were possibly AI now. A lot of the AI models were likely trained on art prints found at conventions

Boom! Headshot.

How much for the cardboard sign?

White oil marker might be 5$, cardboard is free with any pizza
- Even comes pre-oiled!

What if actual artist are using AI to enhance their art. Like, they draw stuff and then scan and edit with AI imaging software to make changes and add depth, etc. Is that allowed? It's still an artist creating art, they just enhance it with readily available editing software?

What if you just get better at doing your art instead of using a skills-reducing crutch?
What if you also made it clear that a large part of your art is AI-created instead of passing it off as human-made?
What if you stopped making disingenuous arguments in favour of slop?
- It's not me or my art. Dude is an amazing artist, in any media format. I am not being disengenous, nice try. I am also not defending fake AI art as art. Just like any tool, in the right hands it can craft marvelous things. How is using rendering software any different? It just speeds up the process, but time and effort are still applied. You have to know how to use it to use it well. He does t generate images, he enhances his own art. He also went back to school on his 40s to study machine learning because he finds it fascinating and cool. Not your average Joe.

Now someone just needs to start doing this to all of them (and the lazy 3d print booths) popping up in farmers markets...

Where is it? Nice avenue it must be if they do this.

Dragon Con is Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, Georgia. (Annual). It's the second largest con behind Comic con I believe. Used to have around 65,000-80,000 people but that was a while back. Not sure what it has now