29/03/2025
TLDR/summary at the ✨s
How can artists who were blessed with the talent to physically draw, some pieces taking up to hours, days or even months to complete, coexist with artists who have a brain of creative ideas but can barely color in between the lines?
I think by both parties understanding one another, and everyone completely against AI art, to see that there are different kinds.
I envy but admire physical avenue artists. I wish I had that ability, truly. I have ADHD and have had constant ideas for art always bumper car driving in my brain my whole life, yet could never get them to exist tangibly in any sense of the word. I had even given up, would commission physical artists to create my vision but let’s be transparent; all artists have their own style, flair, “vibe” so even though the pieces were my ideas, they were ultimately their creation.
This is totally fine and rad, I love everything I have ever comissioned and even still let my tattoo artists have complete artistic freedom, but, I had always longed to create.
Back in the old days of MSPaint, I caught onto my ability to create some pretty cool digital artwork. It was rough, using a mouse will do that but I liked what I saw.
When AI art first hit hard, physical artists were pi**ed and rightfully so. They take so much time and energy to create their visions and here comes a program that can just spit out things in seconds….Soon, companies and those needing promotional content were opting to go AI instead of physical - they were losing money and hey, I’d be pi**ed too. Here’s where an understanding can happen.
✨There is huge difference between lazy AI use and AI foundational use. What I mean by that is this:
✨I’m sure you have seen big company’s advertisements and the person in them have 7 fingers on one hand, 4 on the other and a leg coming out of their hip. I’m sure most of you even see the complete disaster in some video games as of late. That’s *lazy* AI. Some Joe Schmoe with a graphic design certificate (if that) put in some half assed prompt like “happy man and dog” or “woman at beach”. These prompts, when put into an AI generator, will spit out atrocious Frankenstein’s Monster of an image in 5 seconds and Joe is like “Yep - that’s the one. Post it.” without even caring to scan the image for obvious errors.
✨AI artists who take the time to prompt correctly, code then go in and edit flaws, on top of editing even further to put their own spin on the images can and DO, take hours upon hours, yes even days and months, to make the piece *theirs* and not a bot’s. Sometimes, hell - most of the time, AI art generators are not as smart as people think. It takes extensive descriptive prompts, tens of dozens “reruns” of those prompts, rearranging the words in the prompts or completely scraping a prompt (most a paragraph long) before they even get the image they were envisioning. THEN, comes editing. I don’t use AI for my editing, it’s all done through photoshop style apps and websites.
Here are some before and afters. The left is what AI spit out on me (the top one being the 53rd “rerun” and the bottom being the 39th.) Then, I plugged them into my shop apps and added “me” to them.
I don’t expect anyone’s opinion to change about AI art but if I can at least explain that there’s different ways to utilize it, then that’s what I’m going to do.
I’ll step off my soapbox now. 💚