But ultimately, don't use AI art.
I've ultimately come to the decision that I'm
pro-AI. I spent
years learning how to draw, paint, airbrush, Photoshop, do CGI, etc. manually by hand & was going to go into art professionally before switching to computers in college. I still have & use my tablet, Spacemouse, Tourbox, airbrush, Cricut machine, color calibration hardware, etc. to help me create DCC projects like CAD & art. To me, AI is just another tool in my creativity toolbag.
It's a tricky discussion. AI art wouldn't exist without the world's art to train on. But then, neither would
any human being's art who learned by copying styles in their own studies & in art school. We can now use computers to do more & do it faster, sort of like going from a horse to a car & from a stick-shift to a slushbox automatic to where automatic transmissions are faster than manual cars & electric cars are even faster than those!
The reality is that the cat is out of the bag. Static AI art hit photorealism this year & has a complete index of any style available digitally. From this point on, the tools are just getting better & more refined to be more usable for the average, non-technical person. My wife did professional photography for many years & would spend
hundreds of hours editing her work. The tools are so much easier & better these days:
The most advanced AI upscaler & enhancer. Magnific can hallucinate and reimagine as many details as you wish guided by your own prompt and parameters!
magnific.ai
Adobe's AI tools like generative fill, remove and expand, are meant to help speed up your creative workflows.
www.cnet.com
There is some great discussion on the ethics of AI in these subreddits:
As both a traditional & digital artist myself, these discussions are worth having &
definitely worth exploring:
AI companies are inflicting moral injury on artists.
www.vox.com
As debate rages around the ethics and legalities of artificial intelligence, some artists are exploring the technology’s possibilities – and its precarities
www.theguardian.com
Ghibli filters and generative AI raise the ‘inspiration vs infringement’ question among artists
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
It's tricky. The art I've published professionally in the past can now be replicated by any middle-schooler in minutes using AI tools. The same thing happened in the photography field...dSLR's became cheap & great and Instagram filters got really good to the point where you could hire a random higher schooler off Cragslist & get 90% of the same results for a
fraction of the cost, which turned out to be "good enough" for many people! Same with real estate photography, which we did up until just a few years ago...my wife didn't want to get into 3D tours & drone video work. The stuff you can crank out with modern tools is phenomenal &
absolutely affected the market in both postive AND negative ways!
My view is: there's no stopping it now, so either get onboard, get left behind, or
really work to master your analog craft & create your own signature style! Today will always be the worst that AI will ever be. It's all about the
quality of your content now, as the creative tools have been democratized. There will ALWAYS be space for "real" artists, but most people have NO IDEA how much content they see every day is
already AI generated, from TV commercials to billboards to radio ads to movies to product designs to relationship software to social media posts & comments.
I'm VERY excited about a lot of the technology advances to bring more power to more people! For example, I love traditional film, but it's cumbersome & expensive to work with. A 65mm IMAX film camera can cost $500,000 by itself & millions upon millions of dollars in film. I'm vey much looking forward to working with the new 17K-resoltion 65mm digital Blackmagic camera, which starts at $33,000 & is already available for daily rental: