For over ten years, I have commissioned talented, hard-working artists from around the world. It has been my pleasure to be a patron of the arts. During my tenure as a commissioner, I have learned from the artists and I value their labour. I never had the ability to render design to visual art except through photomanipulation collage. My own creations are inherently amateur and the craft I practice is that of a hobby only.
It seems that other hobbyists such as myself have a penchant for vindictiveness within the art community. A lot of the "prompt stars" warring against real artists are thinly veiling the contempt they have always had for those with a talent that they lack - that I lack as well. Where I admire artists, these prompt stars loathe them, and it is all based in their own lack. A pathetic state of affairs and AI Art is not truly related to democratic values or technophilic zeal as many Wankensteins would have us believe. The debacle of AI Art is an outgrowth of the reckless laissez-faire capitalist and irresponsible liberal values of contemporary society.
And so, I now present a piece, "Wankenstein", to be added to the protest against AI art as an ubiquitous aspect of the visual art repository online and as a legitimate form of commercial art creation. My father has always said, "the more you do, the more you can do; and the less you do, the less you can do". He is a workaholic. I have been allowed to eat and sleep comfortably my whole life because of his hard work. I don't agree with everything about my father, but I can't knock him for working hard.
Wankensteins, or Prompt Stars, do not work hard and they don't want to work hard. They are symptomatic of our times. Perhaps, we need to be more blunt about what is at stake when we protest the degradation of societal values. The rise of illiteracy, activism, and apathy are a thundering juggernaut crushing the spirit of personality and good character. At the rate we are going, in two decades, almost all humans will be as useless as Wankensteins are today. AI will do all the work and humans will be dilletantes at best, and most often, hacks, in everything they do. It will be a Dystopian New Bad Futurescape. It is coming our way, fast and furious.
I hope to see the artists continuing the good fight against Wankensteins.
I have noticed a horrifying trend in the past six months, both here at Deviantart and also at ArtStation. Real art is worse than it has ever been.
Since 2010, I have followed over 5000 artists and viewed over one million pieces of art each year. I would like to think that I have become decent at analyzing visual art.
AI generated art is looking so good sometimes - having a technical sheen and 'pureness' that almost no living human can re-produce. Perhaps, only a Warren Louw or Stanley Lau can really keep up with AI art. The real thing hindering AI art is the dilettantes creating it. Eventually, real engineers will take the work of those prompt stars and convert that data into the basis for a program that enables AI self-learning, and then the AI will create billions of images each day on their own and the machines will create only great looking images of the highest aesthetic quality. Prompt stars will be Finito Mussolini.
But to my point... real artists are resisting AI as a "tool", in fact they are protesting it actively. I can see why - the AI products are much higher quality. It is a sad state of affairs.
However, artists who I have followed for over a decade are still publishing art, yet it is their worst pieces by far. What's going on?!!
My theory is this: artists feel betrayed and terrified, however, they are also being pragmatic. They are producing the worst garbage in their portfolio since they started training and there is a good reason why - they want to use AI, but they want to feel it was a last resort for them.
They are intentionally, yet unconsciously, creating art pieces that are far below their skill level, and this will eventually lead them to embracing AI as a tool.
Sakimichan is already using AI as a tool whether that will be admitted by the artist, or not. Just look at the work in the past six months as compared with the last five years. The style clearly has the markings of AI "refinement". Personally, I think it looks terrible and trashy. Sakimichan use to have a rough-hewn aesthetic that was unique and endearing... and most of all, attractive. Now, the work looks like it is pandering to some "ideal" in the zeitgeist of prompt stars ffs.
I feel great sympathy for the artists and I am not here to berate them.
I guess the silver-lining is that in five years this will happen:
1) Real engineers will create self-learning programs for AI art generators that render prompt stars redundant,
2) Real artists will learn how to use AI as a "tool" without it diminishing their unique aesthetic style. It will be a learning process but those first pieces with the Ai tool will clearly be better than the last works without the AI (as I have written here, I believe this ruse or self-deception was intentional).
I would like to believe that in five years visual art will be a healthier and happier community than it is today. Today, it is at its lowest point since the Black Plague. I can't even use dA or AS anymore. It's a bad joke.
Deviantart was founded by a nice guy named Matt Stephens. The site was created for graphic designers, specifically for the sharing of skins for media players on MySpace and related social media sites. Matt had some partners and they allowed the site to expand its mandate until all the pro comic artists were here and many digital painters and illustrators, as well as photographers had joined the active community.
However, Stephens and his partners sold the site. The new owners don't care about art and artists, and they are not artists themselves. They care about money. Almost all of the professional artists left this website starting in 2011 because amateurs were being very rude and presumptuous with the pros and it was intolerable and insulting to the pros. Deviantart owners did nothing to educate the amateurs on etiquette, decorum, and general appreciation of professional artists being in the community.
The owners wanted to maximize their profits and they discovered that letting tryhard amateurs overrun the site and gatekeep was the best way to make money because these lazy, amateur kids were all buying premium memberships as a means to gatekeep and gain status on the site. The MLP community was a huge burgeoning clique on dA during the mass exodus of pros and secured the attrition of the lowest common denominator on this website.
Eventually, dA has become the top amateur artist site while Artstation won a war of attrition with other sites such as CGHub as it took over as the top site for professionals. Now, dA owners recognize that the amateurs are turning to AI generators and fast becoming enamoured of their own creations which reflect no talent and virtually no original vision. These vainglorious amateurs will now spend more on premium memberships than ever before because they are deluded and believe that their AI creations are worth something monetarily. Additionally, they will spend on services through dA to create prints and such. dA owners will be making more money than ever before off of these dilletante AI "artists".
As such, dA owners have ZERO incentive to alienate their cash cow and instead will do as little as possible to protect "haptic art" or shame AI art. In ten years, visual art on planet Earth will be the same as music today - generic trash created slapdash using digital software by poorly-trained engineers who rarely practice yet petulantly claim a superior understanding of the craft. What a joke the world has become since 2000.
Don't agree? Change my mind...