The other day I was thinking about how AI art has already changed, or maybe defaced would be a better word, the internet. Youtube and Deviantart are awash in it. It’s all over social media, but I’ve noticed something about it that made me think a little deeper. Access to AI tools is still basically dependent upon the user having money. Every change in industry that has happened in my lifetime has worked essentially the same way. The people who already have resources get to use all the new things while everyone else lags behind. It took me a decade to get the tools that my peers were using day one even in this sad little corner of art. This next thing is going to work the same way. Everyone else will be way ahead of the game while people like me are left behind to fight over scraps. It’s not as big a deal for me since I carved out a little chunk of the internet for myself over time, but the general principle is the same.
When I started the drawing area I used was the size of a postcard. It was also not a screen, so there was a disconnect from my hand to my eyes. When I got the first drawscreen I moved up the size of a sheet of paper and drawing directly on the screen. That was quite an upgrade. All that time I was using a stolen copy of Photoshop that crashed regularly. After several years I moved on to the first Microsoft Surface, which was a refurb. The screen size stayed the same but the screen was much better, plus it was portable. I eventually had to stick a USB fan to the back of it to mitigate the overheating it did. My hand was always freezing cold unless the room itself was too hot. I also moved on to Manga Studio for my art program, which I bought legally. It’s called Clip Studio Paint now. The best thing about CSP is that it’s extremely stable. It rarely stresses the processor as well. Since my art is very simple it suits my needs very well. Which is not to say it can’t go toe to toe with Photoshop. Rather what I make doesn’t take advantage of it the way other art would. CSP was one seventh the price of Photoshop at that time 100$ Even with my meager earnings I could afford 100$. Of course as some point I had to go from my stolen copy of PS to whatever their budget version was called. I used it for quite a while before moving to CSP. I ran my first Surface into the ground, but I held out until Microsoft made one that had a USB C port built in because it was supposed to become the new industry standard for everything. It still hasn’t really done that, but I’m glad I waited since this newest drawscreen can use my Surface to be its brain via a special kind of USBC cable. That saved me having to get a new tower just to use the new screen. That’s all pretty recent history. My art may not show it but going from the sheet of paper drawing area to this massive size has really changed things for me. I feel unchained and can work much faster. Sometimes I get pages ready a day or more in advance now so I can do other things that come up. It may not seem like much but it means I don’t spend all my time when I’m stuck doing some other thing thinking about the work I need to be doing. It’s been a very long road to get here. Now the next thing has come along and I wonder how far behind I’ll be when all the other artists are secretly using AI to do their work because they are ashamed to admit they’ve been doing it. I’ll give you that some artists will hold the line against AI for a while. Some of them may even stay principled on the matter till the end of their careers, but the artists that are always swooping in to get all the money they can will be using AI as much as they can without being caught. It’s already happening at companies like Wizards Of The Coast, and by extension Hasbro, and it’s been going on since the first time AI came into the space. Hollywood will lean heavily into AI, but it won’t democratize anything there. People with money will always stop that from happening, just like they did with the internet.

Kind of a gloomy line of thought, but there’s no point in pretending it isn’t happening. In any case I hope your week gets off to a nice start. I will be back with more hand crafted, artisanal, comic on Wednesday. Until then, dig a little hole for your feet to go in.

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AI has come along in quite considerable leaps in quality in past few years it has been booming. Especially the music parts.
Now the lazy fast made slop is still easy to pick up, but where it is adjusted well can be tricky to spot. Probably easier to speciaöist of the media than toa layman öike myself.

but seems like it is here to stay, in what capasity remains to be seen. Also there are “free” AI tools but those tend to have daily limits and according to what I’ve heard, AI needs enough tard wrangling that sometimes the daily tokens aren’t enough.

Tom did do that; Literally, as a matter of fact.

As someone who regularly re reads this entire comic seeing an in universe reference to basically the very first pages is very fun to see as yes, Thomas did quite literally kick the door open.

Still think Ed might mean both the job and Nina.

So far AI is pretty obvious and I refuse to interact with bots. However I imagine it will eventually get to the point where it is not obvious. This is when I will quit all social media because what would be the point of interacting with bots and not humans. Good luck to us all.

I took a book from daydream to novel in the space of about four months. Half of that was editing the finished product. AI is a game-changer, no mistake.

The hue and cry we’re hearing now is the hue and cry of master weavers who won’t be convinced that this new loom will make their jobs go a lot more smoothly.

Of course, given how the last few decades have been unkind to regular workers taking advantage of technological boosts and getting nothing out of it but more work–the new machines make you twice as efficient? Great, you can do Bill’s job too! Oh, no, there won’t be any extra pay. You’re working the same number of hours, aren’t you?–this resistance is to be expected. But honestly, I doubt it’s the kind of thing anyone is going to stop. So you might as well figure out how to work with it, because it’s coming.

It’s not comparable to introducing a new tool, because the things that they’re pretending are “AI” aren’t capable of actually doing the work. They don’t create anything. All they do is steal and remix the work of actual people who actually did the work. (Or, increasingly often as the Internet fills up with slop and the models are being fed their own shit, slop that another “AI” produced that’s gone through one or more steal-and-remix cycles already.) Anyone posting slop and claiming it as their own work isn’t an artist; they’re a plagiarist, and a plagiarist who can’t even do their own plagiarizing, but has to get a machine to do it for them.

I actually am a weaver. I’m totally down with a new tool that would make it faster and easier, because, seriously, I recently finished a tablet-woven band that I started weaving in the Before Times (granted, I was only working on it intermittently, but still, it was many hours of work). I am not down with someone stealing that band and a bunch of other people’s, cutting them up, tying the bits together, and then saying, “I wove this!”

AI created it. Not you. It’s plagerism and public domain. You don’t even own it. Good luck to you.

At this point with AI I shall do like my parents with the dot-com bubble: wait for the pop and see what is still standing afterwards.

To the comic, I’m liking the little heart-to-heart we’re having here.

I still tell people “Psychological warfare starts at the door” from that one time Thomas kicked the door open for Ed.

I’ve been playing with AI since Eliza. I’ve hacked MegaHal. I’ve written Markov Chains.. I know how it works. I could feed your art into an uncensored ai and duplicate your writing and art style. Your original work would still be better.

Meh. AI certainly can be a problem but some people are very close-minded about it. For example; Jackie, if you lost the ability to draw for whatever reason, like a tragic accident, so you had AI learn your art style and do all the drawing for you, with you providing the words to tell your story, I would not only not be mad about it, I’d be thrilled this option existed and you got to continue your work in some fashion. If someone makes a whole video game in their basement on their free time, but has no musical talent and so uses AI to spit out some generic fantasy background stuff, I’d think that’s great. If a YouTuber uses AI to make a funny thumbnail after spending 100 hours creating an excellent video, that’s fine. There are obviously problems with people lying about AI, and AI slop obviously sucks (although non-AI slop also sucks, let us admit), but it is definitely a tool that CAN be used in a reasonable manner, to allow solo creators or small teams to make projects far out of their reach by conventional means.

As for it only being for the rich, nah, that’s just how it starts. I remember my Aunt, who is rich and snobby, bragging about her amazing Blackberry, with all these cool features our poor-people flip-phones could never do. Now we all have supercomputers in our pockets. Vision correcting surgery used to be quite a fancy and expensive procedure few could afford, and now they have discount surgeons who knock out 30 surgeries a day for a fraction of the cost. Cars used to be very expensive and exclusive, as they were built by hand by a team of skilled machinists over the course of weeks, but once the the basic technology was perfected, Ford Motor Company started churning them out daily at a cost regular people could afford. All that money the rich poor into new industries is what provides funding for those industries to discover ways to make the product cheaper and more accessible, so more people can get it.

Door kicky Noise!

Crap in a hat!

[I gave you a start. you succeeded. Now, please go do your own thing]…or words to that effect.

I like Tom’s style of being a leader.

2990 The Lesson.

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