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I'm not a gifted artist. When I was a kid, I loved comic books and sci fi/fantasy books and films and wanted to draw superheroes, spaceships, Jedi, dragons and the like. I labored gamely at recreating my favorite characters and scenes, and wrote my own derivative and awful comic strips as well. It was a fun way to pass the time, and gradually I attracted a group of fellow nerds to create art and comics with. I discovered soon enough, to my personal sadness, that I was actually the objectively worst "artist" of my bunch. Ah, how I burned with envy as I looked at my friends' artwork. Of course, I realize now that they were actually working to perfect their craft and become better artists than I. Young me seemed to think that I should have been able to achieve competency just by virtue of wanting it really bad.
To be fair to my past self, I had a lot going on and I channeled a lot of my creative energy into roleplaying games, reading, and writing short stories, so my efforts and will were divided. Later, I began doing the sort of work and practice I should have been doing all along, and achieved modest but decent results. I have very amateur but decent skills at representational art, but I remain a bit frustrated that I can't quite draw or paint the way I really want to... I still recognize that I haven't put the requisite time into becoming a competent artist, but I've also accepted that there is unlikely to be any real payoff for doing so; I'll only ever be a hobbyist.
At some point, I also seemed to develop a bit of a case of "artist's block". Every time I sat down with a pencil or pen, I couldn't think of a dang thing I wanted to draw. The well was dry. I still occasionally sit down with a sketch book and force myself to draw something as an act of pure will, but there's been no real passion or interest.
I ignored the recent "AI Art" trend until fairly recently, when I saw some examples on a Twitter thread and was fairly shocked by how good the illustrations were. I had some extra time off around the holidays, so I found an AI art program and ordered a month's subscription. I am pretty sure that I didn't find the specific program that produced the images that originally "wowed" me, but the samples I produced were intriguing enough that I got into it... for a while.
In essence, you create a text prompt for the art you want the AI to generate, and then it produces an image, which may or may not have a whole lot to do with the prompt you selected. In order to get results even remotely like whatever you may have had in mind, you have to get pretty creative with the prompts. After a few hundred generated images in a variety of styles, I was getting quite creative with my prompts. I still couldn't get much of anything like I was going for, although many of the pictures were satisfyingly bizarre.
Gradually, I came to the realization that all of these prompts I was putting into the keyboard were ideas. Ideas that I, with whatever modest skills I have developed, was capable of producing far better than a computer scouring the internet for references and mashing them together in strange ways. Just like when I was a kid, I didn't really want to be a working artist; I wanted to have created art, and to get credit and accolades for making something cool without any real effort.
I guess there's kind of a debate raging about AI generated art and how it will put artists out of work, and they will all become obsolete. That may be the case, although I'm not so sure, myself. I spent a couple days using the program and I'm utterly bored with it and won't be renewing my subscription.
I got some killer ideas for some artwork, though.
To be fair to my past self, I had a lot going on and I channeled a lot of my creative energy into roleplaying games, reading, and writing short stories, so my efforts and will were divided. Later, I began doing the sort of work and practice I should have been doing all along, and achieved modest but decent results. I have very amateur but decent skills at representational art, but I remain a bit frustrated that I can't quite draw or paint the way I really want to... I still recognize that I haven't put the requisite time into becoming a competent artist, but I've also accepted that there is unlikely to be any real payoff for doing so; I'll only ever be a hobbyist.
At some point, I also seemed to develop a bit of a case of "artist's block". Every time I sat down with a pencil or pen, I couldn't think of a dang thing I wanted to draw. The well was dry. I still occasionally sit down with a sketch book and force myself to draw something as an act of pure will, but there's been no real passion or interest.
I ignored the recent "AI Art" trend until fairly recently, when I saw some examples on a Twitter thread and was fairly shocked by how good the illustrations were. I had some extra time off around the holidays, so I found an AI art program and ordered a month's subscription. I am pretty sure that I didn't find the specific program that produced the images that originally "wowed" me, but the samples I produced were intriguing enough that I got into it... for a while.
In essence, you create a text prompt for the art you want the AI to generate, and then it produces an image, which may or may not have a whole lot to do with the prompt you selected. In order to get results even remotely like whatever you may have had in mind, you have to get pretty creative with the prompts. After a few hundred generated images in a variety of styles, I was getting quite creative with my prompts. I still couldn't get much of anything like I was going for, although many of the pictures were satisfyingly bizarre.
Gradually, I came to the realization that all of these prompts I was putting into the keyboard were ideas. Ideas that I, with whatever modest skills I have developed, was capable of producing far better than a computer scouring the internet for references and mashing them together in strange ways. Just like when I was a kid, I didn't really want to be a working artist; I wanted to have created art, and to get credit and accolades for making something cool without any real effort.
I guess there's kind of a debate raging about AI generated art and how it will put artists out of work, and they will all become obsolete. That may be the case, although I'm not so sure, myself. I spent a couple days using the program and I'm utterly bored with it and won't be renewing my subscription.
I got some killer ideas for some artwork, though.