DashMcCool

This was part of my thoughts I expressed in the “Now I’m a hypocrite” post, but that was already too long. This is related but different. Lots of people are worried about AI taking over the world, often in a “robot uprising” scenario where Skynet nukes humans and unleashes killer bots on the survivors, a lá Terminator. That might be a possibility in the far future but I see it as highly unlikely in the near term. What I see as a clear and present danger in the immediate future is the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the arts. Programs like Midjourney and Dall-E (and whatever DeviantArt’s version is called) are coming for the painters and picture-makers. And doing it in the vilest way possible by stealing their own work and remixing it. Other programs like ChatGPT are stalking writers in the same way. None of these algorithms are very good yet, and you can usually tell when a picture or prose has been artificially generated, but they’re improving rapidly at a terrifying pace. I’m

I’m not thrilled with AI art taking over everything, particularly as it’s clear that the people creating these algorithms are essentially stealing the work of real artists. As something of an autodidact I did a deep dive into the subject of the current state of AI in all its forms, and eventually decided to try it out for myself. As is clearly evident from my Gallery, I was quickly hooked and started using the various tools available to create scenes and characters, turning me into a hypocrite. It’s insidious how addictive it is. The rendered results of the prompts are produced in seconds, which gives you a dopamine hit, and 99% of the time they come out wrong. Either slightly or massively. Some of it is real body-horror stuff, with melted faces, twisted bodies and extra limbs/fingers/toes. But the wrongness of the resultant pictures simply gamifies the whole process as you try different keywords or put phrases in a different order in the pursuit of the image you’re trying to create.

DeviantArt, please stop asking me to “welcome new artists”. First of all, none of them in the past 6 months have been artists. They’ve been AI code kiddies who are typing in prompts to AI art thief/generators which are then pooping out this generic junk. One of the keys is seeing 22 pages of new stuff that was all uploaded in a 2-hour period, all of it vaguely resembling some weird Photoshopped mash-up of other artists, some famous, most not. Second, I can;t welcome 37 people a day. WTH is that all about?