The Implications Of AI Art.

[JohnW]

the mutant bear charges at him with ferocity.

With ferocity?
Godammit, the AI stole my script!
I was going to pitch this to Tharg on Monday!
(Only in my version, the hyper-intelligent mutant bear can do long division.)

[JohnW]

(Only in my version, the hyper-intelligent mutant bear can do long division.)

Oh, I should have clarified.
He can do long division in his head.
Because he's hyper-intelligent, see?
It adds dimension to the character.
Trust me. I'm a writer.
AI will never take over while the likes of me are around.

[The Legendary Shark]

I too, as well. Being an writist is only four, us fleshy ones.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

But can the mutant bear do long division with ferocity?

To be fair, the likes of Kev O'Neill or Brendan McCarthy could probably spin that script into a really fun comic about Dredd fightin' a big weird lookin' bear.

[Funt Solo]

This is making me wonder if nightmares are generated by an AI:

Monkey Rock Star Concert. AI Generated Video.

[Hawkmumbler]

The Cinema Cartography made an excellent video on the commodification of fast-art under capitalism, including at some length how AI will inevitably erode the ethos of what it imeans to create itself.

And how we can look to turn the tide.

[Hawkmumbler]

Adam Nevill, one of the great living British authors, has some choice words on the worrying implications of AI in the literary field.

Dude is one of the good ones.

[Hawkmumbler]

Possibly of use for the writers of the board.

[Hawkmumbler]

An amusing, if entirely depressing, autopsy of the grifter mindset of an "AI Artist".

[The Legendary Shark]

Heh, that's great - one pompous ass ripping into another pompous ass. They both make good points, though.

From my perspective, I find myself a fan of A.I. art - as you can probably tell from my Infinite Collection of Shark-Based Avatars^TM - for three major reasons. Firstly, I'm no artist, secondly, I fancy myself a writer and, thirdly, my mind's eye is blind. This third thing is a relatively recent revelation that basically means I think and remember in concepts rather than images. I can conceptualise a dragon fighting a cybernetic lion on Mars but I can't visualise it. This is why reading fiction is such a chore to me, I can't visualise any of it. Where most people might say of a literary character brought to the screen, "that's not what they look like," I think, "so that's what they look like." This is why I love comics, I think, because the images come built-in, like braille for the visualisationarily impaired. And because I can't visualise, and because I love comics, I like to write comic scripts. It doesn't matter whether my efforts are any good or not (I find most everything I write disappointing) because I enjoy doing it.

But I can't do the art - I've never once made a good image. Never once. My visualisation skills are non-existent in my head and wholly inadequate on paper - inadequate by some considerable margin to my conceptualisation skills. That's why comic writers need artists (including letterers, colourists, and editors) to bring life to the concepts. JohnW demanded, "Pictures!" But I can't give you those. If Dave Gibbons drew Blue Murder, he'd make it good. He'd make it great. But that's not going to happen in reality, but to you lucky visualisers it can happen. An amateur artist might make the story good, or at least interesting, but where's their incentive to do so? It takes a lot of time to bring a script to life, so it has to be worth it. I'm just some loon who writes fan-scripts for fun and I don't care about copyright or money. Who the Hell wants to get involved with that, right? And then there's the fact that I don't think it's a very good story as it stands, and needs to be a comic strip to stand a chance of being interesting.

For me, A.I. presents the opportunity to visualise some of my concepts to a) get across to a proper artist or the reader the kind of thing I have in mind and b) to inspire me. 

As an example of the first, I have spent some time generating images to support my prose (purely to please JohnW) in the upcoming Advent Calendar. I had to generate a lot of images and few of them even came close to what I was after, but a few were better than anything I could ever put into pixels, and these I used.

It's nowhere near as good as a human artist, no question, but for me it's a way to get a concept across beyond dry words, but it's far from perfect. I simply couldn't get the A.I. to give me exactly what I wanted. For example, this image was vaguely close

But this one was just not it at all,

And, no matter how hard I tried to get the A.I. to render the final scene of my story, it just wouldn't do it and spewed out nothing but monstrosities like this

*shudder*

So, even though A.I. is vastly inferior to human artists (and having enjoyed the privilege of having some of my scripts brought to life by proper artists and letterers and editors I can speak with authority here), it is capable of being better than me.

Then there's the second reason, what Bob Ross would call the "happy accident." Sometimes, the A.I. will come up with completely the wrong interpretation of the prompt and come up with something... inspiring. I've already posted the next image elsewhere but it's put ideas in my head for a continuation of this year's Advent contribution,

And this next one was supposed to be a fight to the death, but now it's two pissed mates staggering home through the snow. Santa's singing Show me the way to go home and the werewolf's howling along. They're going to the grotto, because there's more schnapps in there,

Now, there's a story I want to write. 

That concept might have popped into my head, but that image never would.

So, sure, I'd rather have a proper artist, but at the moment I'm not writing anything that deserves one so I'm having to make do. It's the writing I enjoy, seeing scripts brought to life is just a bonus and anything more is superfluous. I wish A.I. was advanced enough, and cheap enough, to illustrate my strips properly so that I could just indulge my fantasies (and continue to inflict them upon you, bwa-ha-ha-haaa) in peace, but it's a thousand miles away at the moment. Me? I'm more like a million.

TL; DR I'm a fan for my personal use, but A.I. will never equal I.

[Richard]

I asked an AI thing for Judge Dredd riding a penny farthing. This is what I got:

[The Legendary Shark]

At least it got the helmet right - the ones I've tried never do. Which one's that? (There's a great alternate universe Anderson idea in that first one...)

[Richard]

Bing

[The Legendary Shark]

Thanks. That's... amazing...

[JohnW]

(purely to please JohnW)

Does anything else matter?

(And thank you for the word 'visualisationarily'. I'm only sorry my teaching gig ended this week or I'd be shoehorning it in there at least twice in every class.)