My Thoughts on AI-Generated Art
I’ll be honest, AI-generated art is pretty cool. It makes some cool stuff. AI art can’t seem to do everything, it really depends on what AI generator you are using, what settings you use, what terminology you use to describe what you want and, more importantly, how much data there is about a thing. Despite that, AI art still has a lot of problems. It’s not the most accurate and the more obscure the request, the less accurate the result. AI art also still has massive issues with hands and feet, as well as extra limbs. Fingers are often contorted, and heavens forbid you want an image of a normal human being holding something.
My favourite thing to do though is to create AI-generated furry creatures. There are already a LOT of furries out there and millions of fursonas, so there’s a lot of data available. Funnily enough, AI art of furries has actually been around since way before AI art became mainstream. The website thisfursonadoesnotexist.com is a good early example of AI art, and you can clearly see common traits based on popular furry characters. That being said, like all AI art, AI furry art isn’t perfect, and you do get a lot of… weird goings on with faces, since they’re rather varied. And even earlier and fuzzier example is thesecatsdonotexist.com, which shows the flaws even more. Some cats come out completely normal, but many have extra limbs or merge into a simple lump.
The problem is, this AI-generated art doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s created by scraping art from across the internet, putting it all together and building AI art based on what it’s found. The AI is trained on sample images, learns what makes an image and then scrapes up something that resembles what you asked the AI to create. And the more information you feed into an AI, the better the results will be. And that art can be taken from anywhere. When DeviantArt created their own AI image creator, they just scraped their entire website for data. They didn’t ask permission, instead they said that users could opt out, by adding a tag to their creations. In reality though, this should have been the other way around, with people opting in instead of having to opt out.
There’s even cases of AI potentially replacing actual people. While looking for models for t-shirt designs, I stumbled across multiple websites that offered AI models to be used in the fashion industry. These were completely AI-generated woman, designed to wear whatever clothes you could slap on them. It seemed a bit unfair, especially because becoming a model is extremely difficult. It’s a very competitive field and models must spend a huge amount of effort strictly controlling their body and weight. Replacing an actual human with an AI-generated picture just seems cheap. While I was searching, I did also find a sort of ai-based t-shirt design model thing, using stock photos and an AI that would ‘cleverly’ put your design on said stock photos, but they wanted $7.99 for a single low quality image, more expensive than the stock photos themselves.
The thing is, AI art is generally pretty cool. But I don’t think it’s completely ethical. Who actually gets credit for creating the images we see? Certainly not the artists behind art that has been scanned and catalogued behind the scenes. A lot of the art generated by these generators is marked as public domain, since they weren’t really drawn by anyone, and many samples are deleted, lost to the abyss, never to be seen after being generated. It’s a bit of a mess, one I’m not always willing to get into.
Still, if you are looking for references, it is pretty useful. Unless the references you need are for hands and feet. Bloody hell, I’ve seen some twisted fingers while looking at art generators…