Here’s somebody describing their process for creating comics with a combination of AI and Photoshop (the post starts out with someone giving general tips for Midjourney image generation, but somebody gets into their comics specifically).
All of the imagery is AI-generated. It takes them about the same amount of time to create a comic using AI as it would for an experienced artist to create them by hand, but there’s different advantages and disadvantages to it.
Advantages: you don’t have to be physically able to sit up in a chair or hold a pencil steady to create art, it can just be done with a keyboard; you can easily change art styles without having to spend a bunch of time learning a different medium (this particular comic takes advantage of it to tell stories!); it’s fucking cool to have a comic generated by a computer; it can really get the style and feel of these older comics down in a way that’d take a lot of practice and technique for a human to do.
Disadvantages: there’s a whole different set of prompting skills you have to learn (they discuss how, say, “tentacles for hair” gets you hairy tentacles, so you have to say “tentacles coming out of their head”, etc); it’s difficult to get your characters’ appearances to be consistent; you have less fine control over how individual pieces of things are drawn; many of the popular generators with the best technology (character reference) have super strict censors and you have to get around them.
Sure, you could claim the “art” here is the photoshop, you could call it collage of existing images, but the prompting is undeniably part of the process here, there are skills that have to be built to manage the AI image generation to get exactly what you want.
Here’s somebody who doesn’t use photoshop at all. They just use AI image generation to fine-tune the picture they want. This is absolutely not “just searching google for artwork”. This is art, this is how art works, there is a human here making a series of decisions.
This isn’t even the highest level of control people get with AI art - I’ve messed around with Stable Diffusion for Krita sketching blobs and just having the generator render them into full pieces for me (mostly to fix parts that annoy me about mahjong women), there are certainly people out there using AI in their traditional art process to speed up rendering and increase the speed at which they can make the picture they want. This is awesome, it’s great to help people speed up their art process so they can create more of what they love, it’s great that technical skill is less of a barrier to people creating what’s in their head.
In some cases it enables people to make choices they couldn’t without AI. If I have, say, chronic joint pain, and can’t put in the wrist time to render something very detailed, or I can’t draw smooth lines the way I want, I have only one choice with typical art: make something not very detailed, and have shaky lines (other external tools can also help with these examples, they’re shallow examples, don’t nitpick them pls). If I can use image generation to fill in rendering and create smooth lines, then I can choose either my own manual shit (if I like the look) or an array of different prompts I can use to get various different looks for my detailed rendering and smooth lines. More choices!
Any definition of “art” that excludes this will also exclude photography, which is a very apt comparison! It’s very easy to be a mediocre photographer. Pull out your phone camera, point it at your kids, hit the button. Comparable to typing “hot boobs woman” into Midjourney and seeing the result. That doesn’t mean photography isn’t an art form, that doesn’t mean there aren’t photographers who are artists. Skilled photographers will think about the composition of their photograph, they might even stage the scene to get a good photo, there’s dials to adjust, exposure and focus and such (I dont konw anything about pghotograph). Just because it’s easy to get something decent doesn’t mean it’s easy to be world-class.
And that brings me ot the rest of your post:
All of these aspects of skill I described earlier in photography are known and accepted because photography is an old medium. People have had time to learn it, to figure out how to be good at it, to create art with it. AI is a new medium. It’s being extremely overhyped by circus clowns from the circus. Therefore, there are a lot of people who think they’re good at it who are just pressing a button, because people don’t know how the technology works yet, the technology itself is young and has taken some time to develop these extra buttons and levels to give you artistic input.
I bet if you put an ad in the newspaper for a photographer to replace your portrait artist shortly after photography became widely accessible, you’d get inferior results, too. The broad population hasn’t had time to develop skill in this tool yet, the people making good art with it are on the cutting-edge. The people making good art are always on hte cutting edge. You’re allowing people trying to make quick money to dictate your opinion on an entire medium, you’re dismissing it out of hand because the field is currently dominated by grifters, that’s intellectually lazy. That isn’t how you should act, that’ll make you dismiss a lot of legitimate applications of overhyped things.
If these online artists explaining their process in these posts were the ones hired as “prompt engineers”, I’m sure they would’ve gotten much better results than the people who actually got hired in your third-hand anecdote. And technology can and will get better - the oldest cameras didn’t have the kind of super-fine control over the picture you get in a new one, people are going to figure out ways to get better and better at creating AI art.
The people engineering prompts at such a detailed letter are doing art, this is undeniably art, the people I’ve posted are doing art. The people who type “big boobs anime women” into Midjourney are doing the same something-that-vaguely-resembles-art that home photographers are doing - they are still expressing aesthetic preferences, they’re still creating a thing that entertains them and makes them happy, but they’re not doing it in a very deep or thoughtful way. That doesn’t mean you get to dismiss the entire medium out of hand.
Your opinion is shallow, it’s not based off of understanding of what people are actually doing with this technology, it’s based off posts, you’re quoting posts at me. This is an undeniably cool new technology! It helps people make art better! And you’re dismissing it completely because you it’s something you can be lazy with. You can be lazy with a fucking camera. Doesn’t mean cameras don’t do cool shit.