I understand the OOP’s sentiment. There are plenty of us who have visually detailed and complex ideas, but are unable to fully express them via conventional media, due to lack of skill or disability. Not everyone can practise their way into being a master painter. It doesn’t mean I think of it as art, and I can’t understand why some people are fine with passing off something generated from others’ work as their own creativity.
Whilst true that not everyone can practice their way into mastery of painting, I usually find people don’t even try.
I definitely prefer honest garbage to polished inauthenticity, but, based on AI usage, it seems the ordinary person disagrees. It’s sad, don’t you think?
100%. Obviously-AI images induce immediate repulsion in me, and I hate that I feel the need to inspect normal-looking images to see if they might, too, be AI. For some I’ll never really know.
Having a linguistic concept in your mind does not mean you have a “complex visual idea.” The whole point of “practicing” is training your mind against it’s nature and start to think visually for the first time. The tragedy of AI image generation is that it keeps people from exploring that side of their imagination and learning to really see. they never really develop a visual language but instead take the prepackaged style of the llm vending machine. It is sad to think that a voice is lost because they traded the vulnerability of making something to getting a predetermined product and pretend they had something visual in their mind to begin with.
Not exactly; People who can draw can use that tool to explore visual ideas and think visually; But you can do that with design concepts, paper cutouts, Adobe Illustrator shapes and so on. People who only engage with linguistic concepts as in the case of an LLM are not really engaging in the nuances of any visual language. They are using information set into a translator that outputs a result. It’s like thinking that Using google translate Makes me “Think in Chinese” lol.
I see it often that clients come to me thinking that they have a realized visual Idea but they really don’t have much. They have some overall aesthetic short hands. A couple of images they liked and a standard they want to meet. This is not visual thinking; this is called being a client. Then there is the job of art directors, they won’t draw everything themselves but they will offer a system, information critique, cultural awareness, even technical methods.
You can engage an LLM as a client or an art director; But in the end you are still using google translate to write in English and have an output in Chinese, if you follow my former metaphor. You are not really thinking in the true language of the output, There is wide cultural barrier between you and what you are making; most of the context cues and nuances of your message are lost or irrelevant.
You’re judging people’s thoughts by their output. Explaining visual ideas in detail, in words no less, is yet another skill separate from drawing and thinking. It’s closer to writing clarity, how well one expresses themselves in text.
It isn’t fair to think someone who’s bad at communicating ideas is equally bad at having them. This is the same fallacy that causes one to think LLMs are alive. People are more than their output, they have inner lives.
I don’t contend that people who can’t paint can think like a painter, but that visual thinking is more than just thinking like a painter.
In the case of the people you describe as ‘client’, it sounds to me like they just don’t care about what the result is, it’s just a job to them.
That said I do think there’s merit to expressing ideas yourself. Having to dwell on it to bring it into existence, to make decisions where the idea is vague can make you realize its shortcomings and see how it can be improved. The act of creating the product can make you aware of the strengths and limitations of your tools. That becomes a lesson for the next time, so you can have better ideas from the get go. And the experience from creating it lets you know which details matter when explaining it to another person.
I’ve met a lot of people who are very proficient in Putting down visual Ideas and most of them have a very humble approach to what they do. They speak about “experimenting”, “doing research” and “putting down options for review.” The Dunning Kruger effect comes to mind where The less someone knows about a discipline they are tackling the more you overinflate your level of skill. On the flip side; The more experienced you are at a discipline, the more you understand your limitations and become humble. In this sense It’s not aimless judging to make a guess that people using LLm’s thinking the have “fully formed ideas in their mind” are overestimating their abilities. LLM’s have a bad rep of exacerbating the dunning Kruger effect by cutting them off with engaging with the medium they are “commissioning” The LLM.
I have never seen a commissioner believe they created the image they commissioned, but for some reason LLM users want some recognition for being “Ideas men” We have always had Ideas men. Everyone has a dumb Idea in their head. Some of them are stuff that don’t need to engage with any cultural language or medium. But is there any merit to them? I’ve had clients that do care for the results given: A writer asks for a set of sketches for the architecture of their fantasy story; They ask questions, they beg for feedback, they even bring crude MS paint drawings. If a visual concept results from this collaboration, The writer won’t take credit for the visual part. They will be humble and recognize that they don’t have the background to generate a fully fleshed visual idea idea. But the work done during the collaboration, The back and forth enrich both parts of the process; An artist can learn a lot from a writer and vice versa. The is struggle, critique. It’s messy; There is work done.
This will sound like an unrelated topic; But I’m a huge music fan; I have a collection of hundreds of albums. And what disgusts me about AI music in particular is not the fact that “there is no talent” or “soul” but that it’s designed to kill the vibrancy of the music community. Everyone can take someone else’s sound, and tack a dumb masturbatory “idea” on top. There is no engagement with theory, music history, or with music scenes. There is no engagement with people. It’s spam. It’s Useless spam made by “idea men.” And there is an air of staleness to it. I said it on the initial post; There is a stench of cowardice to AI “creative” tools. The AI music scene statistically is full of white men making music that mimics Black women singers. It’s larping, It’s being unable to own up to your body and it’s limitations. Who wants to waste time listening to that? I feel “ideas men” Have a tradition of being like that. People that don’t want to put themselves in their ideas and instead outsource the work. At the very least conceptual artists of the 80’s and 90’s like Demian Hirst thought of a brand or a style. But Ideas men of the LLM go beyond that. It’s the signature style of the vending machine or some lora of work they stole.
It is easier than ever to make something and putting it out there, and it’s pathetic to see people make excuses on why they won’t do it. I know people in wheel chairs paralyzed that draw with their frigging mouths! There are no excuses.
It is common for people who start learning a skill to talk that way; They believe they have a strong grasp on some kind of thinking and in practice they find out they are way behind… They call it Dunning-Kruger something? In people who are learning art or design i see it all the time, people talk about their “visual ideas” and then get frustrated because they can’t put them into paper. A lot of their visual ideas are Imitation without personality. When the student starts to develop a language they gain an added feeling of empowerment: They have connected many forms of knowledge and experience that once existed arbitrarily in their heads. They have a method a system and i repeat visual language. It’s one of the biggest tells of AI slop images in the wild. You can’t see a person, you see the diffusion model itself, and often times since diffusion models need to take information from training that casts a very wide net it looses any personality or distinct voice.
Lastly; we often confuse “making art” with “making a product” and forget that art is a form of communication itself. If people rely on translators instead of learning a language, do they really “think” in that language?
You can make a product: Write a novel in German even if you barely speak that language by inputting your English text into google translate and carefully and editing the output as best you can. But there is a communicative barrier between you and your product. You don’t really think in German, you don’t know the slang, and the nuances of the language by relying on the translator.
That’s true, and I didn’t say that. I’m talking about being able to visualise something in one’s imagination, but have difficulty in translating that into reality, so others can see an approximation. I agree with the negative affects on imagination, cognitive surrender is real.
So what then for those with aphantasia? They may be able to describe something in detailed words, but not visualise it themselves at all. In that case, AI really might be able to help them express an idea.
I have aphantasia. I still draw manually; I just need a reference photo (or subject) and “modify” it as I draw. Imagine if you couldn’t remember what something looked like so you have to memorise “ok their right eye is 30% down their face and only half visible from this angle and extends 20% horizontally at about 10 degrees until it’s covered by the nose which is…” etc. Then I draw that tiny line and have to check again
Writing it out, I just realised it’s actually similar to how you would describe it to an LLM 😂. I will admit that I’m very unsuited to this skill, and it’s extremely difficult for me, but I still find it fun. Maybe because of the difficulty itself?
Actually, lately I’ve been challenging myself by using pen and doing line-art. Normally, because I fuck up so much, I do messy sketches; so it was really interesting using a medium that is so punishing. I’ve learnt with line art it’s mostly about what you don’t draw, rather than what you do, if that makes sense
I fucked around with a locally installed image generator A.I. for a while in the past ~ it was fun, but I got bored of it quickly, and it became kind of hollow
I do not have aphantasia, but a painting technique I follow could work for someone with aphantasia. It’s more about pattern-recognition than imagining something beforehand.
I pretty much start by following whims. I pick some colors and do what feels right. Only after a bit do I look again at the work and think, “Huh, that looks like an alien” or “That kind of looks like a tree,” etc. It’s kind of like making my own Rorschach test - making sense of the noise on a canvas. Then, I start accentuating the pattern I see until others can see it, too. In the end, it’s a unique piece that looks like I planned it all along.
I’m not sure if that sounds up your alley, but I figured I’d share just in case.
That’s cool, but if he was having trouble communicating a visual idea, and he wasn’t good at painting, drawing, sculpting, or digital tools, would you think less of him for using AI to help him crystallise it and show it to you?
The thing is; Our “Imagination” lies. Our brains are especially good at forming concepts that are often snippets of visual echoes and linguistic narratives but don’t form into anything concrete. In order to form a concrete visual idea you need to engage with visual concepts themselves. A character designer needs to have a grasp on human anatomy but there is design specific information like contrast and color balance, form, shape, line economy, design sense; then there is cultural information like emotional response to shape and color, particular fashion sense, cultural and environmental cues. All those are choices; a designer engages with them, interiorizes them, experiments and chooses what works best for them. Every Specific Area has different context and it’s own sense of rules.
A Good character designer might think they would have good “visual ideas” for graphic design but in reality this won’t be true until they engage with the particular context that is proper of graphic design. Since by using AI people are cutting themselves off to working with any visual concepts: (It’s all linguistic descriptions) They are cutting themselves off from making decisions that are truly visual. They are clients. Just like the clients that hire an artist that more often than not, don’t know what they want. But “think” they have an idea that is concrete in their heads. People that instead of immersing themselves in visual or cultural concepts take short hands. Reminds me of this thing of calling visual trends “punks” putting “cyberpunk”, “cloud punk” or “hope punk” in their prompts. Oversimplification. Visual stupidity.
As for aphantasia; Supposedly I have it. Back in college it was impossible for me to visualize images. And I used to heavily forget faces, places or shapes. I confuse people I already know with other people, Images just don’t stick in my head. But again. Visual education is not so much as a mental faculty but a system. I have a very particular system developed with experience and a formed visual language. So It doesn’t matter that I can’t visualize something in my head; Because I can get to any drawing pad and jot it down. Journaling is important for me. Often time I record the process I used to find a particular answer and keep them as “maps” to retrace my steps. As I developed more visually intelligence I got better at retaining images in my head. I feel my ADHD has a bit to do with it, because back when I was a kid it was difficult to find contextual cues, subtle proportional differences and cultural responses. I trained myself to get better at picking up on those over time, and my “aphantasia” feels less prominent today.
I think we’re talking about separate things, you about those who don’t fully know what they want to express, and that art comes from their attempt to express it, with the influences of their life experience, and should they offload that attempt to express a concept to AI they lose that idea (or never really knew it). I’m talking about those who do know what they want to express, visually, and regardless of the tools used, could look at the output and say with confidence ‘that’s not it’. It seems this is a bit foreign to you because you perhaps have never experienced seeing a full visual scene in your mind’s eye, and known you are unable to draw/paint it with a level of fidelity that even approaches the visualisation. I can imagine all sorts of things, see them clearly in my head, and though my drawing skills aren’t terrible, I couldn’t reproduce them well. I could describe something linguistically, but have no interest in spending time using an AI to try to express it. That doesn’t mean no people exist that have things in their heads that could be expressed via AI.
The thing Is I have seen my work being realized: through doing it. Through doing the hard work. I am not a musician but i love music, and I’ve done a couple of songs that i like by recording simple things and mixing them together. I don’t have music in my head. I experimented, did the work. Made a mess.
I think the problem is that there is people out there that has never experienced the satisfaction of creating and want a palm in their back for not even trying! Thinking that they have fully realized ideas in their head is a great cop out for this.
You don’t have to be a master. Started drawing recently which you can do for less than £1 and free if you wanted to put effort into doing it for nothing.
Helps to find things which are easier to draw with minimal skill, which isn’t necessarily everything. Also repeating the same or similar thing too.
I want to come up with decent patterns to engrave into wood which does limit it a bit, can’t really do shading and the lines can’t be too close or once carved into wood they merge into each other. I think a bird standing on a branch and some Halloween ghosts are probably things I can do well enough now that they could be worth carving at some point. Sanded some more scrap wood recently which I could use, might be worth buying some boards soon if it comes out well.
but are unable to fully express them via conventional media, due to lack of skill or disability. Not everyone can practise their way into being a master painter.
A master? Maybe not. But you can absolutely practice your way to being a decent painter. Enough to get your creativity expressed.
And there are plenty of disabled artists out there. I’ve seen decent painters who had no arms and had to do all their painting with brushes held between their toes. Don’t let disability be your excuse. (Unless your disability is blindness, I guess? It would be awfully hard to be a blind artist. But a blind person is going to have an equally hard time getting anything meaningful out of AI.)
I get it, but I don’t see it as all or nothing. If you want to be an artist, but you’re “creating” with gen AI, I’m not interested.
If you have something inside your head that you want to just show someone, and its not intended to be art, or remembered, then should you spend years practising to use some medium in order to create it yourself?
If you have something inside your head that you want to just show someone, and its not intended to be art, or remembered, then should you spend years practising to use some medium in order to create it yourself?
How many resources does that use, and opportunity cost in time spent, vs a occasional generation? I have a fair idea. Creating stuff is fun if that’s your goal. Dedicating time and resources to become an artist only to convey a bit of info occasionally, not so much.
People have been communicating ideas through stick figures and poorly drawn lines for about as long as people have been drawing.
Edit to add: perspective and shading are also extremely modern techniques, invented during the Renaissance. Every castle, every cathedral, every bridge, and everything before then would have been planned and communicated without any way to communicate a 3 dimensional shape in 2 dimensions
Does that not illustrate the point? Our methods and tech for expressing ideas have come a long way. Historically, there would have been more people (at least proportionally) who lacked the means to communicate their ideas as fully as they would have if they’d had access to the same education and resources as we do now. It’s an analogous situation that there are now technologies one can direct to (potentially) communicate an idea better than if one first had to achieve decent artistic competency to produce a similar result.
The difference is in the cost-benefit. Shading and perspective have minimal extra cost in materials to add to a drawing. Maybe your drawing takes a bit longer and uses a little more pencil lead/charcoal/ink/whatever, and the individual requires more training and practice to draw it well. That’s not a high cost to being able to communicate 3 dimensional shapes in 2d drawings
Machine learning requires a massive amount of compute upfront (basically a swarm of GPU servers at 100% for a few days or weeks, so easily multiple kilowatts per hour at the low end), it also requires a massive amount of training data (literally hundreds of terrabytes of data! This data is typically a mix of existing datasets with appropriate licensing and scraped data which hammers small community servers and creates extra cost and work to mitigate the extra unexpected traffic, etc. etc. oh also included in those training datasets is a lot of CSAM, private medical imagery, copyright infringing uploads, invasive medical and police report information, etc etc.) then still needs a large amount of compute once the model is trained to output an image (basically 100% of one GPU for 10-60 seconds, so maybe only a few watt hours per image but it adds up fast) and the resulting output is…no better than anything a human is capable of drawing or painting.
In aggregate we’re consuming hundreds of killowat hours of energy, consuming unthinkable amounts of water to attempt to remove hundreds of killowat hours of heat out of these systems. Small webpages operated by individuals are shutting down due to the cost of bots excessively crawling their sites looking for training data. Victims are being revictimized as the worst moments of their lives are sucked up into the datasets these machine learning algorithms are training on so they can remix and recreate these worst moments an infinite number of times. And to what end? All of this societal cost just to save you from drawing some stick figures and lines on paper? This cost benefit ain’t mathing out here
The only revolutionary thing about image generation is that there’s never been such a costly way to create images. Oh and maybe it’s kinda novel that humans aren’t the ones drawing it. The output isn’t anything new, just an amalgamation of existing ideas (seriously try having it generate anything that’s not already in its existing dataset in large numbers, it completely falls apart!)
In short, I’m not convinced that your AI generated images are communicating anything that you can’t communicate with a paper and pencil. And I know I and most people for that matter would much rather see a stick figure and poorly drawn lines that a human drew than whatever slop you poked out of the slop machine
I completely agree with the ethics problems you raise, but you’re not even trying to understand my point:
the resulting output is…no better than anything a human is capable of drawing or painting.
It’s no better than what competent humans can produce, whereas I was, from the beginning, talking about those who are not competent and likely never will be.
Maybe your drawing takes a bit longer
I don’t consider months or years of a person’s free time, for something they may not be passionate about, as “a bit” of time, and I doubt you do, either.
You might want to revisit your maths, there. There’s no way sitting at a computer learning Krita for months uses less electricity than a few prompts to an AI, and there’s no requirement that the AI in use has to be running remotely at one of those big, fuck-you data centres owned by Anthropic, OpenAI, or whoever.
That is not the argument being made here. The argument is that people would rather see a bad or decent piece of human-made art to be able to look in someone’s mind, than look at amazingly skillful AI art.
Your thinking comes from a productivity and competition standpoint, which is just not what’s being talked about here. Productivity and competition is so deeply ingrained under capitalism that not caring about both of those things is hard to conceive.
It’s not talking about making a movie that succeeds on Netflix, or making a cover image to sell a product, etc etc etc, but about expressing yourself as a human to other humans.
I understand the OOP’s sentiment. There are plenty of us who have visually detailed and complex ideas, but are unable to fully express them via conventional media, due to lack of skill or disability. Not everyone can practise their way into being a master painter. It doesn’t mean I think of it as art, and I can’t understand why some people are fine with passing off something generated from others’ work as their own creativity.
Whilst true that not everyone can practice their way into mastery of painting, I usually find people don’t even try.
I definitely prefer honest garbage to polished inauthenticity, but, based on AI usage, it seems the ordinary person disagrees. It’s sad, don’t you think?
100%. Obviously-AI images induce immediate repulsion in me, and I hate that I feel the need to inspect normal-looking images to see if they might, too, be AI. For some I’ll never really know.
I also hate that there’s now certain styles and fonts that I now just assume are AI without any other evidence
Having a linguistic concept in your mind does not mean you have a “complex visual idea.” The whole point of “practicing” is training your mind against it’s nature and start to think visually for the first time. The tragedy of AI image generation is that it keeps people from exploring that side of their imagination and learning to really see. they never really develop a visual language but instead take the prepackaged style of the llm vending machine. It is sad to think that a voice is lost because they traded the vulnerability of making something to getting a predetermined product and pretend they had something visual in their mind to begin with.
You believe people who can’t draw also can’t… think visually? That’s a completely different skill common in most of the population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking
Not exactly; People who can draw can use that tool to explore visual ideas and think visually; But you can do that with design concepts, paper cutouts, Adobe Illustrator shapes and so on. People who only engage with linguistic concepts as in the case of an LLM are not really engaging in the nuances of any visual language. They are using information set into a translator that outputs a result. It’s like thinking that Using google translate Makes me “Think in Chinese” lol.
I see it often that clients come to me thinking that they have a realized visual Idea but they really don’t have much. They have some overall aesthetic short hands. A couple of images they liked and a standard they want to meet. This is not visual thinking; this is called being a client. Then there is the job of art directors, they won’t draw everything themselves but they will offer a system, information critique, cultural awareness, even technical methods.
You can engage an LLM as a client or an art director; But in the end you are still using google translate to write in English and have an output in Chinese, if you follow my former metaphor. You are not really thinking in the true language of the output, There is wide cultural barrier between you and what you are making; most of the context cues and nuances of your message are lost or irrelevant.
You’re judging people’s thoughts by their output. Explaining visual ideas in detail, in words no less, is yet another skill separate from drawing and thinking. It’s closer to writing clarity, how well one expresses themselves in text.
It isn’t fair to think someone who’s bad at communicating ideas is equally bad at having them. This is the same fallacy that causes one to think LLMs are alive. People are more than their output, they have inner lives.
I don’t contend that people who can’t paint can think like a painter, but that visual thinking is more than just thinking like a painter.
In the case of the people you describe as ‘client’, it sounds to me like they just don’t care about what the result is, it’s just a job to them.
That said I do think there’s merit to expressing ideas yourself. Having to dwell on it to bring it into existence, to make decisions where the idea is vague can make you realize its shortcomings and see how it can be improved. The act of creating the product can make you aware of the strengths and limitations of your tools. That becomes a lesson for the next time, so you can have better ideas from the get go. And the experience from creating it lets you know which details matter when explaining it to another person.
I’ve met a lot of people who are very proficient in Putting down visual Ideas and most of them have a very humble approach to what they do. They speak about “experimenting”, “doing research” and “putting down options for review.” The Dunning Kruger effect comes to mind where The less someone knows about a discipline they are tackling the more you overinflate your level of skill. On the flip side; The more experienced you are at a discipline, the more you understand your limitations and become humble. In this sense It’s not aimless judging to make a guess that people using LLm’s thinking the have “fully formed ideas in their mind” are overestimating their abilities. LLM’s have a bad rep of exacerbating the dunning Kruger effect by cutting them off with engaging with the medium they are “commissioning” The LLM.
I have never seen a commissioner believe they created the image they commissioned, but for some reason LLM users want some recognition for being “Ideas men” We have always had Ideas men. Everyone has a dumb Idea in their head. Some of them are stuff that don’t need to engage with any cultural language or medium. But is there any merit to them? I’ve had clients that do care for the results given: A writer asks for a set of sketches for the architecture of their fantasy story; They ask questions, they beg for feedback, they even bring crude MS paint drawings. If a visual concept results from this collaboration, The writer won’t take credit for the visual part. They will be humble and recognize that they don’t have the background to generate a fully fleshed visual idea idea. But the work done during the collaboration, The back and forth enrich both parts of the process; An artist can learn a lot from a writer and vice versa. The is struggle, critique. It’s messy; There is work done.
This will sound like an unrelated topic; But I’m a huge music fan; I have a collection of hundreds of albums. And what disgusts me about AI music in particular is not the fact that “there is no talent” or “soul” but that it’s designed to kill the vibrancy of the music community. Everyone can take someone else’s sound, and tack a dumb masturbatory “idea” on top. There is no engagement with theory, music history, or with music scenes. There is no engagement with people. It’s spam. It’s Useless spam made by “idea men.” And there is an air of staleness to it. I said it on the initial post; There is a stench of cowardice to AI “creative” tools. The AI music scene statistically is full of white men making music that mimics Black women singers. It’s larping, It’s being unable to own up to your body and it’s limitations. Who wants to waste time listening to that? I feel “ideas men” Have a tradition of being like that. People that don’t want to put themselves in their ideas and instead outsource the work. At the very least conceptual artists of the 80’s and 90’s like Demian Hirst thought of a brand or a style. But Ideas men of the LLM go beyond that. It’s the signature style of the vending machine or some lora of work they stole.
It is easier than ever to make something and putting it out there, and it’s pathetic to see people make excuses on why they won’t do it. I know people in wheel chairs paralyzed that draw with their frigging mouths! There are no excuses.
Speak for yourself.
It is common for people who start learning a skill to talk that way; They believe they have a strong grasp on some kind of thinking and in practice they find out they are way behind… They call it Dunning-Kruger something? In people who are learning art or design i see it all the time, people talk about their “visual ideas” and then get frustrated because they can’t put them into paper. A lot of their visual ideas are Imitation without personality. When the student starts to develop a language they gain an added feeling of empowerment: They have connected many forms of knowledge and experience that once existed arbitrarily in their heads. They have a method a system and i repeat visual language. It’s one of the biggest tells of AI slop images in the wild. You can’t see a person, you see the diffusion model itself, and often times since diffusion models need to take information from training that casts a very wide net it looses any personality or distinct voice.
Lastly; we often confuse “making art” with “making a product” and forget that art is a form of communication itself. If people rely on translators instead of learning a language, do they really “think” in that language?
You can make a product: Write a novel in German even if you barely speak that language by inputting your English text into google translate and carefully and editing the output as best you can. But there is a communicative barrier between you and your product. You don’t really think in German, you don’t know the slang, and the nuances of the language by relying on the translator.
That’s true, and I didn’t say that. I’m talking about being able to visualise something in one’s imagination, but have difficulty in translating that into reality, so others can see an approximation. I agree with the negative affects on imagination, cognitive surrender is real.
So what then for those with aphantasia? They may be able to describe something in detailed words, but not visualise it themselves at all. In that case, AI really might be able to help them express an idea.
I have aphantasia. I still draw manually; I just need a reference photo (or subject) and “modify” it as I draw. Imagine if you couldn’t remember what something looked like so you have to memorise “ok their right eye is 30% down their face and only half visible from this angle and extends 20% horizontally at about 10 degrees until it’s covered by the nose which is…” etc. Then I draw that tiny line and have to check again
Writing it out, I just realised it’s actually similar to how you would describe it to an LLM 😂. I will admit that I’m very unsuited to this skill, and it’s extremely difficult for me, but I still find it fun. Maybe because of the difficulty itself?
Actually, lately I’ve been challenging myself by using pen and doing line-art. Normally, because I fuck up so much, I do messy sketches; so it was really interesting using a medium that is so punishing. I’ve learnt with line art it’s mostly about what you don’t draw, rather than what you do, if that makes sense
I fucked around with a locally installed image generator A.I. for a while in the past ~ it was fun, but I got bored of it quickly, and it became kind of hollow
I do not have aphantasia, but a painting technique I follow could work for someone with aphantasia. It’s more about pattern-recognition than imagining something beforehand.
I pretty much start by following whims. I pick some colors and do what feels right. Only after a bit do I look again at the work and think, “Huh, that looks like an alien” or “That kind of looks like a tree,” etc. It’s kind of like making my own Rorschach test - making sense of the noise on a canvas. Then, I start accentuating the pattern I see until others can see it, too. In the end, it’s a unique piece that looks like I planned it all along.
I’m not sure if that sounds up your alley, but I figured I’d share just in case.
Thanks! I’ll give it a go one day
Nice! Don’t know why you got downvoted just for sharing your experience.
I remove my own upvote from my comments because I like things starting at 0
I mean one of my brothers is aphantasiac. He’s a great 12 string guitarist. He does covers, but even with practice not everyone can write music well.
That’s cool, but if he was having trouble communicating a visual idea, and he wasn’t good at painting, drawing, sculpting, or digital tools, would you think less of him for using AI to help him crystallise it and show it to you?
The thing is; Our “Imagination” lies. Our brains are especially good at forming concepts that are often snippets of visual echoes and linguistic narratives but don’t form into anything concrete. In order to form a concrete visual idea you need to engage with visual concepts themselves. A character designer needs to have a grasp on human anatomy but there is design specific information like contrast and color balance, form, shape, line economy, design sense; then there is cultural information like emotional response to shape and color, particular fashion sense, cultural and environmental cues. All those are choices; a designer engages with them, interiorizes them, experiments and chooses what works best for them. Every Specific Area has different context and it’s own sense of rules.
A Good character designer might think they would have good “visual ideas” for graphic design but in reality this won’t be true until they engage with the particular context that is proper of graphic design. Since by using AI people are cutting themselves off to working with any visual concepts: (It’s all linguistic descriptions) They are cutting themselves off from making decisions that are truly visual. They are clients. Just like the clients that hire an artist that more often than not, don’t know what they want. But “think” they have an idea that is concrete in their heads. People that instead of immersing themselves in visual or cultural concepts take short hands. Reminds me of this thing of calling visual trends “punks” putting “cyberpunk”, “cloud punk” or “hope punk” in their prompts. Oversimplification. Visual stupidity.
As for aphantasia; Supposedly I have it. Back in college it was impossible for me to visualize images. And I used to heavily forget faces, places or shapes. I confuse people I already know with other people, Images just don’t stick in my head. But again. Visual education is not so much as a mental faculty but a system. I have a very particular system developed with experience and a formed visual language. So It doesn’t matter that I can’t visualize something in my head; Because I can get to any drawing pad and jot it down. Journaling is important for me. Often time I record the process I used to find a particular answer and keep them as “maps” to retrace my steps. As I developed more visually intelligence I got better at retaining images in my head. I feel my ADHD has a bit to do with it, because back when I was a kid it was difficult to find contextual cues, subtle proportional differences and cultural responses. I trained myself to get better at picking up on those over time, and my “aphantasia” feels less prominent today.
I think we’re talking about separate things, you about those who don’t fully know what they want to express, and that art comes from their attempt to express it, with the influences of their life experience, and should they offload that attempt to express a concept to AI they lose that idea (or never really knew it). I’m talking about those who do know what they want to express, visually, and regardless of the tools used, could look at the output and say with confidence ‘that’s not it’. It seems this is a bit foreign to you because you perhaps have never experienced seeing a full visual scene in your mind’s eye, and known you are unable to draw/paint it with a level of fidelity that even approaches the visualisation. I can imagine all sorts of things, see them clearly in my head, and though my drawing skills aren’t terrible, I couldn’t reproduce them well. I could describe something linguistically, but have no interest in spending time using an AI to try to express it. That doesn’t mean no people exist that have things in their heads that could be expressed via AI.
The thing Is I have seen my work being realized: through doing it. Through doing the hard work. I am not a musician but i love music, and I’ve done a couple of songs that i like by recording simple things and mixing them together. I don’t have music in my head. I experimented, did the work. Made a mess.
I think the problem is that there is people out there that has never experienced the satisfaction of creating and want a palm in their back for not even trying! Thinking that they have fully realized ideas in their head is a great cop out for this.
Yes, we’re most certainly talking about different things.
Get a pen and paper, that’s enough to make great art and express yourself.
If you try.
No shit, mate.
You don’t have to be a master. Started drawing recently which you can do for less than £1 and free if you wanted to put effort into doing it for nothing.
Helps to find things which are easier to draw with minimal skill, which isn’t necessarily everything. Also repeating the same or similar thing too.
I want to come up with decent patterns to engrave into wood which does limit it a bit, can’t really do shading and the lines can’t be too close or once carved into wood they merge into each other. I think a bird standing on a branch and some Halloween ghosts are probably things I can do well enough now that they could be worth carving at some point. Sanded some more scrap wood recently which I could use, might be worth buying some boards soon if it comes out well.
A master? Maybe not. But you can absolutely practice your way to being a decent painter. Enough to get your creativity expressed.
And there are plenty of disabled artists out there. I’ve seen decent painters who had no arms and had to do all their painting with brushes held between their toes. Don’t let disability be your excuse. (Unless your disability is blindness, I guess? It would be awfully hard to be a blind artist. But a blind person is going to have an equally hard time getting anything meaningful out of AI.)
I get it, but I don’t see it as all or nothing. If you want to be an artist, but you’re “creating” with gen AI, I’m not interested.
If you have something inside your head that you want to just show someone, and its not intended to be art, or remembered, then should you spend years practising to use some medium in order to create it yourself?
Yes, because creating stuff is fun.
How many resources does that use, and opportunity cost in time spent, vs a occasional generation? I have a fair idea. Creating stuff is fun if that’s your goal. Dedicating time and resources to become an artist only to convey a bit of info occasionally, not so much.
People have been communicating ideas through stick figures and poorly drawn lines for about as long as people have been drawing.
Edit to add: perspective and shading are also extremely modern techniques, invented during the Renaissance. Every castle, every cathedral, every bridge, and everything before then would have been planned and communicated without any way to communicate a 3 dimensional shape in 2 dimensions
yeah but perspective and shading ruined art of cats.
Does that not illustrate the point? Our methods and tech for expressing ideas have come a long way. Historically, there would have been more people (at least proportionally) who lacked the means to communicate their ideas as fully as they would have if they’d had access to the same education and resources as we do now. It’s an analogous situation that there are now technologies one can direct to (potentially) communicate an idea better than if one first had to achieve decent artistic competency to produce a similar result.
The difference is in the cost-benefit. Shading and perspective have minimal extra cost in materials to add to a drawing. Maybe your drawing takes a bit longer and uses a little more pencil lead/charcoal/ink/whatever, and the individual requires more training and practice to draw it well. That’s not a high cost to being able to communicate 3 dimensional shapes in 2d drawings
Machine learning requires a massive amount of compute upfront (basically a swarm of GPU servers at 100% for a few days or weeks, so easily multiple kilowatts per hour at the low end), it also requires a massive amount of training data (literally hundreds of terrabytes of data! This data is typically a mix of existing datasets with appropriate licensing and scraped data which hammers small community servers and creates extra cost and work to mitigate the extra unexpected traffic, etc. etc. oh also included in those training datasets is a lot of CSAM, private medical imagery, copyright infringing uploads, invasive medical and police report information, etc etc.) then still needs a large amount of compute once the model is trained to output an image (basically 100% of one GPU for 10-60 seconds, so maybe only a few watt hours per image but it adds up fast) and the resulting output is…no better than anything a human is capable of drawing or painting.
In aggregate we’re consuming hundreds of killowat hours of energy, consuming unthinkable amounts of water to attempt to remove hundreds of killowat hours of heat out of these systems. Small webpages operated by individuals are shutting down due to the cost of bots excessively crawling their sites looking for training data. Victims are being revictimized as the worst moments of their lives are sucked up into the datasets these machine learning algorithms are training on so they can remix and recreate these worst moments an infinite number of times. And to what end? All of this societal cost just to save you from drawing some stick figures and lines on paper? This cost benefit ain’t mathing out here
The only revolutionary thing about image generation is that there’s never been such a costly way to create images. Oh and maybe it’s kinda novel that humans aren’t the ones drawing it. The output isn’t anything new, just an amalgamation of existing ideas (seriously try having it generate anything that’s not already in its existing dataset in large numbers, it completely falls apart!)
In short, I’m not convinced that your AI generated images are communicating anything that you can’t communicate with a paper and pencil. And I know I and most people for that matter would much rather see a stick figure and poorly drawn lines that a human drew than whatever slop you poked out of the slop machine
I completely agree with the ethics problems you raise, but you’re not even trying to understand my point:
It’s no better than what competent humans can produce, whereas I was, from the beginning, talking about those who are not competent and likely never will be.
I don’t consider months or years of a person’s free time, for something they may not be passionate about, as “a bit” of time, and I doubt you do, either.
i mean if you want to do a cost:benefit analysis doing it yourself wins every time
You might want to revisit your maths, there. There’s no way sitting at a computer learning Krita for months uses less electricity than a few prompts to an AI, and there’s no requirement that the AI in use has to be running remotely at one of those big, fuck-you data centres owned by Anthropic, OpenAI, or whoever.
Yeah, why use technology when decades of practice will accomplish the same thing? Everyone is just too lazy to master every skill.
/s
That is not the argument being made here. The argument is that people would rather see a bad or decent piece of human-made art to be able to look in someone’s mind, than look at amazingly skillful AI art.
Your thinking comes from a productivity and competition standpoint, which is just not what’s being talked about here. Productivity and competition is so deeply ingrained under capitalism that not caring about both of those things is hard to conceive.
It’s not talking about making a movie that succeeds on Netflix, or making a cover image to sell a product, etc etc etc, but about expressing yourself as a human to other humans.