@Background Pony #23CC
I am sorry. What I really wanted to say is there are people who has a vision but not skill to put it into a picture, myself included. Artists don’t have time to draw such people’s all visions. This tech resolves this problem, at least by majority. There still will be visions that only artist can draw.

You know, it was hard being an artist back in the day. If you were a painter and you needed the color blue, you would have to wait for indigo leaves to arrive in town courtesy of a traveling merchant, purchase them at an exorbitant price, ferment them in a limestone solution over a period of days, and then powder it yourself. And let’s not get started on what you had to do to procure quality canvas or brushes.

But then one day acrylic paint was invented, paper was mass produced, and plastics became cheap. All the craftsmanship behind the painting process went away, and artists could focus more on what really mattered—executing their vision.

We needn’t even go back that far to see the same thing happening. A few decades ago, if you wanted to produce a cartoon, you had to draw each and every frame by hand and then composite them. Nowadays, you can design just a few character rigs in Adobe Flash, and make them dance with a few mouse clicks—the computer performs all the complicated math to turn it into a smooth vector animation. It takes no skill or practice, clearly, and our computer-coded pony show might just make Walt Disney spin in his grave…

Or not. Technological progress has a tendency to turn sacred skillsets of the past into mere historical footnotes, but it also allows so much more beautiful art to be produced, and lowers the barrier of entry for everyone. Artists can choose to stick to the old methods if they wish, but the new methods shouldn’t be denigrated.

@Background Pony #23CC
This isn’t exactly true, and it’s going to become less and less true as people familiarize themselves with the tech and the workflows it enables.

For example, I needed some art for a chapter of my story. According to what happens in my story, I needed a close-up shot of a messy chemistry table, in the foreground of which were six petri dishes, five of them tinted blue, one tinted bright red, and one of the blue dishes separated from the other five. I needed a small paper label inscribed with a foreign letter on each dish. And finally, I needed all of this to be in a painterly style with visible linework, in order to be consistent with the style of artwork I’ve already produced for the story.

For this particular piece, this is what I was able to produce. It may not be perfect (and I could fiddle with it more if I wanted to), but it’s realms away from what I could ever achieve by hand, let alone in only an hour or so.

I didn’t know there was some mlp art being done by ai. 😶

@Background Pony #23CC
That’s true. However the AI can only generate simple idea images, mainly portrait-like. Most artists do more complicated ideas than the AI.

@Background Pony #23CC
I guess it’s okay if you need to generate a quick image for a thumbnail or a cover but using AI to “shine” as an “artist” is just unfair to those who actually spend years of practice to make art. Anyone can input some codes in an AI generator and have an artwork generated in 1 minute it takes no skills and practice.

@Background Pony #23CC
On behalf of someone who has spent dozens and dozens of hours with this stuff, I can appreciate your open mind.

What is your stance on AI assisted artwork?

As much as I am against AI generated art, golly, this is beautiful!