Concern about AI Generated Art

We all know that whenever new technology comes along, change is always inevitable. However, this time the newest technology (AI generative artwork) is not just affecting the big corporate businesses, but the little guys as well, artists.

As an artist myself, it is devastating to see that what I would usually spend 5-6 hours drawing an art commission for a client, can now be accomplished in 5-10 minutes with a four to five word prompt through an AI generator. Obviously, who would need an artist anymore to draw our commissioned art, when I could just use an AI app to do the work for me, for free no less. There is no easy answer to solving this dilemma, but one way forward is for the artist community to now adapt to this new technology and innovate along with it, in order to keep up with artificial intelligence to enhance our own profits, instead of competing against it.

So here is the good news, is AI art truly perfect? No, absolutely not. There are many flaws when generating art with AI, such as generating 3 legs instead of 2 for a human body, or 6 fingers instead of 5 fingers on a human hand. So what does this mean for the artist? The artist must now become the editor and fix the flaws in the AI generated artwork, so we can “perfect” AI generated artwork. Remember, a generated artwork by AI is 100% owned by the person who generates it. So, if you are an artist who generated an artwork using an AI app, that art belongs to you, even though you technically did not draw it. However, after fixing the drawing mistakes drawn by the AI app, you are free to do whatever you choose to this artwork, because YOU generated it.

Then question comes in hand, what can one do with this artwork that we own 100%, generated by the AI art app? That is for you to decide, you could sell it, you could use it in a game or software, or you could repurpose it in whatever way you choose. There are some limitations, such as creating a visual novel you cannot generate CG illustrations with a character artwork design you just generated, and it is very hard to generate web comic panels with it, because you need certain poses and the same clothing to “redraw” the same character in every comic panel. Some YouTubers have started using AI generated art in animated slideshows of children’s tales like “Cinderella” using 3D generated artwork of Pixar-esque princess drawings (blurred, to hide the 6-7 fingered hands and hide other imperfections) to create their YouTube videos for their channel.

In order to keep up with this new technology trend, we must come up with new ideas, to benefit even more content creation efforts. Because if we come up with new ideas to generate content with this new technology, I believe the artist community will be able to make more money than they are right now. All of us just have to be creative, and come up with clever ways to enhance our content(s).

Of course, the ultimate goal for this, is eventually for an app to be created where we could feed the app our own drawings and artwork as data, so the app could learn an individual artist’s drawing style and generate art for a specific artist’s art. This would be the ultimate goal, because this would mean an artist wouldn’t have to draw from scratch for commissions anymore, they could just use an app to generate art in the artist’s very own art style, then the artist could edit to artwork to fix imperfections, and they would be able to finish an art commission in 5-10 minutes instead of spending hours drawing it from scratch. This would be the ideal situation.

Overall, our stance at CloudNovel is that we support AI generated artwork, as we believe the good it brings to the online internet community overshadows the bad (such as people using AI apps to generate artwork to “draw” commissions, stealing a commissioner’s money that they paid full price for a real artist) but we must be creative in how to use this new content, and not use it for malicious means.

We hope we brought to light some of our concerns for AI generated artwork, and we hope after reading this, you may understand why we fully support this new technology. Thank you for reading, and I hope this helps fellow artists!

Ciao~!

-Sonya