I’ve been a graphic designer / creative director / web designer / photographer / video editor / musician for over 20 years.
Last autumn I was still happily self-studying human anatomy (80+ hour course!) to improve my digital illustrations, practicing all the time and continuing spending insane amounts of hours to get better with 3D sculpting and 3D modeling using Blender.
Then this AI thing came out.
I immediately felt a sting of jealousy inside. As if I was betrayed and this was freaking unfair, you know “but I actually have a degree on art history and art theory and skills and now it’s all rendered useless” kinda feeling?
I’m a dumb person, but fortunately I realized immediately that it makes absolutely no sense to fight against a technological revolution of this magnitude, so I literally forced myself to embrace this new tech asap, to observe it as a new tool which will radically change the way we will do visual / graphic / concept designs etc. in the future.
AI and Photoshop workflow and where to focus on.
Nowadays I still spend stupid amounts of time photoshopping hands etc. but I’m trying to learn to think this beginning phase of the age of AI from a different perspective: more like that I’m tweaking an AI “camera” to take a “photo” that represents whatever concept / idea I have in my mind, AS ACCURATELY AS POSSIBLE.
As a neurotic perfectionist, my salvation in both DeviantArt and AI has been that I can just leave some things unfixed, and say, a year later I can return to any image and recreate it with AI more to my liking and to continue photoshopping and improving it to my heart’s content.
Heck, I can then even replace the old version at DA with the improved image! My neuroses thank you, DeviantArt.
We’re in the middle of an actual technological revolution. So I’ve figured the most reasonable thing to do is to 1) create good images, 2) fix ’em just enough so that they’d be okay for presentation or commercial work and 3) move on. Learning by doing, by reading all I can about AI and by doing so, trying to ride this constantly evolving digital giant tiger.
As a student of AI, I focus on improving my understanding on how the entire diffusion / neural network thing even works and how to control the output better. Things will of course soon get to the point that we can REALLY manifest whatever we see in our imagination, and mold our visions in an entirely new way. Which is just stunningly awesome!
Art theory does not disappear with AI.
Now everyone creates beautiful images. But with time, a background in art theory and experience on the field will rise to the surface and it’ll begin to show up. This first wave of AI graphics will very soon look so identical, generic and boring, that a pro illustrator can create AI images that’ll separate from the crowd by standing on the foundational knowledge of visual arts regarding composition, lighting, anatomy, colours, perspective, the use of empty space and all that.
An illustrator can do miracles to an already decent looking AI image by simply painting over it manually, or by additionally bouncing it back and forth between AI and your digital pen.
And as people get more interested in visual arts, they’ll start to notice the images that are more pleasing to the eye, as all the tricks us traditional artists have learned to manipulate the viewer’s experience still work like before.
But for now, it’s a tsunami of generic looking AI images of pretty babes, and I fully confess on being a part of that busty tsunami as well.
Conclucion and logical fallacies.
So my fellow traditional artists, who are being disrespectful and confrontational towards people who use AI to create images: I respect your choice to behave that way, being emotional and defensive. But wouldn’t it benefit us all if we’d detach emotionally a bit and actually talk to each other about things, and perhaps even learn something about this new AI monster together?
Recently a person insisted on me that creating AI graphics is “about as much ‘work’ as putting a coin into a slot machine and pulling a handle waiting for the outcome.”
By this logic crunching numbers as an accountant all night long, writing a novel or a doctoral thesis, or spending days working with coding or programming, developing a software, is not considered work.
The emotional and defensive attitude makes people forget that the ARTISTIC MERITS OF AI and the CONCEPT OF WORKING HARD are two entirely separate topics. And mixing these two on purpose along with being disrespectful is not the way to go.
As I wrote in the beginning, initially I felt that way too. So I get it.
But now it’s time to get over it and adapt.