The people that think A.I. won't be able to make amazing original art in a few years, are the same ones that thought cars, planes, and home computers were fads that wouldn't catch on. I barely know anything about it, but I've seen the improvements in a shockingly short space of time.

Again, not cheerleading for the technology, just being realistic. Lots of "I don't like it so it must not really be game changing" copium.

Quote from: THE_Leopold on May 13, 2023, 01:05:12 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2023, 12:53:31 PM
I would love to be able to get a brain implant that downloads artistic skill into my mind. Unfortunately, I suspect that by time such tech is viable, nobody will remember what artistic skills are.

What I find frustrating is that his whole debacle has led to countless amazing artists nuking their public online galleries and depriving us of their art forever. I hate that. There are so many amazing unique art pieces that I only vaguely remember which are now gone forever. Work that AI cannot replicate and probably never will.

Those are the same people who grew up on the playground and literally took their ball and went home.   All they are doing is hurting themsleves and their artisitic repitoire of talent and works.

Their void will be filled and then they too will be forgotten because their pride got in the way of progress.

Yeah, it's too late to take down your work because the art was already collected. And trying to avoid your work being fed to these algorithms thereafter is impossible. Nuking your gallery just makes it harder for true fans to find and appreciate your work. Not to mention that it also makes it harder to prove your work was harvested if you ever get the opportunity to file a claim since you no longer have the gallery to use as a receipt.

With musicians, the music lobby has ensured that every single reuse of a musician's work gets them some money. Why can't the art world do the same? Art is art.

Quote from: Grognard GM on May 13, 2023, 01:09:38 PM
The people that think A.I. won't be able to make amazing original art in a few years, are the same ones that thought cars, planes, and home computers were fads that wouldn't catch on. I barely know anything about it, but I've seen the improvements in a shockingly short space of time.

Again, not cheerleading for the technology, just being realistic. Lots of "I don't like it so it must not really be game changing" copium.

Other technologies took a while before they made a huge difference. The internet, for example, took around two decades to really take off. These recent AI developments are progressing ridiculously fast, more akin to the boom and bust cycles rather than permanent technological revolutions.

We've seen this with crypto, streaming, NFTs, news media, etc in the last decade. Boom and bust. It remains to be seen whether AI generators are here to stay or not. They're interesting novelties, to be sure, but they cost a lot of money to maintain and it remains to be seen if it has an adequate RoI.

Google has recently leaked that open source AIs are going to make the market unviable for tech giants, which is a first. But tech giants are also the few with enough money to maintain these programs.

It's unpredictable and that should be terrifying.

I've been unbelievably happy with using Midjourney for my one-man publisher needs.  My last 3 PDF releases have included A.I. art and, visually, they're looking really cool. 

It's not just a difference between $30 monthly subscription fee vs a couple thousand dollars, but the difference between $30 and leaving half the art out of the book so I can afford to release a book that only has $1,000 worth of art in it.

An AI Girlfriend made $72K in 1 week

A 23-year-old Snapchat star, Caryn Marjorie, has monetized her digital persona in an innovative and highly profitable way. Using GPT, she has launched CarynAI, an AI representation of herself offering virtual companionship at a rate of $1 per minute.

Key points about CarynAI and its success so far:

    Caryn has a substantial follower base on Snapchat, with 1.8 million followers.

    In just 1 week, over 1,000 virtual boyfriends have signed up to interact with the AI, generating over $71,610.

    Some estimates suggests that if even 1% of her 1.8 million followers subscribe to CarynAI, she could potentially earn an estimated $5 million per month, although I feel these numbers are highly subject to various factors including churn and usage rate.

The company behind CarynAI is called Forever Voices and they constructed CarynAI by analyzing 2,000 hours of Marjorie's YouTube content, which they used to build a personality engine. They've also made chatbot versions of Donald Trump, Steve Jobs and Taylor Swift to be used on a pay-per-use basis.

Despite the financial success, ethical concerns around CarynAI and similar AI applications are raising eyebrows and rightfully so:

    CarynAI was not designed for NSFW conversations, yet some users have managed to 'jail-break' the AI for potentially inappropriate or malicious uses.

    Caryn's original intention was to provide companionship and alleviate loneliness in a non-exploitative manner, but there are concerns about potential misuse.

    Ethical considerations around generative AI models, both in image and text modalities, are becoming increasingly relevant and challenging.

What's your take on such applications (which are inevitable given the AI proliferation) and it's ethical concerns?

Also, if you like such analysis and want to keep up with the latest news in Tech and AI, consider signing up for the free newsletter (TakeOff)

By signing up to the newsletter, you can get daily updates on the latest and most important stories in tech in a fun, quick and easy-to-digest manner.




When that eGirrl sold her bathwater I knew that simps would pay anything to famous people... it was only a matter of time after ChatGPT that a bot trained on influencer data and images would be launched.... this is the next step of onlyfans... interactive porn / virtual friend tailored to ring money out of freaks.

wonder how long till your funral service will be like... "and would you like her to be distilled into an app on your phone so you can still talk with her"?

we truly are living in a dystopia

I find myself extremely pessimistic about AI art and AI in general. I guess I learn to live with it the same way people learned to live with the invention of the atomic bomb. I only see negative trends coming from this, with positives only as a mild side-effect.
Hopefully, Il be dead before this becomes EXTREMELY nightmarish. Or at least nightmarish for me.
If AI can take art jobs, it will eventually take all jobs with maybe a few leftover niche curators, or places where human labor is just cheaper.

Edit: When AI was shopped around in the fiction of the 50s, it was so it would do the unpleasant plumbing or dehumanizing monotonous labor while leaving art, creativity, and discovery to others. It appears the development is in reverse.

The technology is already good enough to replace a lot of artists as it is. Not that they ever had that much of good career prospect to begin with, cuz the fact of the matter is that art as a profession utterly sucks on many levels and does not pay well at all with few exceptions. The other side of the coin behind all the comments putting down artists here is that art to the degree of quality and output many potential clients expect is often unrealistic if not outright impossible by human hand, specially at the rates that they're willing to pay, versus the amount of time and effort it takes to create this art. And it takes exceptional talent on top of years of training and dedication to develop.

It's not a matter of entitlement, but a matter of reality. And no other profession invites clients telling you how to do your job, or acting like paying you for a product entitles them to act as your boss or art director, like art does, when they don't even know WTF they're doing. And all of these changes and special requests ultimately have labor intensive knock on effects* that none of them are ever willing to pay. Cuz the more demanding that a client is the less they want to pay for art, cuz have skewed perceptions of what art is worth based on pricing that they see for infinitely resellable stock art, trading cards, or "custom" logos based on templates, etc.

On the upside, AI has the potential to serve as a useful tool to increase output and help serious artists shell out a lot of sample variants for bitchy clients that want to pay you less for your time than you'd make shoveling fries for an equivalent amount of time, then call you entitled for it. And you'll also be able to work out more ideas that you can modify and fine-tune later faster than you'd ever be able to do drawing them by hand from scratch.

All those artists shutting down their online profiles and stumping their feet need to understand that AI just saved from one of the most unfulfilling careers there is for the amount of skill and dedication it requires. Not that there aren't valid concerns about the pace this tech is advancing and what tech giants might ultimately do with it. But most of what AI will ultimately take away is the tedium of dealing with a thousand request changes from stingy clients wanting to play art director and expecting a hundred samples, cuz now the AI will do them for you at a minuscule fraction of the time. And at least for the time being you'll still have a job modifying the end product to the client's exacting specifications at a fraction of the hassle.

If you still want to keep your pride, you can use it to do work that you actually love for yourself and beef up your portfolio with all the time that you'll save having the AI do all the tedious stuff for you. There's still the matter of how art skills will likely degrade over time as a result of this technology, but fuck'em. If this is the future humanity chooses it deserves to go down with the rest of civilization. But this tech ain't going away unless a cataclysm takes place, so you might as well make the best of it.

*not just from the changes themselves, but from all the additional changes that will inevitably come when the changes they requested suck from a design perspective, like you told them they would from the get go. Cuz someone paying you for a drawing makes them a qualified art director, somehow.

Quote from: THE_Leopold on May 11, 2023, 03:50:00 PM
I spent 4-6 hours casually creating a dozen pieces of art that are better than something WOTC puts out with all the bells and whistles that I would need to publish the book and have it look amazing.  this would cost me in the realm of $500/piece for the color and detail that I spent $30/mo on. $6000 vs $30.  For my niche product that will net me dozens of dollars I'd have to be insane to spend that money on art when I can spend it on layout instead which is vastly more work and time consuming.


What I may have to do is have an artist touch up the pictures, add a few things here and there which may cost me as much to detail 12 pictures as it would to have one picture created.  All fully licensed and approved under the Midjourney CC license.


The evolution of art generation has reduced my neeed for spending a fortune and managing people who are notoriously flakey with a work ethic that rivals homeless people.  ...

This is where the future of art for RPG's is headed.

Pure Human drawn art will become be something only the Truly Talented will be able to command money for.

And I suspect many will be using AI as a tool to speed up production and output at competitive prices.
After all; when you can feed your own portfolio into the algorithm...

The wheat will be winnowed from the chaff in short order.

It's basically a land rush. Whoever can claim substantial real estate in the new high-production-value RPG space will earn a lot of money.

Full-color artwork with incredible art is no longer the exclusive purview of big name brands/IPs.

Quote from: Zelen on May 13, 2023, 04:37:45 PMFull-color artwork with incredible art is no longer the exclusive purview of big name brands/IPs.

It won't. The printing costs for color are still the primary determinators.

Quote from: Grognard GM on May 13, 2023, 01:09:38 PM
The people that think A.I. won't be able to make amazing original art in a few years, are the same ones that thought cars, planes, and home computers were fads that wouldn't catch on. I barely know anything about it, but I've seen the improvements in a shockingly short space of time.

Again, not cheerleading for the technology, just being realistic. Lots of "I don't like it so it must not really be game changing" copium.

Agreed. Mark Twain famously passed on the opportunity to invest in Telephones because he didn't think they'd catch on.

AI art is the future of commercial illustration. All the freelance artists are in denial of reality. They are trying to sue, get regulation passed, form unions to block it. So are writers, they are freaking out, and should be. This technology is bringing high level art and writing to the masses. We're talking supra-genius level art and writing. The future is going to be amazing and scary. Just like the 20th century was.

The only limit will be user's imagination.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2023, 01:23:05 PM
Other technologies took a while before they made a huge difference. The internet, for example, took around two decades to really take off.

The Internet was a weird, mostly academic thing initially. Then the world wide web protocol was made royalty-free in 1993, making the Internet far more user-friendly. The technology became widely taken up by the general public over just a few years, to the extent that I suspect most people don't even realise that there is an Internet beyond the www. It feels as though the user-friendliness is already there for AI.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2023, 01:23:05 PM
With musicians, the music lobby has ensured that every single reuse of a musician's work gets them some money. Why can't the art world do the same? Art is art.

Musicians get royalties when their songs, or covers, are played. Similarly, you have to pay to make use of an artist's work.

But you don't have to pay royalties if you write a song inspired by or influenced by another artist. Similarly, artists don't pay for creating art influenced by other artists. Music-generating AIs don't pay royalties on the songs that they were trained on. I don't see why AI art would be any different.

Quote from: Thor's Nads on May 13, 2023, 05:39:37 PM

Quote from: Grognard GM on May 13, 2023, 01:09:38 PM
The people that think A.I. won't be able to make amazing original art in a few years, are the same ones that thought cars, planes, and home computers were fads that wouldn't catch on. I barely know anything about it, but I've seen the improvements in a shockingly short space of time.

Again, not cheerleading for the technology, just being realistic. Lots of "I don't like it so it must not really be game changing" copium.

Agreed. Mark Twain famously passed on the opportunity to invest in Telephones because he didn't think they'd catch on.

AI art is the future of commercial illustration. All the freelance artists are in denial of reality. They are trying to sue, get regulation passed, form unions to block it. So are writers, they are freaking out, and should be. This technology is bringing high level art and writing to the masses. We're talking supra-genius level art and writing. The future is going to be amazing and scary. Just like the 20th century was.

The only limit will be user's imagination.

I've tried using ChatGPT to write fiction and for brainstorming. It's been completely useless to me

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 13, 2023, 04:41:07 PM

Quote from: Zelen on May 13, 2023, 04:37:45 PMFull-color artwork with incredible art is no longer the exclusive purview of big name brands/IPs.

It won't. The printing costs for color are still the primary determinators.

Well yes, but print is only a fraction of all RPG products. I interact a lot more with PDFs than I do with my books these days, since my group went fully online.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2023, 06:19:08 PM

Quote from: Thor's Nads on May 13, 2023, 05:39:37 PM

Quote from: Grognard GM on May 13, 2023, 01:09:38 PM
The people that think A.I. won't be able to make amazing original art in a few years, are the same ones that thought cars, planes, and home computers were fads that wouldn't catch on. I barely know anything about it, but I've seen the improvements in a shockingly short space of time.

Again, not cheerleading for the technology, just being realistic. Lots of "I don't like it so it must not really be game changing" copium.

Agreed. Mark Twain famously passed on the opportunity to invest in Telephones because he didn't think they'd catch on.

AI art is the future of commercial illustration. All the freelance artists are in denial of reality. They are trying to sue, get regulation passed, form unions to block it. So are writers, they are freaking out, and should be. This technology is bringing high level art and writing to the masses. We're talking supra-genius level art and writing. The future is going to be amazing and scary. Just like the 20th century was.

The only limit will be user's imagination.

I've tried using ChatGPT to write fiction and for brainstorming. It's been completely useless to me

My co-worker used ChatGPT to do some pretty neat stories -- very short, like a page or two. Not publishable, but interesting. I've actually read much worse professionally published.

Our Traveller GM used the chat AI on Discord (forget the name) to make a rap about Traveller and to create a science fiction tea for the Traveller universe. The tea was pretty cool. It looked like it used text related to a drug as the basis.

Quote from: THE_Leopold on May 13, 2023, 07:50:11 AM
which is 100% where AI art comes in.  Instead of a nebulous concept you have a "I like this picture but make the sword bigger and give him green eyes and a horn on his head". A world where 95% of the work is done and now it's a matter of curation instead of invention.

One of the running jokes among artists has been "AI requires clients to write a clear description of what they want. We're safe."

Having done thousands of illustrations for clients I can tell you, very few of them know what they want. Part of the job of an illustrator is to interact with the client and figure out what they really want.