AI quicksand/fetish art?

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Viridian
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby Viridian » Sun Jan 08, 2023 6:28 am

I've tried to pioneer using AI tools to enhance our unique fetish and people went at me for it.

I've been producing digital illustrations for the better part of a decade and tried to improve myself. But what I produce as digital illustrations did not match my ideal of what I wanted to illustrate. Was it bad? Mostly, yes. Did some people like it? Sure. Most importantly, I didn't like it. It was an excessive and disproportionate effort to create a cover for what I produce: writing. I'm not in a position where I am likely to upskill to produce the illustrations that I want.

The improvements and accessibility have been a godsend to my workflow. Since my forte is writing and concept design, AI allows me to spit out ideas that I can work from, which I use to generate better AI graphics, and so on. I design my concepts, stories, setting and characters. Often I've already drawn them, or draw the pose reference, and run it through AI prompts to get the output that I specifically want so that it matches the narrative I am writing.

Is that not the same workflow as what an artist does? Am I not expressing a unique idea that I have in my head? Or does putting through what is essentially a rendering tool completely void all the creative elements I did in my process? Again, I'm not claiming that it is art and I'm not claiming to be an artist, let alone a professional one making money from a fetish hobby. I'm a degenerate who writes short stories as a form of digital masturbation, yet some people hold a higher moral ground in this extremely obscure niche and want to boycott someone who is using AI to depict a generic raven-haired big-titted OC.

I'm supposedly bringing down the art industry, but I can't get the AI to consistently make my OC wear a red shirt instead of a black one while sinking into a substance I'm spending hours trying to not render as brown water.

So who am I stealing from? Is Greg Rutkowski and Alex Ross producing quicksand fetish artwork and taking commissions for a perverted WAM obsession? Is there an artist in the QS community who is doing photorealistic airbrushed portraits of a black-haired reporter in a red shirt with her tits sticking out? Am I siphoning revenue away from our own artists? If someone *is* offering to produce exactly the kind of thing I want, please send me details and I'll bankroll you for a fetish hobby that about 50 people care about.

Saying the AI generators take no effort is absurd. You don't just "type in a prompt" and get majestic images, no more than a photographer just has to push a button. Are you calling Fred a fake producer because all he has to do is hire a bikini model, make her wallow in a clay pit and call it Lucid Dream #20239? What makes a professional photographer a step above a kid with an iPhone is how much creative direction and control they have. The exact framing,the exact postures, the exact lighting, so that their final product conveys what the photographer wants. Working with AI generators is very similar, but with *far less* specific control. Someone pushing AI generators for artistic creativity is going to tinker with the lighting, poses and framing like a photographer or a videographer. More often than not there's additional editing and painting required either pre or post which is no different to how our 3D artists create their digital stories. But are you going to shut down a Daz3d or Poser creator because they're using the same model that they didn't create themselves?

It's also disingenuous to take the extremely low bar of generic, soulless AI images and contrast that with the hours of work a true artist does. It is true that the skill floor is much, much lower. Once you know some good prompts, you can spit out a graphic that is much better than what most people can produce themselves. The trap with AI is that a lot of inexperienced creators throw dozens, if not hundreds of their creations online and think people will fall in love with their personal fantasies and dream waifus. That's a similar problem with things like photomanips and screenshots of Roblox and Second Life.

But that's a "problem" with art in general. A lot of QS art is generic and soulless, because most people in the QS realm aren't artists. They just want to see their OC (which is typically [hair colour] + [big boobs] + [outfit of choice]) sinking into quicksand at either ankle, thigh, chest or nose level. And our artists are well aware of how generic this gets. The whole "your character here" commissions are built around just that. You create a template for a character up to their chest and take payments to swap out colour palettes. So if AI "art" is just typing in a prompt, then authentic QS art is just putting a character into a brown textured layer with black concentric rings.

While we might have our personal standards for quality and preference, no one is doing any of this maliciously. Virtually everyone, whether using AI or traditional tools, is fulfilling the inherent desire to express themselves.

That leads me to the most pertinent point in this thread: the QS fetish. While the industry will have large questions to answer for AI art in general, the mindset is causing disproportionate ripples in what is, for 99% of the QS community, a personal hobby.

There are about a dozen people who produce QS illustrations, maybe a third of them prolific or regular. Most are skewed towards anime style. A handful more create 3D art. There's not exactly a lot of supply or competition for what we make. For those who do put their work up, it is (in my experience), low in gratification. The community around QS art (and arguably any kind of fetish art) is gimme in nature. The vast majority are consumers, not producers. You can spend hours putting together your ideal vision, but the typical responses are in one of two categories: either they have their hand on their dick and are typing out their orgasmic sensations while looking at a red-haired hottie drowning, or they are writing out a wish fulfillment novella.

This is where AI could be the thing that fills in the wide gaps that producers leave. Instead of harassing creators to fulfill wishes, AI enables talentless hacks to create their own. Often I get requests for nudity and erotic depictions. Well, with AI, you can do it yourself. At the moment, AI tools aren't very good at specific depictions of quicksand textures, facial expressions and emotions. But in the time that I've been trying to learn the tools, there's a lot that goes into constructing the right kind of scene to convey the expression that I want to tell a story with.

Crossfire.png


What I really enjoyed with AI tools was how it allowed me to string together the ideas in my head. This kind of storyboard could fit any number of QS scenarios, and part of my experiment was to allow the viewer to make their own narrative. But no, it's AI, so the anti-AI brigade comes along and boycotts it.

So if I want to see Black Widow sink in quicksand, what are my options? Do I pester our venerable Acidtester to draw my fantasy in a completely different style and then express annoyance because he drew a scared expression while I want a determined focused one? Do I harass every 3D artist to spend a month to render a new character and set up a scene the way I want it?

Or do I shut up and make it myself?

When I started with AI, it was legitimately fun to put fantasy scenarios together. Like with my own digital illustration journey, I was overly enthusiastic about sharing anything that looked reasonable. Then, as I honed my craft, I only shared the ones that I felt had artistic value to others and not just to myself. 99% of the images I generated were never saved or shared, even though any one of them could have gained a thousand views and a hundred favourites, because they weren't good enough, had flaws or needed further refinement. Just like an artist will constantly draw the same eye over and over again to get it to look right, I spent hours re-rendering and tweaking the input to get it exactly the way I wanted. It was like bashing rocks together and hoping for something different. But that's learning and experimentation.

It became un-fun when people spread the toxicity. In the end, I agree with the sentiment that it feels like GarageBand and Autotune. I wouldn't feel comfortable claiming that any AI generated image is "my art", because while it's my work in assembling it, I didn't produce it. But the graphic is only one part for me.

For those who hate AI art, what is it exactly that you hate about it? Empty, soulless, bland, generic and not creative? A lot of art is just that. Poor quality and unrefined? A lot of art does that. Too much junk quantity flooding deviantart? A lot of art does that.

Stealing and sampling from artists? Debatable. Style isn't unique and copyrightable. A lot of things that make signature styles look good are generally what artists and audiences have taken on as conventional ideals, whether it's the golden ratio, the rule of thirds, using airbrushes for shading, perspective, focus, positioning lighting for dramatic or cinematic effect, dynamic poses, etc. Even my digital illustrations "steal" from AWSands - I like the way he draws QS textures and backgrounds, so I adopt similar look albeit different methods. The combination of methods and style, whether digital or AI, looks nothing like the inspiration or source.

But really, as a QS fetishist, what's the difference between these two pieces?
Bad Date.png
qq8_final_by_nomino_tacet_delfuyr.jpg

What makes one art and the other not? Both have deliberate elements inserted for creative effect. Both have context clues to help the viewer create their imaginary narrative, and both were made with original plots. I can claim neither to be my illustration, but I can claim both to be my concept, idea and story. Both were made to be enjoyed at absolutely no expense to the viewer.

The difference is that one of these was created by someone who quit all forms of art because of toxic gatekeeping. I am clearly someone who wishes I could make something but am unwilling to put "real effort". If people are upset over my alleged art theft, then I'll simply not produce. I didn't have anything to gain from my QS work. It's my personal wish fulfillment and genuinely the most fun I've had in the creative process. I hoped to offer something to fill a gap in the QS niche, but it's become bogged down in the AI war.

This isn't my fight. Let real artists do their thing.

DM me with your rates if you want to be my personal illustrator.
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BogDog
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby BogDog » Sun Jan 08, 2023 10:16 am

Acidtester wrote:AI is the opposite of art.
There is nothing authentic, creative, poignant, passionate, sentimental or meaningful about it. It takes work from real artists and swirls it around at the whim of whoever plays with it. It’s plastic and flat and silly. To take AI art seriously is a joke in itself.



Agreed. COMPUTER-generated art has been around almost as long as computers, and have seen some beautiful ABSTRACT artwork coming from them: https://www.google.com/search?q=compute ... 1&dpr=1.25


But mimicking human-created art does nothing for me. As I said, go ahead and bring it. Just be sure to "AI" watermark it. As the rendering code gets better it will be harder to tell the human-or-PC diff,and I wanna know the diff.
"Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid." - John Wayne

Acidtester
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby Acidtester » Sun Jan 08, 2023 5:39 pm

Viridian, I don’t think anybody has a problem with what you’ve been doing with the tool. I think they look cool, I just kind of wish their faces didn’t look so bored. But that’s just me, my opinion doesn’t have to mean anything to you. There’s tons of shit on deviantart thats made by AI that I’ve favorited. I don’t “boycott” or hate AI art, I just feel that, as someone who didn’t get frustrated and give up on developing skill (that’s not directed at you, just in general)I personally don’t respect the level of effort and dedication that goes into it the same way I would a good guitar player, or a juggler, or anyone who actually had to practice their craft.

The “is it art” question pre-dates AI and all of our lifespans. It’s a world wide argument with people on all sides of it. It’ll never be settled who’s right or wrong about it. I don’t think you need to be so defensive about it.

Personally, I don’t like to use much photoshop on my drawings, I prefer not to use a lot of effects when I play guitar (my main instrument is classical guitar, with no effects at all), I just like to do stuff raw, as it is, without extra effects or filters. But this issue is something different entirely. This would be like buying a guitar that just makes noise for you and you pick your favorite noise. Yes, there’s decision making, that a lot of people are using as their argument that they “created” it because they picked their favorite out of a batch. To me that’s just someone playing with a new toy.

You aren’t claiming to be an artist, your pictures are fun to see, and I don’t feel any sort of competition or resentment with anyone who comes up with some AI art because I know it’s just not the same thing I like to do at all. You are using it for your own purposes, not bragging about it or “showing off”, and that’s cool. What’s not cool though, is saying that all artists do is slap a hair color and depth on a generic template, and that’s the same as AI, that’s pretty condescending man. I guess I wasted a lot of time coming up with nothing.
If the system had one neck,
You know I'd gladly break it.

Viridian
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby Viridian » Sun Jan 08, 2023 8:10 pm

Acidtester wrote:What’s not cool though, is saying that all artists do is slap a hair color and depth on a generic template, and that’s the same as AI, that’s pretty condescending man. I guess I wasted a lot of time coming up with nothing.

It's also not cool to just say that we're playing with toys. Are you doodling with crayons?

That's the vitriol that anti-AI bandwagoners spit. I'm not saying it because I believe it - you know as well as I do that we go through a creative process when making our illustrations. I'm not saying that AI is like working with QS templates. I'm showing that if people oversimplify any art product enough, it's going to sound ludicrously dumb. Push a button on a camera, use hotkeys in Photoshop,type a prompt into an AI generator, stick a banana on a wall, or draw circles around a face and call it quicksand.

You don't get the AI pieces I create by typing "girl in quicksand", just as you don't create your artwork by drawing squiggly ripples. Here's my "girl in quicksand" AI generation:
girl in quicksand s-3294771725.png

That's a whole lot different to this image:
Cross Country.png

My point is that it's more than just saying "Alexa, give me a quicksand scene". I will agree that it's not the same as creating the art, but the functionality of AI is less like playing guitar and more like being a sound mixer. The skill set is more in knowing how to balance the inputs to generate the desired output. I suppose you could make the argument that sound mixers don't make music; they work with it. You could say the same with AI image creators.
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Acidtester
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby Acidtester » Sun Jan 08, 2023 8:42 pm

Well whatever, I can’t wait till the AI’s figure out how to make actual facial expressions, I think that would look cooler.
If the system had one neck,
You know I'd gladly break it.

CreamyClayK
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby CreamyClayK » Mon Jan 09, 2023 2:09 am

Viridian wrote:
Acidtester wrote:What’s not cool though, is saying that all artists do is slap a hair color and depth on a generic template, and that’s the same as AI, that’s pretty condescending man. I guess I wasted a lot of time coming up with nothing.

It's also not cool to just say that we're playing with toys. Are you doodling with crayons?

That's the vitriol that anti-AI bandwagoners spit. I'm not saying it because I believe it - you know as well as I do that we go through a creative process when making our illustrations. I'm not saying that AI is like working with QS templates. I'm showing that if people oversimplify any art product enough, it's going to sound ludicrously dumb. Push a button on a camera, use hotkeys in Photoshop,type a prompt into an AI generator, stick a banana on a wall, or draw circles around a face and call it quicksand.

You don't get the AI pieces I create by typing "girl in quicksand", just as you don't create your artwork by drawing squiggly ripples. Here's my "girl in quicksand" AI generation:
girl in quicksand s-3294771725.png
That's a whole lot different to this image:
Cross Country.png
My point is that it's more than just saying "Alexa, give me a quicksand scene". I will agree that it's not the same as creating the art, but the functionality of AI is less like playing guitar and more like being a sound mixer. The skill set is more in knowing how to balance the inputs to generate the desired output. I suppose you could make the argument that sound mixers don't make music; they work with it. You could say the same with AI image creators.



i love the work you've done with the ai tools, and i was genuinely a little sad to see you took those works off of your deviantart. seeing AI as another tool and not as a competition was something i never even thought of! that's super cool

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MadMax359
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby MadMax359 » Mon Jan 09, 2023 3:00 pm

in the meantime, Cross Country is excellent, and in my opinion she does not look bored :twisted:
The strong do what they want, the weak do what they must

Viridian
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby Viridian » Mon Jan 09, 2023 4:03 pm

MadMax359 wrote:in the meantime, Cross Country is excellent, and in my opinion she does not look bored :twisted:

I've done a lot more work since to improve textures and expressions.
pullmeoutquick.png
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CreamyClayK
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby CreamyClayK » Mon Jan 09, 2023 9:37 pm

you do a really good job with the expressions, and the texture of the mud itself. you can really see where it's being pushed down, pulled up, and how it latches onto the women. really well done honestly. the physical texture of quicksand/mud has always been one of the biggest things i look for in art and mud, and it's one of the hardest things to get right in artwork, hand drawn, computer animations, or otherwise

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MadMax359
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Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?

Postby MadMax359 » Mon Jan 09, 2023 10:12 pm

i continue to be impressed with the progress

as for pulling her out quick... maybe if another button or two gets undone... :twisted:
The strong do what they want, the weak do what they must


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