Re: AI quicksand/fetish art?
Posted: 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.