Ask Lemmy

The first image is your artwork.

It represents your slow but steady progress in your hobby. It may not be what you want yet, but it is still a stepping stone on your journey.

The second image is a compilation of your artwork and the stolen efforts of millions of unpaid artists, their works unceremoniously ripped away from them and sold as a tech company's product without any compensation to them for aiding building such a machine. It isn't art.

Keep at it, yo. Art is a frustrating hobby at times, but enjoy the learning.

First of all it's your hobby and you can do whatever you want forever. That being said if you want to improve your skills you won't get there by relying on shortcuts. Drawing is 10% talent and 90% practice as are many creative skills. There are great tutorials out there to teach you about proportions, perspective, lighting and so on. And the most important thing is persistence. Draw everything you want to and try not to care too much about the outcome. If you stay at it then sooner or later you will be able to draw all sorts of things just like you imagined them without even thinking about it.

I wouldn't consider this slop.

Let's compare this to photography. If you use a camera to take a picture of something, sure, the machine is doing most of the work, but the photographer is playing a vital role in this.

Now there are photographers that spend a lot of time composing a shot. They'll mess around with shutter speed, aperture size, ISO, zoom, depth of field, etc. They'll also figure out the subject matter and may add some other elements to it. Afterwards they'll make adjustments to the picture with something like Lightroom or Darktable, and maybe touch up some things with Photoshop.

Then there are people that take pictures with their phone of a computer screen showing something cool happening in a game and post it on Reddit.

On one end of the spectrum I would consider the photo to be art, on the other I would consider it to be slop. However, there are many degrees between one end of this spectrum to the other.

With AI tools it's not much different. The machine is doing a lot of the work, but how much of it is guided, reshaped, or directed by a human? With Image Generating tools you can tweak the seed, the steps, the cfg, the sampler, denoise, etc. You can choose the base model, add multiple LoRAs and embeddings, or train your own if you're looking for a certain style.

Then you have users that go to ChatGPT, type in a prompt and have ChatGPT do everything else.

Like photography, on one end of the spectrum I would consider it art, on the other I would consider it slop.

But this all begs the question, what is art? How do you draw the line between what art is, and what it is not?

The example you provided isn't upscaling. Upscaling is the act of interpolating pixels to increase the resolution of a bitmap image. What you've done is had the AI color and shade in your sketch.

Frankly, it's clear from the sketch that you have some great foundational skills. I don't really understand why you would stop halfway and let a computer steal the learning and practice opportunity from you. It's like a carpenter building a piece of furniture and just stopping before sanding and painting it.

My opinion is different from most other comments here. AI is a tool. If it gets the job done exactly the way you intended it, there is no problem in using it. In my opinion, it's only slop if it's generated mindlessly and without care. In your case, you gave very specific constraints. If the result is exactly what you intended it to be, if you can get behind it 100%, it is your art, it is not slop. I think people need to reflect on their definition of art a bit. There was a time when people claimed using Photoshop made your art unworthy. The new tool is now AI. Just because it makes creating something so easy doesn't mean a tool is not "allowed" in art. Actually, anything is allowed in art, there are no rules.

What the AI did isn't something you can't do with practice. Besides, you probably wouldn't have put the belt buckle on the back of the pants. Believe in yourself and work at it.

Still slop, sorry amigo! (Probably not what you want to hear, but I'm just being real...)

If I sketch something, and have an ai upscale it for me

That's not an accurate description of what you did, is it?

You didn't simply "upscale" your drawing. You had AI turn a rough sketch into an inked, colored and shaded but otherwise incomplete piece.

I like to think I poured my heart and soul into it.

Yeah, I'm sure you like to think that...

But in reality you did part 1 of a 4 part process and told a computer to do the rest. I don't know how long you spent on your initial sketch, but in the end you relied on a gimmicky shortcut (based on the exploitation of other people's stolen art... stuff that they REALLY poured their heart and soul into before it was unceremoniously ripped off by mega-corporations) to do at least 75% of the work. I'm being brutally honest, but at best you can only really think of it as being 25% yours.

Again, is this slop? I am not an artist. I drive a forklift real good, that's my skillset.

Am I being too harsh? Why am I telling you this?

Here's the thing you need to understand...

If you made that original sketch then you ARE an artist. Sure you don't feel like you're as good as you want to be (no artist EVER does, by the way), but you are already 10000x more of an artist than someone who writes some text and gets an AI to slop out some generic shit.

The composition and sketch is the hardest part and you already did it. Linework (if that's your style) is basically just tracing. Coloring is as easy as doing a kids coloring book. Shading can be a puzzle, but you'll get it in time if you keep the light coming from the same direction.

You spent some time doing the hard part, liked how it looked, and then instead of just cracking on with the next part, you got lazy, turned your brain off and fed it to the instant gratification machine, turning it into slop. Taking your hands off the wheel entirely, you know?

And for what?

Now you have a "pretty picture", but you didn't learn a damn thing about taking your art from sketch to lines, or coloring, or shading. And to make matters worse, you can't even point to the picture and say "hey look at that, I MADE THAT", like you can with the sketch.

In the end, I'm gonna call it slop. Ethical problems aside, AI generated slop art is a dime a dozen these days. I don't see any value in it at all. I think you have more talent for art than you know, and I hope that you keep it up and try to approach your work with more pride as a human being making something cool by hand.

Back in the early days of animation, the animation process involved an animator who would draw the scenes frame by frame and then hand them over to a team of colorers to color.

This is not so different. You conceptualised the scene and handed off the colouring to the AI. So it isn't really slop.

If you are using AI to do things you cannot do yourself, you’re not an artist- and it’s slop.

Instead. Do it yourself and keep doing it poorly until you do it better. Then poof: an artist emerges.

Hey @glitchdx@lemmy.world,

First, I think your sketch is great!! I'd encourage you too feel pride in it, because you did it! I bet it's better than you could do a year ago, and honestly a lot of people could never do that much (including me). So keep running with it.

Second, you said you are genuinely trying to get better at art. So keep putting your efforts where your mouth is by continuing to practice, and not taking any shortcuts to the finish line just to get a finished product. Shortcuts don't make you better, grinding does.

Finally, is it slop, yes, but I'm a bit more lax on your question about using ai-slop than some others. By example I mean:

• If your goal was simply to make (with a LLM assist) some cool looking desktop background for your own personal use it whatever. Go for it, enjoy! But don't go sharing it saying 'look what I did,' cause you didn't, fully.
• If your goal is to publish something (& you mentioned 'your book'), esp to sell it, I personally would take no pride in sharing something a slop-bot was used to get it out the door, nor would I appreciate it being shared with me. And I'd love for you to feel pride in every aspect of your personal projects.
  • And if you've got a vision for a project, and you're worried it'll never happen without help, I get that. But while it could be hard, maybe you could search for another artist whose style you like (there is a LOT of starving ones right now) to partner up with you. Maybe you commission them, maybe you become co-owners of this project, etc, but ultimately it becomes a project two+ people could be proud of! 🥳
    • And if you get to that finish line the way a creative should, I'll honestly be super stoked for you. So let me be first in line to pre-order the fruits of your labor. I believe in you! Keep us posted.

I’ll count this as slop, but don’t let that discourage you. This is coming from an absolute untalented bum. That sketch looks really good. I promise you you’ll have fun learning to fill in the colors. The art is not that it looks good, the art is knowing someone went through the time and effort to figure out the best way to finish a piece. AI is not art, but you seriously have talent!

First. You are an artist. You make actual real art and have skills. Your sketch is pretty good as well.

That isn't just upscaling, it colored it in too. If it just upscaled it'd be different.

Yeah, it generated everything that wasn't the monochrome silhouette. That is AI generated

If you can do a rough sketch this good then yes you are an artist.

Just finish your own art. You already did the hard part.

brother/sister/sibling, that's a neat sketch. You have potential. People from Uni have started with a similar skill level and are now fucking smashing their artwork. I understand that arts are mentally hard at times, when you feel nothing works and you don't improve fast enough. Give yourself some credit.

Now you are saying you'll be using the output for your book. Is it important to you, that it is 100% your work? Is it important to you to not misrepresent your skills? Then declare that and how AI was used. Will you monetize said book? Then there are a few legal things to consider (in Germany for example anything an AI generates for you is per definition not your creation and cannot be copyrighted by you. If you make changes to the image/text/video before publishing you can at least secure some rights on it)

I am not going to rate it as slop or not. If you need an illustration, and you need it now, who am I to tell you that this is not a legit tool, no matter how I myself feel about it.

Who cares what other people think? Do you, unapologetically.

Honestly your sketching is quite solid, you've obviously got a decent knowledge of anatomy. All you need is some color theory and some practice, which AI will rob you of.

Alternately you could pay a real artist to color and finish your sketches, this is how comics and many other works are traditionally done.

If you use AI, I would definitely disclose that in the description of the book, and as a consumer I would certainly be turned off by that fact. The fact that you're using it to enhance your own art absolutely makes it better, but the finished product still isn't really your art any more.

Lemmy largely is very anti AI art. You're basically going to a vegan convention and asking "Is it ok if I have a little meat? As a treat?"

That's not "upscaling". That's having the AI color it in for you. Like a comic artist who has a colorer (person that literally does that).

Upscaling just makes the image bigger (resolution-wise). It uses the same exact technology as regular AI image generation though 🤷

There's degrees to everything. AI haters are at the point where they're arguing with digital artists over what counts as art and it's getting insane.

Being slop or not is not the issue, the real question is is it morally correct. To me it depends on your usage, are you generating stuff for yourself? Then it doesn't matter. Are you generating stuff to communicate to the artist you're hiring your intended vision of the thing, or building a mood board or similar? Then it's probably okay in my book. Are you using the generated image for something or selling it? Then it's wrong.

This probably isn't the answer you want to hear, but yes, I still consider it slop.

Not everyone is an artist, and that's okay. Just do your best, and even the worst chicken-scratch doodles are better than what any AI craps out.

Your sketch is essentially a highly detailed prompt. If you want to be an artist, stick with what you can do and use practice and repetition to get better. You're already far better at drawing than you think you are.

If you insist on using AI to finish out what you sketch, then it becomes a product of AI and everything that comes with that. It is no longer your own work.