DeviantArt, were you dreaming?
The art community site has created its own AI. To say it’s not been universally well received is an understatement…
My thanks this morning to film industry professional and feature writer Frank Garcia, who sent me a link to a CNet story by Leslie Katz: “This Comic Series Is Gorgeous. You'd Never Know AI Drew the Whole Thing”.
The story centres on the creation of new comics created by Steve Coulson utilising the AI software Midjourney, available free from US media company Campfire’s web site.
(As a brief aside, I wonder if Indian publisher, Campfire Comics, are going to be a bit miffed at potential confusion here?).
With greatest of respect to the article’s author, an item that makes for an interesting read, it’s not that hard to spot that there’s something off about the art in these comics. I read two of the stories on offer, The Lesson and Exodus, and, for me, quite apart from the incredibly static art, the central female characters in each looking more like 1950s Hollywood starlets, both stories are pretty soul less and drawn out - a bit like over extended 2000AD “Future Shocks”.
I’m reasonably confident that most comic fans should, for now, be able to distinguish AI for human drawn comics work. The means of generating the stories seems to have limited the scope of the storytelling, too. But I fully expect that what we are seeing is “baby steps”, and things will change, rapidly.
Frank asked me, “How far will this go — this is where we are at?”.
Well, for me, after exploring further, it went as far as deleting every image I had uploaded to DeviantArt last night to promote various comics over the past 15 years, concerned that the “safety protocols” in place, mentioned in an updated ArsTechnica news item (“DeviantArt upsets artists with its new AI art generator, DreamUp”) were not enough to stop their new AI scraping my photographs and the art of others to “train” it.
Frankly, I’m surprised DeviantArt even considered its own AI, let alone developing and launching it, without informing all community members of their plans, after the hostility from some artists toward these developments when I innocently posted a picture of an AI-created cartoon cat on my social media.
I can’t begin to imagine what the reaction of a huge, creative art community to DreamUp has been, but the fact that DeviantArt quickly rolled back on telling members - paid members, at least* - that they were going to let DreamUp scrape their work to “learn” new skills, unless they specifically opted out of allowing it, suggests they were given both barrels, in no uncertain terms.
As far as I was concerned, after reading about their AI project, I hadn’t drawn any of the art I’d posted to the platform. When I posted it, I never for a for a minute considered that, in the future, someone would develop a system that would scrape that work to develop software that might take away their jobs, particularly the very company that had developed such a vibrant, creative art company in the first place.
I simply didn’t feel I could keep those images on that platform, out of respect for the creators who drew them.
Was this an over reaction? Well, from my point of view, I don’t think so. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I expressed mine in the only way I felt right, by action.
Don’t get me wrong. AI is an incredibly useful tool. In science, for example, it’s being used to identify and predict ways microorganisms and viruses are evolving, spotting potential dangers humans have missed. That is a use of AI I can get behind.
I have also, of course, been reading arguments for and against AI art generators for weeks now, and can see that projects like MidJourney, Dall-E and others are useful for, say, kicking around story concepts. I’ve been talking about them with clients, including games producers and publishers.
I even used PicSo myself this week, as an experiment, as a means to generate a single image, a potential starting point for a new story… but with with every intention to work with a human artist to deliver it, and ideas are already being batted back and forth. Using it to created a full comic never crossed my mind.
I will be watching developments in the arena of AI art generation very closely. For me, the court is still out. But right now, I’m more worried about how humans are exploiting others to develop this technology.
The AIware isn’t at fault here. The BioWare in charge is.
Thank you for reading.
John Freeman
*As of this morning, Wednesday 16th November, I had not received any email from DeviantArt of the launch of DreamUp. I wish to make it clear I am not, currently, a paid up subscriber, although I have been in the past