Circular Idiocy · 11:13pm May 10th
This week, I learned there was such a thing as an AI Fixer or "Humanizer."
As a commercial artist, I have been using AI tools mostly because Adobe has been pushing them in my face for a while now, and some of them are actually useful, like an up-rez processor or a canvas extender. Sure, I can do pretty much the same thing with unsharp mask layers or the simple smudge tool, but the AI tools do make the task go a lot faster, even when you factor in the couple dozen iterations you have to go through to get something acceptable looking.
But that's not what I'm talking about here. What I encountered was a job to fix the Lovecraftian horrors produced by Generative AI. (This is evidently done with text as well, hiring writers to "humanize" stilted and bland AI output, instead of having them just write the text in the first place.)
Evidently the suits are not going to give up on trying to replace production artists any time soon. They would rather have an AI produce artwork and then hire an artist to fix it. Cutting out the artist on the front end only to stick them on the back end? Yep, that's the new brilliant idea from execs who spend most of their time golfing and trying to think of ways to squeeze an extra tenth of a percent of profit out of their projects. Evidently there is a "balloon head guy" vid going around that is supposed to be an AI generated movie—and it only took a team of VFX artists to make the thing presentable! The future is dumb.
So, I got a call from a friend of a friend about doing an AI Fix job. I would have turned it down because I'm mostly in the biz for the fun of it nowadays, but the offer was really good, and I was curious, so...
I really wish I could show y'all the before and after shots, but I'm under an NDA. Suffice it to say that I probably could have done a digital painting that matched their specs quicker and easier. In the end, I had to frankenstein several different images together and do a lot of over-painting to get a satisfactory result. The client was pleased, and more convinced that ever that AI art is the future. I'm absolutely certain he showed the images around, presenting them as pure AI art, with no mention of the two days of work that I did on them.
But, I got paid on the spot (which was very nice) and I got to play around with DALL-E2 for a while. It really is impressive for meaningless details or background images where errors in size and proportions aren't really noticeable. Even figures can come out pretty well if you want something basic. But when you need very specific and consistant images that have to reliably follow the prompts or be consistant from image to image, it's not even close to being useful.*
As long as I had the system to play around with, I thought I'd see what it could do with ponies. I really shouldn't have, because I think I'm not going to sleep well tonight:
I'm pretty sure y'all know what I was going for. This isn't the worst one that was generated, but it's a pretty good example of the typical things that go wrong. There were some that even looked pretty good as long as you didn't look too closely, and those were the ones where the prompt was as generic as possible, resulting in generic images (of course) which wasn't what I wanted. I might get a decent Blackmane out of the hundreds of images** I churned out, but it would take the same sort of editing and over-painting I did for the client, and I've got other things to do.
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* Surprisingly, it seems DALL-E2 prompts have to be kept to a grade-school level of vocabulary. It pretty much ignores anything else.
**All generated in just a few seconds! I will admit that AI is blindingly fast. The slow part is sorting through the mountain of obviously unusable junk to get to the things that can be used.
fuck AI >:( and execs and their toadies
A question of curiosity: Is there a time difference in making art from scratch or fixing AI outputs? I'm not an artists, so I don't know how long everything takes.
Bleah, least you got paid well!
Clearly The Opaline Obscurity will involve wave after wave of defective Twilight clones trying to claim Nebula for their own.
Well, the ones who don't collapse from their own poor construction first.
AI art has its place. That place is not for use with art that must be consistent with each iteration. And many of those iterations are true nightmare fuel. Just let the AI do the generic stuff, and let the artists do the real work.
Might end up seeing more specifically focused AI models for different genres of things soon. Fantasy art, realist art, and others all separate so it wont do such an awful job scrambling them all together. Kinda like the coding focused AI chatbots. We'll see though. I think that currently AI is more like the paint bucket tool. You want to fill something in without doing all of the monotonous garbage, filling in the blanks. Its pretty damn good at that, but expectations seem to be extraordinarily high due to hype, as it's the "everything" fix. Background stuff, though, it is really really good at. It'll be the bucket tool until something different comes around, dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Drawing streets? Sure. It'll fill that blank. Boilerplate poweshell script? Sure. It's too much to expect it to do more than that, though, and I can't really understand the hype for putting it in everything from the toaster to the microwave. Hope it gets equalized soon, since it can be pretty annoying at times (and the people parroting it too)
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I can't speak to the specifics of making or editing drawn artwork, but when it comes to writing, I have found it much easier to write (or rewrite) entire scenes and chapters from scratch than it is to edit bits and pieces to bring them up to a better standard.
Renovating a house is often more complex than building it from the foundation up. Accounting for wiring and piping when you break down walls, cleaning up, taking measurements... that's all easier to do the first time, when you're putting things together, not taking it apart as a first step.
I'm not sure if that pic is hilarious or nightmarish
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Well, this is the first time I've ever had direct experience with fixing AI, so I couldn't say for sure. The thing it does that the suits seem to like so much is churn out lots and lots of images, so that they can find something to use as a starting point.
When I worked in video games (long before AI), we called this sort of thing "Building a toy store." That meant that the producer wanted something, but didn't know exactly what until he saw it. So, we had to build an entire toy store so he could pick out a single toy. It seems they're using AI for this part of production nowadays. That aspect is cheaper and faster than requiring artists to produce tons of concept art. But you'll never get something unique and exciting from an AI. No style. It's better to put someone with artistic sensibilities in that position and aim toward a look rather than just churn out tons of median junk. (IMHO, of course.)
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As much as I dislike Generative AI, I have to admit that it's getting better very quickly, and even if it never becomes the miracle machine that is predicted, it's not going away unless our technological civilization collapses. The main problem I see with it is that it will flood our media with mediocracy, making it even harder to find unique and different works of art. It'll be McDonald's french fries all the way down.
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*scribbles down notes*
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Dude! What are you, anti-capitalist or something? But seriously, without our near religious pursuit of profit, Generative AI would have never progressed beyond the "interesting toy" stage. It's just one of a million symptoms of money-poisoning.
pfft, now that's what I call science
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Did you know that way back when nuclear bombs were considered exciting new tech, people were actually proposing to use them for excavation projects and spacecraft propulsion? Not nuclear power, but actual nuclear explosions. Google "Project Orion" if you want a laugh.
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There are a few funny HFY stories out there that involve Project Orion
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A natural combo!
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MMmmmyes. Wow.
I mean... I can understand the direction of: "Big big explody thingy has a lot of n-r-g" followed by: "Turn it into stuff"
But just... Wow...
Like, who looks at those numbers and goes: "Let's put that in space!" Or, "Let's make people ride it!"
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Oh, you think the Orion Drive is out there?
I present to you the Nuclear Salt Water Rocket:
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#id--Nuclear_Thermal--Gas_Core--Open_Cycle--Nuclear_Salt_Water
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Holy Carp!
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Yeah.
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Science