I know some people hate ai for some reason but i don't. Ai doesnt charge you 300 for one character. Anyways im looking for a FREE website, similar to mobians.ai, id like to generate some templates for ocs. Anypony know one?

https://dezgo.com/
Free. But there are features locked behind a membership. Still usable however.

Use this to scare AI “artists”

I use this one if it will help

https://perchance.org/ai-text-to-image-generator

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Computer engineering student here that has a good amount of exposure to AI services thanks to my classmates around me. The reason why artists tend to charge so much is because they need to make a living off of their work. Art takes time and dedication, meaning that it may be difficult if not impossible to work a second job so that the art they make can be given away for free. The big concern about AI art is how, unlike the factory machinery that luddites once protested against, jobs are now being rapidly taken away while at the same time being minimally replaced, resulting in a net loss of jobs.

In the past, with the advent of industrial machinery and automation, entire new industries started up that was able to rapidly train the people whose jobs were lost to instead run, maintain, and develop the machinery in question. Being largely mechanical in nature, training requirements remained reasonably low and in time became an entire new industry in and of itself.

However, in the current day, in order to get a job doing something similar in AI if your job has been lost to an AI-centric service, you would very likely need to earn yourself a degree within some highly technical field or another, and that costs money. A lot of money. And plenty of time, too. And if you are out of a job because of the very thing you are attempting to get into, it'll be quite hard to pay your way into getting the credentials needed to fill that new position.

At the moment, because of the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT and art-generating services such as Stable Diffusion, the vast majority of jobs that are currently being lost are ones that can sometimes be known as "cognitive" jobs, in which rather than physical action, it is instead mental skill that is required. Writing, whether creative or technical, is rapidly being replaced or threatened, for example. Take the WGA strikes, for example. These are people alongside artists are ones whose entire livelihoods have revolved around an almost entirely non-technical position, and especially "smaller" authors and artists that don't already have the savings to burn will be especially impacted by the loss of their jobs. As mentioned, AI development is a highly technical field, and because of its ties to software development, is itself a position that may very well be at risk of being handed to an AI service for further development.

So I say this, as someone whose interests once revolved around AI, but has since seen its effects on humanity:

It's okay to not be able to afford art from someone else. You can try drawing things yourself, regardless of the quality of your work. AI tools do still have a use, as I've heard around that they are very good for conceptualization of ideas or giving yourself a point of reference to work off of.

Similarly, artists are not universally as expensive as you may think. Being someone who's commissioned art himself, there are plenty of ways to get cheaper art, whether it be by requesting a sketch commission rather than something with full shading and effects, commissioning artists that are looking for practice work rather than full commissions, or even the occasional free open requests that crop up from time to time when someone is feeling especially bored.

Just please, don't find yourself relying on AI entirely.

There's a phrase that I've increasingly begun to hear thrown around regarding AI. I don't remember it word for word, but it was along the lines of: "If you aren't bothered to do it yourself, and would rather have an AI do it for you, then it isn't something worth doing in the first place."

I know that you're only looking for an AI art generator, not something that does the writing for you, but the matter still stands that generative AI is a tremendous risk to people's livelihoods as it becomes normalized.

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I think you are mistaken about the industrial revolution. The weaving machines put thousands of people out of work, as did the other industrial machines. Many of those people never recovered. It was a generation later, give or take where the new economy created demand for products that simply were not accessible to the average person before. It created the middle class and jobs that did not exist before.

Sort of how the cellular phone industry has created tens of thousands of jobs that did not exist twenty years ago.

But, as I started out, there was a gap where a lot of people were tossed onto the streets, and there were no social programs at the time.

Personally I'm convinced that real artists will be able to use AI to produce a product superior to what a non-artist can produce, and they'll be able to produce much more material.

I'm looking forward to the coming boom in animation where a few people working in a garage will be able to produce an animated product that is not inferior to something like MLPFIM,

The need for voice actors will explode and the market for animated products will expand.

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I think your best bet is Stable Diffusion. There are ways of building/training your own models, though that's something outside of my preview. I've been using perchance, as Felwinter recommended, but you're going to run into a lot of issues if you're goal is to make OCs on a regular basis. The prompts you give will not give consistent results, so you will stuck generating images over, and over, and over, and over again until you find something remotely consistent with what you had before. That, or you'll have to do a lot of manual editing in Photoshop like I routinely have to do. That is, of course, if you're to take in image that has glaring issues like:

• Poorly rendered eyes
• extra limbs
• detached anatomy
• skewed proportions
• incorrect colorizations
• no cutie marks
• accidental gender swaps (it happens from time to time)
• genitalia rendered in if the pose you type in has been used too often with porn prompts
• limitations of poses, perspectives, and/or scales without warping the anatomy of the character
• having multiple characters or species
• rendering a character holding most objects or performing actions
• creating specific locations or settings
• controlling the lighting or colors
• perchance does not come close to rendering accurate versions of species other than ponies, with maybe the exception of Smolder and Ember. As for yaks, changelings, hippogriffs, and other dragons and creatures you may want in the MLP style, it is going to give you something completely different visually.

Now, that's not to say you can't use AI to simply generate an image and call it a day, post it, share it, and say, "Hey, that's the character for reference's sake." At the same time, even using just about any AI, it's a crap chute of what you're going to get unless you're running better hardware for a higher-quality image, you really understand the tags/prompts and anti-prompts, and have the right models to work with in the first place. Even then, you're likely still going to have artwork generated that will need touch-ups, recolors, scaling corrections, or any other number of other edits, if not scraped and restarted anyway.

Personally, I'm thankful for the art classes I took and all the photo editing I've done all the years prior that have carried over and allowed me to do the work I do now. Because, honestly, AI only makes what you tell it to, not what you want it to, but usually fucks it up anyway. So, if you only want simple characters in simple art that you have little control over, you have plenty of options. Otherwise, prepare to spend plenty of hours behind the computer generating enough images to work with so you can fix them. That, or stick with traditional methods.

People will mock you either way. Either your art is AI-based, so you're fake and talentless, or your art isn't good enough, so you're still a fake and talentless. In the end, they give you nothing positive to motivate you nor anything helpful to improve. Why listen to anything they have to say to being with?

Do what works for you, just know that quality in all methods requires effort, skill, and the time needed to get there.

7950969
Fair enough. I suppose on the industrial revolution note about the rate of jobs being added back.

you could also test the "partnersite" to mobians.ai, it's called JSCammie.com

OR you try the generator that civitai.com directly has implemented for some models

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This view might sound a bit unpopular but I think people should do whatever makes them happy. As far as I am concerned AI is harmless and there is not much known about it. I think it is natural to fear the unknown. Another natural fear is the fear of being replaced by machines and studies have proven time and time again that machines add more jobs than it takes away. AI is no different. The thing is already let loose in the world so I say let people have there fun with it and I think that the stereotype of AI artists being lazy is kinda dumb because the same could be said for photography and when 2D art came around it was thought that traditional art was going to go away before it was accepted by the public. We are basically just repeating history. There is so much we do not know about AI and I think that the reason why so many artists fear it is because of two things: the age old idea that we will be replaced which has been disproven over and over again and then we also have the fear of the unknown. Sometimes you gotta live and let live. Not to mention I have seen artists claiming that it is stealing art but I think it is a weak argument because so far all of the videos I have seen is basically artists feeding the machine their own art which is basically giving the machine permission to use it. I am going to say the thing that people do not want to hear which is I do not think there is a legitimate way to actually prove that AI is steeling art.

This view might sound a bit unpopular but I think people should do whatever makes them happy.

As I said in my reply, I ended with saying "Do what works for you." My biggest argument was that using AI wasn't a cure-all, given all the limitations.

As far as I am concerned AI is harmless and there is not much known about it. I think it is natural to fear the unknown. Another natural fear is the fear of being replaced by machines and studies have proven time and time again that machines add more jobs than it takes away. AI is no different. The thing is already let loose in the world so I say let people have there fun with it and I think that the stereotype of AI artists being lazy is kinda dumb because the same could be said for photography and when 2D art came around it was thought that traditional art was going to go away before it was accepted by the public. We are basically just repeating history.

Animated films deemed unacceptable because the unusual motions and colors would make the viewers nauseous or give them headaches. That turned out to be wrong.
Digital coloring was the end of art only physical mediums were acceptable. That changed.
3D animation was a fad that would never catch on because it could recreate the same movements, or expressions, and held too many limitations to what traditional animation could provide... That argument didn't last.
Then there was Flash animation, that was considered too crude and limited as a medium to be accepted as legitimate or anything professional. They got that wrong, too.
Hell, even when I studied art (years ago), there were gatekeepers against airbrushing as an art for pieces to be accepted in a gallery.

Ai-generated art won't be the end of art, but it will change the market. It will change the same way digital scanners made online commissions viable, and retail galleries both scoffed and hated that it happened... until they started doing it themselves. Then programs like Photoshop or Corel Paint with Wacom flooded the market with artists, which angered traditional artists who hated the flat-colored art... that steadly got better and grew with more depth, and then they started using those programs to touch up their own art if not make the switch entirely.

However, with AI, we won't see much in terms of artists growing in popularity. It will be those who are great promoters, modelers, or programmers. Or, perhaps, editors who take what AI generates and modify them into something better, if not drastically different.

There is so much we do not know about AI and I think that the reason why so many artists fear it is because of two things: the age old idea that we will be replaced which has been disproven over and over again and then we also have the fear of the unknown. Sometimes you gotta live and let live. Not to mention I have seen artists claiming that it is stealing art but I think it is a weak argument because so far all of the videos I have seen is basically artists feeding the machine their own art which is basically giving the machine permission to use it. I am going to say the thing that people do not want to hear which is I do not think there is a legitimate way to actually prove that AI is steeling art.

I've always hated the claim of "stealing my art" when it comes to copying a style. This argument that no one can draw a curve the way I draw my curves. Only my straight lines can be this type of straight. I used black on my lineart, now you can't, because that's my style.

If someone wants to argue ethics or morality, sure, fine, but art styles are legally not copyrightable. Everytime I hear or read someone complaining about their art being stollen because someone copied their style I want to ask them why their gallery is still up, or who told them that they didn't own it anymore. Because, if their art style was actually stolen, they wouldn't have it anymore, would they?