Ask Lemmy

I think it’s more like a police sketch: it might help you clarify an image you have in your head and communicate it to others, but there's generally more to art than that (just like conveying an idea through a pastiche of song lyrics isn’t poetry).

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.

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.

Were you on some sort of deadline? That’s the only reason I can think of that you would allow AI to steal this opportunity for you to grow and improve your skills.

Why stop at the halfway point and let the machine steal the fun? I mean art is hard and challenging but also fun to make... you are right there; the rendering doesn't have to be professional level. I encourage you to give it a go.

I would, at minimum, disclose the use of exactly what AI did for you if you were to sell your art.

I would also assume that anything you put into an AI model is now being absorbed by that model, so now your art is copied and available for the AI to replicate. That's something most artists aren't OK with.

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.

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?

Id say dont be lazy. Its a slippery slope. Better to not use it at all if you even have to question it as cheating.

That and its blatant theft. Every llm company should be being sued to the moon and back.

You can certainly use it as a learning tool, and do your own color and shading over it. It's likely not perfect, so you might be able to improve on it. I wouldn't try to sell AI shaded art, though.

Side question:

How do you pronounce your username?