Art Has Always Been Accessible But Apparently Isn't For Everyone

 Over on Twitter there’s another shitstorm about the use of AI generated images, with lazy, untalented, envious losers claiming to be a good thing because now, for the first time ever—somehow, magically—art is “accessible”:

Though I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. I think I was alright at it and didn’t take it seriously until I started publishing tabletop roleplaying game material over a decade ago.

At the time, virtually every indie hack was resorting to shoehorning Creative Commons crap into their particular brand of vapidware slop. When they could be bothered, they might try their untrained hands at editing images—mashing a few together or smearing one or more Photoshop filters over the top.

I didn’t like this (along with other equally half-hearted and -assed layout and design excuses), and not wanting to spend a fortune commissioning art—especially since I also wanted to keep the overall style consistent—I decided to dust off the cobwebs and see what I could do.

This was the, well…result:

Simple and crude, but it was the first of many laughable attempts that eventually resulted in this:

Better. Nothing to write home about but it’s certainly an improvement, especially with Melissa doing the coloring.

The second cover I did was this:

At the time, I was really channeling Mike Mignola—or, rather, attempting to—because I wanted to at least put covers on our stuff and figured his style was simple enough (and it was, though deceptively so as his art looks way better than what I was able to pull off).

Also, I was doing this on an Intuos (a drawing tablet without a screen), and it was very strange learning to draw not looking at my hand, but a cursor on another monitor (and then back to looking at my hand when we got around to picking up a Cintiq).

We revised the Vancomancer cover years later, which ended up looking like this:

Though I wasn’t especially pleased with these early works, our art ended up being one of the many things people praised us for, so we kept at it. Over time, we started relying less on heavy shadows to obscure details and speed the process up. We also reduced the overall “blockiness” of shapes and tried adding more details:

While illustrating Dungeons & Delvers I was also forced to try my hand at more monstrous creatures, and here you can better see more details and Melissa’s coloring getting more sophisticated:

This is a timeframe of around…five or six years, I think, though I wasn’t drawing every day—or every week—and certainly wasn’t practicing efficiently. I was basically teaching myself and muddling through, trying to break away from the Mignola style incrementally with something Melissa thought looked better.

Eventually I had the brilliant idea to check out Youtube videos from actual professionals and see what they had to say. Our initial iconic ranger looked like this:

And for Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition, she now looks like this:

The original barbarian looked like this:

And now looks like this:

Old sorcerer:

New sorcerer:

Not professional by any stretch but there’s a noticeable improvement, and while perhaps not much—especially when you consider that it’s over a span of many years—again I wasn’t drawing consistently: there could be breaks of days, weeks, sometimes even months between getting back to the Cintiq (I think the longest break was nearly a year).

Even so, I can take a certain measure of pride because I did this. I didn’t prompt a machine to generate an image, apply a filter over something else, and/or mash someone else’s images together. I put in the time, effort, and discipline to get where I am (and there’s still plenty of room to grow as I’d like to work on environments and more dynamic poses and facial expressions).

On a similar note my youngest daughter, the deaf one, is really into drawing.

She improves bit by bit, over a very long span of time of course, but it’s still far more rewarding to observe than were she to just type words in a box and get an image. Which, frankly, I wouldn’t give a fuck about at all: it’s basically a few steps beyond doing an image search in Google, which is still better because, at least back in the day, if you found a neat image you could at least attribute it to human effort.

What makes it both hilarious and pathetic—besides a literal child having a better work ethic, I mean—is that you don’t even need to devote a lot of time each day to learn and improve, and there are several YouTube artists that I’m aware of who offer free exercise courses spanning a 30 day period that can help teach you the basics, faces, characters, etc.

This means the only expense would be paper and pencils, both of which are quite cheap, but you can also snag a small Wacom tablet for around $120 (less so if you don’t mind picking up a different brand and/or something refurbished), and Krita is free and does whatever most people use Photoshop for, anyway.

Mostly, it comes down to simply being willing to log off social media, focus, and put in a bit of time. For many entitled millennials with poor impulse control and an attention span fried by phone addiction, calling this a Herculean endeavor would be a vast understatement—which, of course, means it’s not their fault, you see, but rather the fault of actual artists who are somehow, magically, gatekeeping… something:

Oh, oh, how about: laziness and excuses.

During the initial wave of people trying to normalize AI-generated images you saw flimsy justifications like being unable to draw—from a lack of trying, of course—and expense, and it seems that these have been replaced or at least been supplemented by envy and spite:

I’m guessing STG is carrying a grudge because an artist charged more than he was willing to pay for a commission—which is to say any price at all.

He comes across as the type who sneers at artists making money creating art, insisting that it’s a skill anyone can learn—except for him, obviously because he’s just too busy and has far more important things to do, I’m sure—and now celebrates the fact that he doesn’t have to learn to draw…because he can just prompt a machine to churn out art-slop at the push of a button.

Some might find this somehow rewarding, having a machine do your work for you. I’m guessing they also somehow derive a similar sense of achievement when they watch a Youtuber complete a game, or when DoorDash shows up with their overpriced food.

For me, the time and sacrifice gives it meaning. There’s satisfaction in sitting down to draw, going through many sketches and iterations, changing many details many times, and sometimes scrapping everything when you realize the final result just isn’t right—and there’s no easy fix.

And that might explain some of the envy and hostility towards artists: prompters aren’t learning or improving. They aren’t risking or sacrificing or putting anything of themselves into it, as it were. No one was paying attention to or praising them and—possibly most importantly, at least to the prompters—they aren’t making any money off of it.

They hate artists for doing what they were too apathetic—and maybe too cowardly—to even bother attempting. Maybe there was a token effort, but most likely they made a bunch of excuses: they’ll get to drawing later. They need to buy some art books first. They need a drawing tablet. They need to get some custom brushes. They need to watch a bajillion videos first.

Anything to delay putting pencil to paper (or stylus to tablet) amirite?

It reminds me when I’d see people getting pissed off at someone—maybe even an internet stranger—because they got off their ass and hit the gym. Actually it’s worse: it’s people getting mad at someone who exercises, so then they insult him, take drugs to lose weight and then pretend that they did something meaningful to lose weight, and that the guy is just wasting his time and needs to stop “fighting the future”.

Strange, really fucked up, but I can at least kind of understand why people would attempt to convince others that learning a skill and actually working for a result is a waste of time, and paying someone or something else to do the work is somehow rewarding in any capacity: it’s bullshit, spite-driven sabotage, but I can at least understand the motivation without condoning the action.

But, as strange as that sounds, it’s nowhere near as bizarre as some of the moronically disingenuous strawmanlettes that manlettes like Shad could be bothered to muster:

Note that no artist at any point tried to make this argument, even sarcastically. Samg117’s comment was in response to this smooth-brained assertion:

Unlike his brother Jazza, Shad isn’t an artist—which I think has something to do with his constant insistence of relying on AI crutches—so it’s both amusing and unsurprising that he:

• “Knows” objectively that people don’t like the style (which is still better than anything he can do).

• “Knows” the “actual reasons” people like it.

• Would compare art that is used in animation and therefore needs to be simpler to an AI generated image that isn’t intended to be used in animation.

Why not compare it to something like this:

Or this:

Or even this:

Or this:

Any one of those is far more compelling than Shad’s stock model AI slop because a human made them. A human put in the time and effort to learn, refining his technique and a particular style. If those had been generated at the push of a button, why would you care? You could do the same thing and just as flippantly.

Another poorly fabricated and easily dismantled strawmanlette. I suppose you could say his artistic talent reflects his argumentative rigor and intellectual honesty—or, rather, the lack thereof.

No one claimed that an artist must use a pencil and paper, which would be ludicrous because there are numerous (in)famous works of art that are paintings and sculptures (is he suggesting that, say, artists are claiming or would claim that The Last Supper or The Creation of Adam aren’t works of art?). But then you have comics and many illustrations that are inked, and many people use other mediums such as charcoal, marker, watercolor, etc.

But see then Shad would have had to attempt to (poorly) paint a character instead of pinching out some shitty lineart and flats because having AI attempt to prettify his hilarious mess of a character:

From the video he doesn’t start with a sketch or gesture, or attempt to define the character in anyway: he just jumps right and this is in at least part why I think he’s done this particular pose before and yet am not surprised that she has a massive forehead, tits are a bit off center, her right arm is incredibly short and the legs aren’t the same length.

Also: the overall pose is ridiculous, looks like the left arm would be holding the shield off center, why is the hair doing what it’s doing, not sure how the belt is holding up…whatever that’s supposed to be, spaulder looks off, the rim on the shield looks way too wide on the top and bottom (also why does she have it so high up?), sword is directly facing you because he can’t even manage to angle it a bit (which would follow the angle of the hand), and how she can fit her feet into the boots because I don’t see any straps or laces?

Maybe if Shad were to actually do his own art he’d eventually be able to recognize these issues and work to not only fix them, but prevent them in the future (it feels great when something clicks due to your persistence). But, nope: he seems to be content to let AI do the shoddy work for him and instead waste time trying to convince everyone else that he’s somehow an artist.

It reminds me of this response to a game journalist using cheats to beat a game (Sekiro), because he was too inept and lazy to do it himself:

Similarly, going to McDonalds, ordering food, and then maybe adding a few ingredients—a slice of cheese, salt, more ketchup, etc—doesn’t make you a chef. Entering a marathon, running a few dozen feet, and then paying someone else to run the rest of it for you—or I guess driving to the end and running the last bit—doesn’t make you an athlete. Starting up a game, quitting an hour in, and then watching a Youtuber finish it doesn’t mean that you finished it.

Shad and other prompters like him want to convince you they’re artists because…they can get AI to generate an image for them. This is why I think they want to push artists toward AI, to justify their own laziness and lack of talent. AI stifles growth and would likely cause any existing skills to atrophy. I draw to see what I can do, not a machine or someone else: as with many hobbies and crafts it’s not for everyone, and that’s perfectly fine.

I’d encourage artists to keep doing what they’re doing. Support each other, even if it’s just sharing creations and ideas. If you rely on it as a source of income, hopefully if you take a hit it’s not too bad, but if you end up having to get a second job or something try to keep at it. In any case, refuse to support prompters in any capacity (knowingly, as it may not be possible to realize that someone is utilizing AI to do the work for them).

They seem to take a perverse glee in depriving you of a livelihood—or any amount or sort of compensation, really—over imagined slights and so-called gatekeeping, and I see no reason to support people that hate you.