Young Amanda - The last AI art I will post on this page, for now (Patreon)

Thanks for all of the comments and your votes, which quite decisively 70:30 said you don't want to see AI Art on this Patreon.  I thought it was about time to ask especially since I have been spending a lot of time recently checking out the various tools and seeing what they can do (someone in my position would be stupid not to - and it is very very fun).

Honestly it was great to get so many inputs and comments in half a day, many from people who never comment under images.  It's genuinely quite a surprise when you come out and say you value my 3D Art style so much.  Perhaps say so a little more often and I wouldn't even go near AI.

I would also just point out that although the main focus has been 3D art I have also posted my photography and Mr Guest Artist's drawings, so other media and tools are not banned.  I even used Chat-GPT to write the last Rebel Amanda story, even though I am quite capable of writing.

However it seems that AI art comes with a huge stigma and fear factor, plus there's a hell of a lot of poor quality AI art proliferating over deviantART and this is giving it a bad rep.

I will just point out that 13 years ago when I started using Daz Studio it also had a similar terrible reputation and many of the arguments used against it were almost identical: it takes no skill, the models and props are not your own, it has no soul, learn to draw.  Over the last decade a few of us 'good' 3D artists have shown that actually there is a hell of a lot of technical and artistic skill in composing and lighting scenes, customising props and models, and making poses.  We got good, we got your respect - and some of us even got your money.

I do think that AI art is not going away and that the quality is going to get a lot better.  That said, I think it has some fundamental flaws.  Midjourney is absolutely great for beautiful modelling and character concept art shots, particularly standing up portraits.  It cannot however handle any kind of posing, multi character interactions, and if you put a character in your scene they are always central and focal.  It drives me mad that I cannot tilt the camera (though it does allow some limited movement).  DALL-E is a way more powerful engine and can pose a lot better plus it gives you the exact outfit you describe ('hotpants' and 'crop top' are banned requests on Midjourney).  DALL-E can also draw pantyhose which MJ cannot and will not.  However both routes into DALL-E (Open AI and Bing) are so firmly locked behind lobotomizing filters that if you tried to remake pretty much any picture from this Patreon it would be deemed by a computer to be 'harmful and unsafe'.  The final thing about both engines is that they really cannot draw hands and feet.  These are quite important...

So there you go, there's nothing to be worried about, AI is not going to replace my 3D Art.  In a nutshell it's not technically capable and anyway Californian safety culture has crippled it.

Two final points.

I do hear the argument that AI Art is 'theft' and is also not 'original'.  This is predominantly because it has scraped every image on the internet without paying anyone or asking permission and used it for training.  Any image it produces is just a synthesis of other people's work.  I agree!  BUT!  'Real' artists have been doing this for years.  Everyone uses references and pro digital artists have been kitbashing and painting over photos for years.  Just because they're human it's no different.  I used photo references to make my Genesis 8 Poses, and now people use them in turn as references for their own drawings,  I am actually very relaxed about this and honestly I wish that AI would scrape my dA account, Patreon and even my PC, then it would be better and I could just press a button and get  Amanda peril images for zero effort.  I've put in the work already!

Last of all, the REAL sinister side of AI is that - depending on how much they want to automate the Trust and Safety team at Patreon and dA - it's already reading everything I say now and elevating me to a higher 'unsafety' level.  I actually think that it's not long before an AI is searching every image I post on here and deeming it unsafe.  It's only the fact that the folks at Patreon need to make a living and it would hand their business to the Russians (Subscribestar) that they don't.  Trust me, they DO have the capability, and I am never 'safe'.  So enjoy it while you can!

I've dropped a handful of Young Amanda concept images above as an illustration of what Midjourney can do.  Just look at how wonderful the hair is rendered, and the hoodie, and the environment.  This is how I actually imagine them in my mind's eye (I don't actually 'see' in Daz 3D when I imagine).  So, if you want to see more like this, I will continue to post my creations as a sideline in the channel on my Discord server.  If you're a paying Patreon and don't have access to the server, and would like an invite, send me a private message.