Weekly Update - 148 (Patreon)

Finally home. And with no foreseeable travel planned before August. Thankfully.

I'm honestly pretty sick of not being home, and not being able to post comics. Two back-to-back trips around the holidays was, I think, a mistake. I found myself overwhelmed and really struggling to enjoy the second trip. So let's be done with that while we bring in the new year.

I did do some sketches while we were gone, like I promised.  It was mostly Riley. Because how can I not draw this bean?

There's a few more, I might post them yet. We'll see.

Comic this week? No, the timing of all this travel was bad, and I can't create one in two days. But next week we'll be back for sure.

Drawing: Getting back on track to finish out Chapter 9.

Playing: WoW and DF

Ramble:

So I have a lot of thoughts recently, and a lot of them lately have been about AI art. Thing is, I'm not yet sure what my opinion is or where it falls yet.

AI art is a brand new technology, doing what brand new technologies often do when they are thrust unceremoniously onto a population that hasn't been properly primed to embrace them: disrupting the piss out of everything.

I don't know yet where my opinion falls because I'm not ready to form one. I've heard the arguments, the pros and cons. I understand that, as with all things, there are two very strong opinions both for and against that are currently playing tug-of-war. Personally, I like that AI art has the potential to allow non-artists or busy people to produce art of their own for their own personal use. I like that AI art has the potential to generate cost-free references of any form for artists to use when making their own art. I like that, so far, it looks like AI-generated art might not be copyrightable material, which I think is the correct call (though I'm certain the corpo lawyers are arming themselves to fight THAT battle to the bitter end.) There are also many things about AI art that I don't like. Things that I'm worried about. Being an artist of modest capability myself, there is certainly a worry that the point of my entire existence is potentially at risk. Much like if someone invented a robot that played basketball perfectly, what would be the point of human basketball players?

At the end of the day, the topic is complicated, and my opinion on the matter is also complicated and shifting as I learn and process new information. I certainly don't want us to move towards a world where corporations never need to hire artists ever again because they can just pay for the electricity to run a machine that cranks out completely royalty free and copyright protected art like some kind of tireless profit engine. I don't want us to move towards a world where people stop commissioning their favorite artists because they can just ask the AI to create something in that artist's style for free. I also don't know if these worlds exist yet. As we've seen in many procedurally generated video games, when we are flooded with an incredible amount of things that are all unique and special and interesting, humans still get bored with it really quickly. Would anyone watch a basketball game where all the players were robots that played the game perfectly? I don't think so. Does anyone watch two AI's play chess against each other? Probably not as many as watch two humans play.

There remain a lot of unanswered questions about AI generated art for me, personally, and for us collectively, I think. It will take some time before we learn exactly what this technology can do, what its limitations are, and what benefits it can have. We aren't ready to embrace this technology yet, I don't think. We were caught off guard by it, and, as any animal might be when surprised, we are naturally worried and uncertain about it.

Ideally, I think there could be a world where artists and AI art can coexist peacefully, and artists can make use of AI art to improve their own art. That's the world I want to move towards. But I think we have to answer a lot of questions and I think the technology needs to evolve quite a bit before we can get there.