#i see an ai image and all i see is decades of hard work that was stolen like if u ripped the bones out of a living person

[ducktollers]

who up feeling their spirit get crushed into dust by this ai shit 😂😂😂

[rtfics]

So I'll say it yet again.

AI IS THEFT. IT TAKES THE WRITING AND ART DONE BY AMATEURS AND PROS LIKE ME AND VOMITS IT INTO SHIT USED BY PEOPLE WITHOUT TALENT, DEDICATION, OR ETHICS. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR USING AI.

USE YOUR OWN WORDS OR YOUR OWN ART OR USE NONE AT ALL, UNLESS YOU'RE PAYING SOMEONE ELSE TO WRITE OR DRAW FOR YOU.

I DID NOT SPEND LITERALLY DECADES WORKING HARD AT IMPROVING MY WRITING AND DRAWING TO HAVE SOME TALENTLESS ASSHOLE USE A SOULLESS FUCKING MACHINE THAT REQUIRES THE ENERGY OF A SMALL EUROPEAN COUNTRY TO WRITE A FANFIC OR MAKE FANART.

IF YOU USE AI YOU'RE A THIEF. PERIOD. FULL STOP.

From The New Yorker:

Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?

By Kyle Chayka February 10, 2023

According to the lawyer behind a new class-action suit, every image that a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”

Last year, a Tennessee-based artist named Kelly McKernan noticed that their name was being used with increasing frequency in A.I.-driven image generation. McKernan makes paintings that often feature nymphlike female figures in an acid-colored style that blends Art Nouveau and science fiction. A list published in August, by a Web site called Metaverse Post, suggested “Kelly McKernan” as a term to feed an A.I. generator in order to create “Lord of the Rings”-style art. Hundreds of other artists were similarly listed according to what their works evoked: anime, modernism, “Star Wars.” On the Discord chat that runs an A.I. generator called Midjourney, McKernan discovered that users had included their name more than twelve thousand times in public prompts. The resulting images—of owls, cyborgs, gothic funeral scenes, and alien motorcycles—were distinctly reminiscent of McKernan’s works. “It just got weird at that point. It was starting to look pretty accurate, a little infringe-y,” they told me. “I can see my hand in this stuff, see how my work was analyzed and mixed up with some others’ to produce these images.”

Last month, McKernan joined a class-action lawsuit with two other artists, Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz, filed by the attorneys Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri, against Midjourney and two other A.I. imagery generators, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp. (Other tools, such as DALL-E, run on the same principles.) All three models make use of LAION-5B, a nonprofit, publicly available database that indexes more than five billion images from across the Internet, including the work of many artists. The alleged wrongdoing comes down to what Butterick summarized to me as “the three ‘C’s”: The artists had not consented to have their copyrighted artwork included in the LAION database; they were not compensated for their involvement, even as companies including Midjourney charged for the use of their tools; and their influence was not credited when A.I. images were produced using their work. When producing an image, these generators “present something to you as if it’s copyright free,” Butterick told me, adding that every image a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”

Copyright claims based on questions of style are often tricky. In visual art, courts have sometimes ruled in favor of the copier rather than the copied. When the artist Richard Prince incorporated photographs by Patrick Cariou into his work, for instance, a 2013 court case found that some of the borrowing was legal under transformative use—Prince had changed the source material enough to escape any claim of infringement. In music, recent judgments tend to be more conservative. Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a 2013 case against the Marvin Gaye estate, which alleged that their song “Blurred Lines” was too close to Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” The intellectual-property lawyer Kate Downing wrote, in a recent essay on Butterick and Saveri’s suit published on her personal Web site, that the A.I. image generators might be closer to the former than the latter: ​​“It may well be argued that the ‘use’ of any one image from the training data is . . . not substantial enough to call the output a derivative work of any one image.” “Mathematically speaking, the work comes from everything,” Downing told me.

But Butterick and Saveri allege that what A.I. generators do falls short of transformative use. There is no transcending of the source material, just a mechanized “blending together,” Butterick said. “We’re not litigating image by image, we’re litigating the whole technique behind the system.” The litigators are not alone. Last week, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stable Diffusion alleging that the generator’s use of Getty stock photography amounts to “brazen infringement . . . on a staggering scale.” Whatever their legal strengths, such claims possess a certain moral weight. A.I. generators could not operate without the labor of humans like McKernan who unwittingly provide source material. As the technology critic and philosopher Jaron Lanier wrote in his 2013 book “Who Owns the Future?,” “Digital information is really just people in disguise.” (A spokesperson from Stability AI, the studio that developed Stable Diffusion, said in a statement that “the allegations in this suit represent a misunderstanding of how generative A.I. technology works and the law surrounding copyright,” but provided no further detail. Neither DeviantArt, which owns DreamUp, nor Midjourney responded to requests for comment.)

Visual artists began reaching out to Butterick after he and Saveri filed a lawsuit, last November, in the related but distinct realm of software copyrights. The target of the earlier suit was Copilot, an A.I.-driven coding assistant developed by GitHub and OpenAI. Copilot is trained on code that is publicly available online. Coders who post their projects on open-source platforms retain the copyright to their work—under certain licenses, anyone who uses the code must credit its creator. Copilot did not. Like the artists whose work feeds Midjourney, human coders suddenly found their specialized labor reproduced infinitely, quickly, and cheaply without attribution. Butterick and Saveri’s legal complaint (against OpenAI, GitHub, and Microsoft, which acquired GitHub in 2018) argued that Copilot’s actions amount to “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.” In January, the defendants filed to have the case dismissed. “We will file oppositions to these motions,” Butterick said.

Butterick told me that, given the proliferation of A.I., “everybody who creates for a living should be in code red.” Writers had their turn to be spooked in January, when BuzzFeed announced that it would use OpenAI’s new large language model, ChatGPT, to augment its creation of quizzes. McKernan, who draws income from print sales as well as commissioned illustrations, told me they suspect that the amount of work available in their field is already declining as A.I. tools become more accessible online. “There are publishers that are using A.I. instead of hiring cover artists,” McKernan told me. “I can pay my rent with just one cover, and we’re seeing that already disappearing.” They added, “We’re just the canaries in the coal mine.”

In some sense, you could say that artists are losing their monopoly on being artists. With generative A.I., any user can become an author of sorts. In late January, Mayk.it, a Los Angeles-based music-making app, released Drayk.it, a Web site that allowed users to create A.I.-generated Drake songs based on a given prompt. The results could not be mistaken for actual Drake tracks; they tend toward the lo-fi and the absurd. But they possess a certain fundamental Drakeness: lounge beats, depressive lyrics, monotone delivery. The company’s head of product, Neer Sharma, told me that users had created hundreds of thousands of A.I. Drake songs, a new track every three seconds. The site drew upon software resources such as Tacotron and Uberduck, which generate voices and offer specific voice models, including one trained on the œuvre of Drake. The Web site includes a disclaimer that the songs it generates are parodies, which are protected under fair use, and Sharma told me that the company didn’t receive any complaints from Drake’s camp. But the site has already shut down. The project was designed “just to test out the tech,” Sharma said. “We didn’t expect it to get this big.” The team is now preparing more “A.I. music drops.”

As Sharma sees it, the increasing accessibility of A.I. means that “everything just becomes remixable.” The artists who might thrive in this scenario are those who have the most replicable or exportable “vibe and aesthetic,” he said, among them Drake, the rare pop star who has embraced his status as an open-ended meme. Fans could already dress like Drake or act like him; now they can make his music, too, and the line between fan and creator will blur further as the generative technology improves. Sharma said that the company has heard from executives at music labels who are interested in exploring the creation of A.I. voice models for their artists. He predicted that musicians who resist being “democratized”—giving creative agency to their fans—will be left behind. “The people who could win before just by being there will not necessarily win tomorrow,” Sharma said.

A startup called Authentic Artists is seeking to bypass human artists altogether by creating musician characters based on A.I.-generated styles of music. Its label, WarpSound, features “virtual artists” like GLiTCH, a computer-rendered figure derived from a Bored Ape Yacht Club N.F.T., who plays genres such as “chillwave” and “glitch hop” in endlessly streaming feeds of auto-generated music. Authentic Artists’ founder Chris McGarry told me that the character is meant to give a face to the A.I. machine. “We wanted to answer the question, what is the source of the music? A semiconductor or cloud-based server or ones and zeros didn’t seem to be a terribly interesting answer to that question,” he said.

Listening to Authentic Artists’ music, however, is a bit like trying to enjoy the wavering buzz of highway traffic. If you’re not paying attention, it can serve as a passable background soundtrack, but the moment you tune in closely any sense of coherent sound gives way to an uncanny randomness. It called to my mind a much-memed comment that the Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki made after being shown a particularly grotesque A.I.-generated animation in 2016: “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” I wouldn’t go quite so far, but Authentic Artists’ project does strike me as an insult to human-made music. They can manufacture sound, but they can’t manufacture the feeling or creative intention that even the most amateur musicians put into a recording.

Kelly McKernan sometimes snoops on conversations about generative A.I. on Reddit or Discord chats, in part to see how users perceive the role of original artists in the A.I. image-making process. McKernan said that they often see people criticizing artists who are against A.I.: “They have this belief that career artists, people who have dedicated their whole lives to their work, are gatekeeping, keeping them from making the art they want to make. They think we’re élitist and keeping our secrets.” Defenders of A.I. art-making could point out that artists have always taken from and riffed on each other’s work, from the ancient Romans making copies of even older Greek sculptures to Roy Lichtenstein reproducing comic-book frames as highbrow Pop art. Maybe A.I. imagery is just a new wave of appropriation art? (It lacks any conceptual intention, however.) Downing, the intellectual-property lawyer, argued in her piece that the prompts that users input into A.I. generators may amount to independent acts of invention. “There is no Stable Diffusion without users pouring their own creative energy into its prompts,” she wrote.

McKernan told me about Beep Boop Art, a Facebook group with forty-seven thousand followers that posts A.I.-generated art and runs an online storefront selling prints and merchandise. The images tend toward the fantastical: a wizard hat or a lunar landscape in a Lisa Frank-ish style, or a tree house growing above the ocean. It may not be a direct riff on McKernan’s work, but it does reflect a banal over-all sameness across generated art. McKernan described typical A.I. style as having “this general sugary, candy look,” adding, “It looks pretty, but it tastes terrible. It has no depth, but it serves the purpose that they want.” The new generation of tools offers the instant gratification of a single image, shorn of the messy association with a single, living artist. One question is who gets to profit from such works. Another is more existential. “It kind of boils down to: what is art?” McKernan said. “Is art the process, is art the human component, is art the conversation? All of that is out of the picture once you’re just generating it.” ♦

[sepdet]

Candidates' Different Views on Labor Day

Their contrasting social media posts, with bonus federal law violation and (I think?) AI generated fake workers from Trump, are illuminating:

Contrast that with Trump and Musk joking about firing striking workers a few weeks ago:

Under Biden, Harris chaired Biden's pro-labor task force assigned to "promote [Biden's] policy for worker power, worker organizing, and collective bargaining." Here is the plan they created with specific proposals.

As I've noted, my intro to Harris was at a 2017 rally for the ACA organized by SEIU Local 721. As VP, she's done a lot of union outreach, like this speech celebrating collective bargaining to honor the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas.

---

Meanwhile, Trump's Labor Day email to his followers is a shill for illegal merch:

US Public Law 94-344, the Federal Flag Code: "Out of respect for the US flag, never

place anything on the flag, including letters, insignia, or designs of any kind. [...]

Use the flag for advertising or promotional purposes."

The Flag Code was a big deal in the 80s, Trump's favorite decade. Congress passed a law with a big fine and/or jail time for knowingly violating it. The Supreme Court rightly struck down those penalties as a violation of free speech, but the code remains.

Trump followed this email with Labor Day posts on his social media platform:

Happy Labor Day to all of our American Workers who represent the Shining Example of Hard Work and Ingenuity. Under Comrade Kamala Harris, all Americans are suffering during this Holiday weekend - High Gas Prices, Transportation Costs are up, and Grocery Prices are through the roof. We can’t keep living under this weak and failed “Leadership.”….

Workers an afterthought. Every time he calls Kamala "Comrade," I remember Russian news btoadcasts calling him "Comrade Trump."

….In my First Term, we achieved Major Successes to protect American Workers by negotiating Free and Fair Trade Deals, passing the USMCA (U.S./Mexico/Canada), and giving Businesses and their Workers the tools to thrive. We also invested heavily in Education and Job Training programs for those who wish to expand upon their abilities, and be successful in an Industry that they love. We were an Economic Powerhouse, all because of the American Worker! But Kamala and Biden have undone all of that. When I return to the White House, we will continue upon our Successes by creating an Environment that ensures ALL Workers, and Businesses, have the opportunity to prosper and achieve their American Dream. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Dismantling Obama's trade deals and putting in his own which raised tarriffs and prices and killed supply chains, making shit up, and taking credit for Biden's job training programs, par for the course. Labor Day? All about ME ME ME.

Someone on the Trump campaign realized that he probably needed a picture of himself with workers, since Kamala had posted one shaking hands with them.

However, there's something off about this image posted to his social media site at 5PM:

The suit and tie are so unnaturally smooth, I did a reverse image search to see if it was a real photo. Zero Results. What are the chances? Any photo like this should already be on the web. And there's what look to be AI artifacts (Eg guy on left missing half of vest, fragments of orange stripes).

TL;DR: I don't think he found a group of workers or cosplayers to loom in front of; I think he's embraced the AI generated crowds he falsely accused Harris of using.

[mariacallous]

Years ago, when people still used Boolean search and I was a cub reporter, I worked with photographer Nick Ut at the Associated Press. It felt like being in the presence of one of the Greats, even though he never acted like it. We drank the same office coffee, even as I was barely out of journalism school and he had a Pulitzer Prize that was nearly three decades old. Ut, if you don’t recognize the name, took the photo of “Napalm Girl”—Kim Phuc, whom Ut captured in 1973, at 9 years old, running from a bombing in Vietnam.

Lots of people know that photo. It’s one of the most searing images to come out of the Vietnam War—one that shifted attitudes about the conflict. Ut himself wrote many years later that he knew a single photo could change the world. “I know, because I took one that did.”

Hundreds of photos have come out of the Israel-Hamas war since it began more than seven months ago. Bombed out buildings, mass funerals, damaged hospitals, more injured children. But, as of this week, there’s one that’s garnered more attention than most: “All eyes on Rafah.”

The image features what appears to be an AI-generated landscape in which a series of refugee tents spells out the image’s title phrase. The exact origins of the image are murky, but as of this writing it’s reportedly been shared more than 47 million times on Instagram, with many of those shares coming in the 48 hours after an Israeli strike killed 45 people in a camp for displaced Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The image was also shared widely on TikTok and X, where a pro-Palestine account’s post featuring the image has been viewed nearly 10 million times.

As “All eyes on Rafah” circulated, Shayan Sardarizadeh, a journalist with BBC Verify, posted on X that it “has now become the most viral AI-generated image I’ve ever seen.” Ironic, then, that all those eyes on Rafah aren’t really seeing Rafah at all.

Establishing AI’s role in the act of news-spreading got fraught quickly. Meta, as NBC News pointed out this week, has made efforts to restrict political content on its platforms even as Instagram has become a “crucial outlet for Palestinian journalists.” The result is that actual footage from Rafah may be restricted as “graphic or violent content” while an AI image of tents can spread far and wide. People may want to see what’s happening on the ground in Gaza, but it’s an AI illustration that’s allowed to find its way to their feeds. It’s devastating.

Journalists, meanwhile, sit in the position of having their work fed into large-language models. On Wednesday, Axios reported that Vox Media and The Atlantic had both made deals with OpenAI that would allow the ChatGPT maker to use their content to train its AI models. Writing in The Atlantic itself, Damon Beres called it a “devil’s bargain,” pointing out the copyright and ethical battles AI is currently fighting and noting that the technology has “not exactly felt like a friend to the news industry”—a statement that may one day itself find its way into a chatbot’s memory. Give it a few years and much of the information out there—most of what people “see”—won’t come from witness accounts or result from a human looking at evidence and applying critical thinking. It will be a facsimile of what they reported, presented in a manner deemed appropriate.

Admittedly, this is drastic. As Beres noted, “generative AI could turn out to be fine,” but there is room for concern. On Thursday, WIRED published a massive report looking at how generative AI is being used in elections around the world. It highlighted everything from fake images of Donald Trump with Black voters to deepfake robocalls from President Biden. It’ll get updated throughout the year, and my guess is that it’ll be hard to keep up with all the misinformation that comes from AI generators. One image may have put eyes on Rafah, but it could just as easily put eyes on something false or misleading. AI can learn from humans, but it cannot, like Ut did, save people from the things they do to each other.

[glitchphotography]

If u think losing a gig to an AI is hard, try losing gigs because your bosses are racist or xenophobic or homophobic or sexist, or try not getting gigs at all because bosses dont think your work is as legitimate as the dude who can draw 100 identical spidermans.

There are serious structural issues with pay-to-play AI services like Dalle2 and it’s centered on how these companies data laundered copyrighted works using fair use laws and research institutions to privatize a tech that should be considered public infrastructure for everyone.

But AI Art itself isn’t evil, its a tool that has been used by new media artists for at least a decade. There’s obviously ethical ways to create AI art: train your own models, create outputs based out of your own works, attribute the artists you use in your prompts, etc.

But suddenly caring about copyright like you are now team disney and team nintendo is weak. And seriously, most of your artstation works aren’t original either. Yall living off of borrowed aesthetics from 100 years of comic books and cartoons and illustrations.

AIs can’t plagiarize the way humans do. You are seeing a calculated average of images. The reason shit looks like your favorite illustrators is because a lot of these illustrators make similar art, and most people writing AI prompts have similar basic tastes. Making great AI Art from prompts takes time and patience and a keen sense of poetics.

But seriously, y’all don’t hate new tech, you hate capitalism and the corpos and bosses who are out to expropriate you.

AI Art, if anything, is the new folk art. Same repeated motifs made by anyone with a clue. This is a wonderful mingling of collective creative energies. Embrace it!

Addendum for all the reactionary responses out there:

~~~~~~~~ Artists should be getting royalties from OpenAI, Midjourney, et al. And they should be able to opt in or out of having their work included in training models. This is a given and I would never argue against compensating artists!  ~~~~~~~~

This isn’t about defending these corpos either, but machine learning tech has been around before these companies started their thing and experimental artists from around the world have been using machine learning to make great art.

Another thing: the moment you post your digital art to a platform, you sign away much of your consent w/r/t how your art is used. Thats what those really long TOS are about. ArtStation and istock were scraped for data under the pretext of Fair Use, which allows or mass scraping internet data for research purposes. Fair Use is like the one law that for the most part, protects artists from the disneys and nintendos of the world. I wouldn’t be able to glitch video games without it. Emulated videogames wouldnt exist with out it either So the question is, why are corporations allowed to use Fair Use as a cover for developing privatized pay-to-play services? People who know a thing, will point out that Stable Diffusion is open source, and that’s great, but why are privatized services allowed to be built on open source infrastructure? Especially when this tech hasn’t been properly vetted for racial biases, pr0nography, etc

Yes its shitty, but these arent arguments against AI tech but against juridical structures under capitalist regimes.

[thesagebrushkid]

New computer = New art!!! So, after 2-3 years of not being able to work on anything because my last computer had no ports for my tablet, I got a new one last weekend. It's hard to believe I went close to 3 years without being able to create anything. As such I am relearning everything. I am also re-honing in on my "classic comic book skills" which I have not touched since I left DC comics....decades ago. I am not as skilled using a tablet and computer as I was with traditional pen and ink. Can't believe the price of India Ink these days. Sheesh. Anyway, I digress on that. I was up till 3:30 last night trying to get this done. SO....here is the first for 2024. Happy belated Easter/Equinox. While such creatures like Jackalopes and Sasquatch are extremely rare, they are out there. And with them come legends. In Sage's world, if you catch a Jackalope on the morning of the Spring Equinox, you will have good luck the whole year long. So, Sage and the boys are out to get them some luck. The catch to the legend is you have to let it go before midnight to ill luck will reign down on you for 2 years. And if you kill it...you will die one year later. Not sure who that would work with Sage's immortality. I mean he is killed almost weekly. LOL.  The traditional depiction of Jackalopes always was disturbing to me (A hare with antlers) It just would not work and the antlers would serve no purpose.  So, I revamped the traditional to something that is actually plausible/impossible: JACKALOPE: A small hooved deer about 3' tall with the head and long ears of a rabbit. Instead of burrowing, it just lives on the plains. Its antlers allow it to knock edible leaves and fruits off of trees and its long ears allow extra hearing perception, being that it is certainly prey to wolves, coyote and cougars. It still has lesser speed of a White-Tailed Deer due to its short legs but can kick the eff out of anything. It lives in small family units of 2-10 but often will take off on its own, once it is not dependent on the family. Seeing one Jackalope on its own is rare. Seeing a family unit is close to impossible. The Wolf Tribe calls them "Jakennesu" and the Messo Blood tribe calls them "Kallopae". When the first Europeans moved west, they confused the two names and so they took the names of both and fiddled them into "Jackalope." Didn't think this would turn into an Animal Biology class, did you? There is a test on Friday. LOL.

Created by myself, with my own human hands, without the need of AI nor stock images. Nor does my art steal jobs from human beings. My work is ART, not images dictated to a computer by lazy people that are stealing jobs from REAL artists. Those that live with AI will die by AI and may Hell save their souls, because for all your sins against humanity, neither God nor Heaven will have you. May every dollar you steal from an artist with your AI sins, so it will be taken from you in turn 1000-fold. Telling a computer to create 50 pictures a day, by taking images from other peoples to make pictures of naked superheroes DOES NOT make you an artist. It just proves to the world you are lazy fat-ass, as well as sexually and mentally unstable.  The Sagebrush Kid is the creation and property of Hallow Comics © 1981 - Present

[hardtruthsfromsoftcats-blog]

Hellooooooo fans of Hard Truths from Soft Cats!...Hello?  Where is everyone?  ...A-ha! *Bends shrub aside to find five tumbleweeds inside*Ah, well, it has been a while, but hopefully this blog still has followers. Hey all!  We're reviving this blog for a limited short run, called "Hard Truths From AI Generated Cats."  They're still just as soft as before, but a little bit glitchy, if you know what I mean.

Why are we doing this?  Well, for clarity, my "name" is Ace (I'll probably put my real name up eventually), and I'm not the original creator of this page, but a friend.  Like a cicada (but much cuter!), this webcomic popped back into my life after eight years of dormancy, around the same time I was talking with a friend about image generators.  I asked HardTruths F. SoftCats for their blessing (yep, that's their real name, sorry to doxx you like that!), and he was supportive.  I think in the eight years since HTFSC ended, life has only gotten harder and truthier (and I mean that in the absolute Colbertian sense of the word); one could probably write an entire thesis on that subject in cat-form, but this run will serve a very specific purpose.

I am an AI researcher myself, and I work on projects that include generative machine learning methods.  At once, I am both incredibly excited and fearful of the potential of these algorithms.  As someone with no drawing capability myself, I feel suddenly empowered to be able to take on art projects I otherwise would not have.  But then, as a hobbyist writer, when I look at GPT, while I don't feel threatened now, I see a future where the technology becomes better and could make my hobby obsolete; for those where it's their livelihood, the worry is far more tangible.

Technology rarely rewinds, but it often can be made to work for, not against, the people. But this only happens if we not only say we need to have a discussion (which is where so many conversations actually end), but to actually have one.  That is a conversation that needs to happen in public forums with those who have the power to effect change, at the level of grassroot and corporate organizations and policymakers, the latter of whom are at least a decade late to the party.  The box has been opened, but whether it's Pandora's Box or a treasure chest is still up to society.

I'll post a comic today and then and likely on a Monday/Thursday schedule after that until I run out, and maybe I’ll accompany it with some commentary.  I hope this is a pithy and cuddly conversation-starter; all I can bring you is the hard truth from probabilistically soft cats.

[rachelillustrates]

Sunday Gnomedays 12-18-22

Something something something about hope.

Drawn in the middle of this weekend’s snowstorm, in the face of a lot of exhaustion of many kinds, including frustration over the AI art situation and all the violation therein.

(Protest image by Zakuga Mignon, used with permission.)

Everything seems desperate and hopeless in the face of such blatant disregard for creative rights. Such complete lack of care about consent and proper credit, such disregard for what we’ve all gone through as artists – regardless of level of formal training or not – to get where we are. We’ve all worked SO hard to build what we have, however small or large our following, so to see it stolen and to see people flock to this idea that we somehow deserve to have had this happen to us because of “elitism” (which is such poppycock, especially in this day and age and with so many artists offering tutorials and classes online for very affordable prices, if not for FREE) is heartbreaking.

I want to not care if I see someone using it for fun. I understand it can just be a casual tool for self expression. The problem (on top of the fact that it’s already literally art theft – the AI pulling from mass internet searches of existing artwork without the consent of those artists) is that many people are using it to produce images as if it’s their own created artwork, and beginning to charge for it as if they created it. Undermining years, decades, of actual labor by actual artists. All the practice and learning and blood and sweat and tears.

We have WORKED for this. We put our hearts and souls into this.

We have not consented to devices like AI using our literal work to build AI images from. And we do not consent to people using our work to charge people as if THEY created it.

Most artists, at least those I’ve seen vocal about this issue, work freelance. It’s not like we have a big union to back us. All we have are our voices. So, I urge you – please – avoid using AI art. Do not support it in ANY fashion, if you care about artists’ rights at all.

And to circle back to the piece for today’s SG – something, something, something about hope. I hope that people hear us. And I hope that those of us who have felt like giving up over this – honestly, myself included – do not stop creating.

No matter what happens, we deserve to be here. Still.

~

💗 Bonus art and stories ~ Prints, comics and more! 💗

[rethmyc]

Ai Arts on Trial

I've been seeing a lot of Ai art discourse and I figured I'd join in with my 2 cents for once. The issue is more nuanced than it first appears and I want to share. If you disagree with me then great! I want to hear why. Lmk ur thoughts.

Art is hard to make. I’ve been drawing and 3d modeling for years and I really enjoy it. I know for a fact that there are artists out there massively better than me that have put in even more effort to perfect their craft. Props to them.

I've been playing around with Ai art for about a week or so. After some good discussion with my siblings here are some points I'd like to share.

Ai art is accessible and allows unskilled users to create things they enjoy.

Ai art is equal to drawing stick figures. Everyone knows it’s a “low form” but we weren’t trying to go in a museum anyways.

Classical artists should be allowed to opt out of being part of the training data or be otherwise compensated for their contributions.

The technical side of ai art is quite impressive. One can be “good at” creating prompts to get a specific effect. It is not entirely without skill.

Ai art can be useful for rapid prototyping of classical media projects.

Computers have been part of the artistic process for decades now. You’re telling me you did that gaussian blur yourself? You did all the math for that fluid simulation personally? All that raycasting was calculated by hand? What’s the difference?

As of right now, ai art is not good enough to replace human artists. Even if it did I don’t think it would pose a real threat to the community. If you want the best possible art piece, commissioning a human will be best.

People who make ai art should be called artists based on the amount of time and effort they put in like anyone else. Someone who generates images with some simple keywords is not at the same level as someone who uses long prompts, negatives, and inpainting.

The people most at risk are smaller artists. Their quality of work is most easily mimicked and they have the most to lose. They have the right and responsibility to push back against ai art.

If a person were to go and study all of a given artists works, practice their style, and gained the ability to recreate them perfectly, I don't think there would be any backlash. The style is "stolen" all the same, and the original artist isn't making money off of the new artist's creations. Ai follows the same process but much faster. What's the difference?

The main difference we noticed was scale. A person who practiced can't hope to create as many works as a trained, well prompted Ai in the same amount of time. At least, I don't think so. I'd like to test that.

Individual, personal use of Ai art generators is probably not going to spell death for classical artists. Large scale, corporate use is going to be an issue though. If Pepsi is making ads using Ai's trained on images they don't own, there ought to be legal repercussions.

This is similar to the invention of the sewing machine on a personal and industrial level. Hand sewing garments no longer needed so many people. Will the people be replaced by Ai artists? Or will those same people adapt and start creating even more art than before with Ai as a tool?

Cameras didn't destroy painting or drawing. Why should Ai generators destroy other media?

Ai art probably doesn’t belong in a museum (tbh what media do and don’t is its own topic of debate), but it also doesn’t deserve total hatred from artistic communities.

If you disagree please tell me why! I just want to start a discussion about this. The technology is here and it's not going to leave, we need to talk about what we're gonna do about it.

[yourpalminsk]

So this new AI policy from Tumblr is putting me in a very uncomfortable state. I need to jot down some of these thoughts to get my head straight and to solicit some advice from other users.

For context, before this site, I posted my art from 2021-2022 on DeviantArt. Before that, I had posted there as a crummy teen over a decade ago, so it had a sense of familiarity that made me go back to it in my current day as a hobbyist artist. dA's brazen decision to create their own AI generator from user data and have everyone be opt-in by default was something that ran too far counter to my principles. I made the decision to leave the site, and instead began to post on Pixiv and Tumblr. You can find my thoughts from that time here.

I have conflicted feelings over AI images, as I've previously supported an open policy for the reuse of art which wouldn't technically be opposed to AI use, but I'm also sympathetic to the rights of artists and don't want to see them abused. And I have to admit that seeing the deleterious effect on the art space over the last year has hardened me further against the idea of AI images.

My one red line is the importance of attribution to the original artist, which dA's AI engine did not respect at all, so out of solidarity I had to abandon the site. This opt-in policy for AI scraping from Tumblr is to me slightly less offensive than dA's actions, but I still find it a crossing of my line. By my own principles, I am leaning towards having to leave this site as well.

Unfortunately, the choice feels much harder this time. While it felt bad to leave dA and people who watched me there, I was ultimately able to live with the choice (especially after providing links to follow me here and on Pixiv). The problem is that I feel even more beholden to the community here on Tumblr. Of course I'm being a little egotistical here as I don't have a real audience to speak of here, but I often feel real resonation with the people who do stumble over my images.

To be clear, I was happy and humbled by all the people who liked my works on dA, and continue to be so by people who like it on Pixiv. It's just that with Tumblr, even if I have less views, I often get messages that make it sound like my images were really appreciated. It's like every topic, even an obscure work, seems to have a fandom here that really appreciates when art of their topic is made. Even my shoddier earlier images like my Apex Legends images or my first image of Snufkin have gotten comments about the poster being really affected by it, and that in turn really affected me.

So I'm really conflicted now on what my course of action should be. My principles tell me that Tumblr's actions regarding AI are not agreeable and I should walk away. But the community here is making me have a real hard time pulling the trigger this time. BUT BUT, another voice is making me question if it's just my selfishness making me not want to abandon the positive attention here, and I'm betraying my solidarity to other artists who are being trampled by Tumblr's policy by choosing that attention instead.

I also have the challenge of figuring out where to go from here. Am I to just stick to Pixiv? (They do allow AI images, but as far as I know they don't promote the scraping of non-AI art without consent from its artists, which is why it doesn't cross my red line. If someone knows differently about Pixiv, DO let me know.) I have no idea what other art sites I could migrate to at this point. I still find the internet at large an intimidating place to interact in, so I feel completely clueless on what to do.

I don't know, this entire blog post might be an exercise in ego-stroking. I know I'm not entitled to an audience for my art, nor advice on this conundrum. Certainly, there are professional artists way more affected than myself by the AI situation, and anyone reading this should consider their situation far before mine. If this blog post is inconsiderate, I'll accept that I'm out of my league and hold my tongue. But if anyone resonates with this post and could provide any advice, please know that you would be appreciated.

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. 

We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.

To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option. 

For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc. 

Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.

If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.

[jamieroxxartist]

Saw this on my feed this morning.

And that's Very True.... Personally, I don't have a problem with it... So long as they keep making everything they do look like it's under a layer of cling wrap.

Some additional thoughts in relation to AI Artwork from a Painter. I have been painting Professionally since 2001. around 10 years of schooling and getting it together before that. So Yeah, been at it for a while. Also have a couple of degrees in my back pocket and know the art world, and how the actual world we all live in works. I have a pretty good bead on it.

Here's the lay of the land as I see it.

First I have a certain affection for certain parts of various paintings I have painted over the years (decades now, Geeze-Lousie!) 'Say, I like this about that. Gee That worked really well, I'll have to remember that move, that technique' etc etc.

But these Are Not my Children. Look, I wouldn't sell my Children! They are not my babies! I mean, not really if I'm honest. I never painted them to be. That wasn't / isn't their job (for me)

But rather I want whomever purchases, or acquires them, to feel that they are their babies! Heck they spoke to them. They made that special connection, the one between Art and the observer. If I listened to all the 'Art speaking to me' in here (my studio, my head) I'd go insane! It's an F'ing MadHouse in here!

Anyhow as far as AI goes, all it is, is just pretty regurgitation, I mean literally, it is. That's all. I mean yeah, you could probably survive on it, but would you really want to?

Look I can pretty much confidently say, that for all of the people who have bought my art, yes they dig the paintings, of course. It spoke to them. But they also dig that I was able to make that happen for them, as a painter, an artist.

Am I worried about losing a sale to an AI image? No. I am not. I have done this long enough to know, that anyone who would prefer to hang that over the piano as opposed to a Real, human-created painting isn't someone I was going to sell to anyhow. They were not at a place, intellectually, spiritually, whatever you want to call it, to take that ride.

When Warhol started painting color-splotches and splashes, backgrounds and highlights on silkscreens did the masses run out and start buying just screenprint images for that perfect place in their perfect pad? No! No one gave 2 shits about the screenprint. If they did, don't you think ole Andy would have made sure all those copies were a little more cleaned up? He really wasn't one to leave money on the table.

His collectors dug what he had created. You take ole' Andy out of that equation... well it just doesn't work.

I was with my wife at IKEA a bit back and they were selling a $35 Audrey Hepburn silk screen print. Why would someone buy one of my more expensive paintings of Audrey when they could just buy that? And look I absolutely think if that's what they want that's what they should buy. But the reason that folks have bought mine, is that there is just something about it, that they needed. It's hard to explain it to someone who has never had that connection yet. There's just something about it. And that's simply what AI can't copy. I honestly doubt if it ever will be able to understand that, let alone reproduce it.

When I go to the symphony and hear a symphony knocking out Beethoven's 9th. I tear up. It speaks to me. That doesn't happen for me, when I listen to a recording. Even if it's a recording of the same symphony, same performance. Is that the same for everybody? Probably not, but boy am I glad that it's that way for me. That I can have that connection. I get that not everyone can, and I feel sad for those who cannot.

So yeah, anyhow, are Fine Artists worried about the AI-Generated art revolution? None that I know are. And neither am I.

However, if I were a Graphic Designer and made my living doing that, yeah I would be. Absolutely.

[stevensavage]

As of late, I’ve started wondering what technologies we’re used to are just going to go away. That’s also a great way to close out the end of the year.

Of course technologies always fall by the wayside. Some don’t work, some get replaced, some get improved, some aren’t practical. There’s a lot created in human history that’s not in widespread use in Western society. Technologies going away is normal (as is reviving them, but that’s another story).

I wonder as of late how many technologies we’ve created are a mix of unsustainable and actually just useless. How many will just go away or could because there’s no reason to keep them or we can’t.

Mostly I’m thinking about “computer stuff,” because that’s what I’ve worked on almost all of my career. I just feel like the last decade or so things have gotten faintly ridiculous.

Embedding computers and wireless into everything. I’m missing simple electro-mechanical solutions, cable connections, and of course I wonder about security issues. Plus how sustainable is “microchips everywhere.”

So-called “AI” which is really just large language models and or algorithms. There’s a ton of hype around it, while it consumes resources and creates all sorts of legal and information issues. AI hype also eclipses really good tools for things like image analysis and searching that aren’t as sensational.

The ads in everything. Yes, we can put ads in everything, but it feels like it’s gotten overdone. Also how much web technology has grown around serving damn ads.

Social media. I think we’ve started to see people rethinking how it’s used – let alone the social, security, and technical issues. Also it seems everyone keeps trying to undermine everyone else. Oh, and ads.

Streaming. Maybe I’m old but I’m starting to miss cable.

Graphic cards. Do I need the latest particle effects when some games run on the CPU? Also, this stuff is getting used for crypto.

And so on.

I’ve been wondering if what we see in technology is basically a lot of people made money, so they can “make” things succeed by investing their word and considerable money into it. Others already had a lot of money so they can try to “make” a market. Combined together I wonder how much of our technological world is just propped up by money, hype, and newness.

And I wonder how much of that is going to be around because what’s the value proposition. Streaming is nice and all, but it’s hard to keep track of everything and it gets pricey. Computer everything doesn’t seem sustainable between costs and the fact it seems we’re well on the way to see refrigerators infected with malware. How much of the technology out there is needed versus just hyped, and we race to get ahead? How oversaturated are markets?

Also can any of this survive our various crises in the world? I mean stuff is kinda shaky right now.

I don’t know. But I have the gut feeling that there’s changes coming as some things can’t be sustained or that no one wants them, needs them, or can pay for them.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com

[nickgerlich]

Smile For The Camera

In spite of marketers’ best efforts to try to overcome the limitations of the e-commerce platform, the fact remains that for all the ease and convenience of shopping online at home, there are some matters that can only be resolved inside a BAM store. Unless a customer has already performed the task before and is now simply in re-order mode, there’s risk in buying some new things.

Like clothing and other personal products.

Walmart, though, is making significant steps to help resolve some of the time and space gaps. Their efforts are not perfect, and could indeed raise eyebrows, but they are big steps. For example, in September 2022 they expanded virtual try-on in the women’s department. They had bought start-up Zeekit in 2021, and the technology allowed users to upload a photo of themselves. The AI and AR would take it from there, letting shoppers “try on” clothing right there on the screen. I wrote about it at the time, and reaction from my MBAs was mixed.

And now they have partnered with Perfect Corp. to offer AR-powered try-on in the cosmetics department. Users can sample 1400 different products, and this time do not need to upload a selfie. Oh, and it is all designed to work within Walmart’s iOS app. Score one more point for mobile.

Now for people like me who absolutely hate to shop for clothing, virtual try-on would be golden. I��d even be willing to take the risk on the first purchase when it comes to actual fit. Let’s face it, a 34” waist in one brand may be comfy, but in another brand may be either too big or too small.

But I understand Walmart’s inclinations to try this with women first, because—no sexism intended—women tend to be more conscious of these matters. If Walmart can crack this nut, it should be easy peasy to rope in the guys.

I also understand the limitations of even these high tech solutions. Color can vary considerably across phones, tablets, and laptops, by virtue of settings and quality of the device. Nuanced shades in the red family, for example, could come out looking muted or like a fire truck.

Then there’s the issue of privacy. Walmart swears that no user data (including images) will be saved from the cosmetics try-on. But for its clothing service, it does depend on just that. Would you want to share a photo of yourself with Walmart—or anyone, for that matter—just for the sake of seeing how you might look in that new dress?

Walmart is also considering how to use the clothing try-on inside its stores, with sophisticated mirrors that have cameras built in. Stand in front of the mirror, and then tell the machine what to do next. If trying on clothes is not your jam, this could save tons of time.

Back to the cosmetics, I see this greatly enhancing sales. Walmart may not be every woman’s first choice for beauty products, but this could pierce that veil. I have to laugh every time I enter a Dillards or similar department store, and find myself having to cut a trail through a cosmetics department that is at least a couple hundred linear feet long. Female clerks in lab coats await customers, and they give them personal applications. It’s great theatre, because it has the look and feel of science going on.

Which then raises another question. Do women crave that 1-on-1 interaction for something so uniquely personal as one’s choice of beauty products? Speaking for myself and not all men, that would send alarm bells and flashing lights into action. No way, no how. Alas, we are not all the same.

I realize there are some for whom purchase of these types of products necessitates a visit to stores. I also realize that the majority of the reluctant ones are probably closer in age to me than they are my students. When you have done something a certain way for decades, it can be hard to learn and adopt new methods.

I bet my tech-savvy daughters would be all over the cosmetics try-on. Instead of the usual Ulta gift card I put in their Christmas stocking, I could just as easily do it for Walmart and let them get on their phones. Because they are young, they are not as likely to be stuck in their ways.

There’s no future in getting old, and let’s face it, my generation’s major consuming days are behind us. Subtract 40 years, and you have legions of young shoppers open to new ideas. Walmart is genius for seeing this future.And that, my friends, is always something I am willing to try on.

Dr “Wearing Shades” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[triple-mayday]

Oh boy… listen up I’m about to go on a tirade cause I’m tired of this shit and I need to vent. Apologies for a very long post, I need to scream into the blue Tumblr void

Tech bros better keep their slimy hands off our fics. The fact that they perceive one of the most genuine expressions of creativity as a “market” is telling. Go fuck yourself, I’m not spending every night on AO3 for customer support simulator, I’m there to experience my favorite idiots through the lens of people who get it

These “static stories” send me to stratosphere convulsing and squealing each and every time without fail, I hoard them like a mad dragon with insatiable appetite for creative thought. I sit atop my mountain of books written with passion beyond the comprehension of dipshits who treat art as a product to be consumed instead of a miracle to be cherished. Fanfiction gave me what AI will never be able to replace. I have community, I have ardor, I have a skill for storytelling that I have been polishing since I was 12, I can build endless amount of worlds just because I feel like it, I have a safe space and a reliable outlet to explore my personal experiences, no matter how dark they are

Tech bros don’t understand that art is a form of communication. AI generated stuff is inherently empty, it’s inspired by nothing because it comes from nothing. It’s a generated answer to a few key words, a collection of genuine works chopped up and regurgitated to fit the prompt, not to tell a story. I don’t care how good AI can get. I’m not reading just to mindlessly consume

When I open a new fic in my favorite tag, when I read it and get the rush of satisfaction and contentment from the very feeling of oh you see it too, you get it right, your perspective and language and flow of story make me so happy I can’t wait to get more of what you create… that’s what really gets me going. When authors shape the narrative using their lives as a template I can see it with absolute clarity. Nothing can beat the relatability of a fellow human being. Do tech bros know that authors and readers interact? Tell each other about their inspirations? Trade stories? Dedicate works of art to each other? Make friends? Develop an incredibly difficult to master skill?

The novelty of AI will eventually wear off, there’s only so much you can get out of a random sentence generator. Shit gets boring, and after getting some hahas from chatbots people will start craving some substance. AI won’t improve your writing and reading abilities. It won’t give you space to challenge yourself and make your own niche. If you want to see what fandoms are really about, what power AI can never have, look no further than the Danny Phantom fandom. People have been faithful to their community for 20 years. I’ve been in this fandom since I was 7. I’m in my 20s now. And all this time, people have been expanding the canon universe, creating and sharing new concepts, building a whole ass character from scratch, developing storylines, new AUs, and so much more. There was a non-stop flow of communication happening for literal decades. People host events, participate in challenges, gather for ambitious projects, and all of it is for fun

I’ve seen way too many attempts to automatically generate images and texts and present them as “art.” No, boo-boo, art is a product of a mind. Art is communication. Art is experience. Art is self-expression. People have this inherent desire to connect, and the act of creation is the most powerful unifying force in the world. Forget your crypto currencies, your market shares, your obsession with optimizing consumption. Sit the fuck down and re-learn how to enjoy things just for the hell of it. If you crave efficiency then teach AI to do work that is hard and miserable to people. Quit trying to take away one of the things that makes us happy (also stop stealing shit, we all know y’all just take works without permission to train your AI, leave people alone you nasty gargoyles. AI is just a tool, sure, but for now it’s being used in the most unethical ways with no proper regulations in place)

starting to suspect that tech bros actually just don’t know what reading is

[jaeharu26]

Very curious still if the Stable Diffusion and other AI lawsuits are going to result in another Napster-like situation. Adobe has already basically copy-pasted Stable Diffusion and is marketing it as Firefly. The more likely end result of the lawsuits looks like taking it away from the majority now and putting it in the hands of mega corps to sell instead (if it doesn’t win as transformative, that is). Still mixed feels on it all. And still neutral. As a piece of software doing what it was designed to do, it’s a major success. As an artist, I do have a problem with the term “Artist” being tacked on to people who make art with it, because they’re not. And that’s just a clear cut fact. Writing text into a prompt box, copy-pasting code and messing with sliders teaches you NOTHING about art or the fundamentals to make it outside of this magic box and requires you to know nothing about art or the fundamentals to use it to make something in. If you’re a visual artist, then you learn the same fundamentals that all of the visual mediums learn, value, composition, anatomy, color theory, light and shadow, line, et cetera. You aren’t no longer an artist if you switch tools from painting to sculpting, because you’ve already learned the basic rules and fundamentals to make it regardless of the tool set, et cetera. It’s the same with any traditional or digital medium be it sculpting or painting or animating or anything else. A majority of the people using AI to make art, and specifically the ones who talk-down to the understandably upset artists, are not artists themselves. The software is the one doing the work and the one who has been visually trained, not the person behind the screen inputting prompts. Not saying they’re not doing any work, but the work they’re doing to help the software produce the artworks is not the work an artist would have to do. I have no problem with Ai Artists making art with AI or doing their own thing with it, people SHOULD be free to explore creative mediums and outlets of any kind as much as they want to and open to experiment. I just wish there was a better term to coin them as than ‘artists’ though, personally. As an artist who studied and dedicated myself upwards of 20 years of my life now to get better at and closer to mastering the fundamentals and who threw away literal decades of my life to improve my craft on the literal back-bone of my own sweat, blood, hard work and actual tears, it’s a huge slap in the face to have someone be treated as if they made the same life-long sacrifice and put in the work for clicking a button and have a code generate an image. Ai Art itself still looks fucking incredible and keeps getting better. That’s also a clear cut fact. I still think it’s provided an invaluable abundance of AMAZING fucking reference material like never before for artists to learn from and study from and I still think its potential at streamlining a pipeline is insane and will continue to have insane potential for classically trained artists as well, if more could set aside their egos and try it out. My biggest personal issue still just lies mostly with the general public en masse. Seeing week old AI Art accounts spring up left and right and hit 1-2k followers after spending again, decades of your life and getting nothing, is one of the worst fucking feelings in the fucking world as an artist and one of the most demotivating. It’s very easy to see and sympathize with artists’ concerns and upset around it. But it’s not the fault of the AI or the people using it. The end result is designed to be good and designed to be appealing. It’s not at fault for doing exactly what it was meant to do. And whether it was around or not wouldn’t change the shitty fucking nature of the general publics’ shitty fucking lack of support and hunger for consumerism that puts a lot of artists out in the first place. It is just kinda sad to see a whole new way that artists can be undermined and under-appreciated and treated like shit now. And it does make it really hard to not want to just fucking kill myself after wasting my entire life honing a craft I loved and praying that “One day i’ll make it if i just get good enough!” to keep myself going, mean fucking nothing, because some guy sitting in front of his computer with a piece of software installed is typing into a text box right now making some fat anime tiddies and getting paid more for it in less time than I have my entire struggling, soul-wrenching career. I didn’t mean for this to get this long. Sorry followers for clogging up your dash. AI Art is unavoidable, and I’ve had a lot on my mind about it lately because of that I guess that I needed to get out so what better place than fucking tumblr.com fml

[boringbones]

Yesterday, Lyralei presented us with a great retexturing pack for The Sims 3! Nothing like a good Upscaling you might imagine... Well, me too Haha However when it comes to The Sims things are not that simple. And almost always, logic creates its own path. Different from what we are used to seeing.

For example, this is a screenshot taken by Lyralei of their 4K retexturing package

And here is the same photo taken by me, but with textures of only 1024x1024. The big difference is that these textures are the result of overlays using GOOD textures from the game itself.

As I always say.. The flaw of The Sims 3 is the mix of hard and soft textures. There is no aesthetic standard. Using rigid textures overlaid with transparency on soft textures and adjusting their colors, we have a really harmonious result. If we take bad textures and apply an upscaling, not even artificial intelligence will be able to guarantee us a quality result. Most of the time it's the opposite.

AI augmenting a default texture gives us this. Recreating the texture from scratch gives us greater control over definition and balance:

Maybe you say: Clearly the quality is different because of the PC. But here we have another example, the two images taken on my computer. The first with 4K package and the second with ProjectEden's retexturing 1024x1024

Discarding the fact that the tones are not identical to the base game, since the Eden Project seeks to create a greater harmony between color and texture, the main difference between the two images is in the Tiling. While the 4K texture can be perfect up close, when we pull the camera away we can see the pattern repeating itself. And this flaw does not mean that the texture is not good, on the contrary, it is just extremely demarcated. The way I found to minimize this effect was to adjust several layers of overlapping textures to make them as smooth and sharp as possible. That way we guarantee a perfect result from afar and even better up close!

The definition quality is not linked to the size of the image, but to the texture itself. The big job of making Ts3 more beautiful is in rebuilding its textures from scratch. Using current textures as a reference or starting point. Never as final destination or conclusion

This is the only way to find the balance between Quality and definition.

This post is not to criticize Lyralei's work, because the fact is that The Sims 3 is a relatively messy game! What she did was a miracle. Finding ALL textures is not easy. And the worst part is when we start the work and the flaws in the terrain painting of the neighborhoods, as well as its modeling start to become more evident, as in the lower right side of this image:

The Sims has an extremely captivating look, it just needs the right textures to be represented at the level it deserves.

I'll point out, because it doesn't follow the logic of other games, when we increase the texture size, what we are doing is increasing the tiling, even if the texture is good. Here's a great example, even with Project Eden's retextures, the flaw is subtle but it shows: (2048x2048)

Now: 1024x1024

Again I would like to congratulate Lyralei for the excellent work. Next to everything we've had in the last decade, this update was without a doubt a key highlight. I'm curious to see how her projects will progress and I make myself available to be a great competitor Hahaha and also, of course, a great collaborator if one day she wants to create something together with me.

I'll be back in the future to talk more about Project Eden and share new information! Until then!!