I just checked Newground's Art Portal guidelines and it is reassuring to see that Mr. Fulp is not only against using AI art as finished pieces to spam the Art Portal with, but any tool that is often used by cryptobros to quickly and lazily bombard us with ads for their products--stuff like Epic Game's Metahuman, Daz Studio and Source Filmmaker after community backlash (apparently), and other substitutes for actually drawing or 3D modeling, at least unless you give credit to the creators of the original assets and your own original stuff is the focus of the piece. It certainly puts a lot less pressure on me to try to "game the algorithm" by posting a lot of "quantity-over-quality" pieces because there basically is no algorithm and in fact I would likely get punished by the reviews if I just post sketches or auto-generated art instead of just posting some high-effort bangers a few times a year.
It's a good thing there is some nuance to the guidelines, though, because for now, unlike NFTs or the "Metaverse," or any other flash-in-the-pan Big Tech trends, I have chosen to be more neutral for AI Art for now, as it currently tends to produce some creepy homunculus-looking surrealist art, which obviously provides a great springboard for my weirder character designs. You can be assured, at least, that even then I tend to follow up by drawing my own concept art in an attempt to make the design even goofier-looking and you may not even know whether or not I used AI art as reference unless I specifically tell you, as I see it more as a challenge to out-weird the original AI abomination. I will still need to hire 2D artists for "prettier" designs, though, that is just not my comfort zone specialty and it certainly isn't AI art's forte at this current stage of the technology.
And as for whether AI art will replace actual human artists in the future, well, it's not like you can just waltz into Hollywood NOW and get even an unpaid internship just by being good at drawing, unless you're good buddies with any of the celebrities or directors there. Will AI art really make that big of a difference in an industry infamous for serious gatekeeping, despite all this talk about hiring more "diverse talent?" My next day job will likely be just another day job to fund my Newgrounds art and animation endeavors on the weekend and HOPEFULLY get a little closer to becoming financially-independent, anyway. Might as well invest in technology that will make it easier to get a significant amount of art done over the weekend so that I can have more energy for my "adult" responsibilities the rest of the week and not burn out and quit like last time.
TheMiamiDeSantos
well, if someone said 10 years ago that i.a. would be doing what it is doing today people would make fun of it. Now i say on the next 5, 10 or 15 years i.a. will be doing even more. On the Supply and demand law let's say art has a lot more of supply than demand, i.a. will reduce even more that demand, it's just a matter of it getting better and more popular.
Also, the problem is not just the i.a. taking some illustrations works, it will take many of the jobs, like the ifood drone, electronic concierge, self driving cars, etc, etc not even talking about what more technologies they will make to take other jobs, where all that unemployed people will go?
jthrash
AI has already taken manufacturing and some grocery clerk jobs in the United States, but that doesn't stop US politicians from promising to bring those types of jobs back. For animation, I feel the more immediate threat to job creation is the decline of "traditional" cable TV combined with streaming services struggling as of late and how their solutions are unfortunately to punish families and friends that share accounts, add in cheaper "ad-supported" tiers that will basically make them cable TV 2.0, and of course relying less and less on expensive, time-consuming animated projects in favor of cheap, inoffensive live-action "junk food" like the Kissing Booth Trilogy.
That's the thing about AI art--if it's used responsibly, it's just another tool, like how Metahuman or Daz3D have hardly dented the need for artists capable of making human models that are both highly realistic and more unique than character generators seem capable of doing, but it's there for people that need good pose reference (Daz3D) or if they need to populate a huge Unreal Engine level with generic NPCs (Metahuman, and its usefulness is severely limited by the fact that it can only really be used in the Unreal Engine and maybe Maya). But it's not unreasonable to think that people are already using it to further push dumb, lazy NFT and "metaverse" scams at a far faster rate than just a year ago, and that movie studios that are only concerned about pumping content into our faces as fast and as much as possible (regardless if that content is actually GOOD...), then they'll definitely feel tempted to use AI if it can produce the same mediocre-but-profitable content that human artists have been putting out for years, but without the need to worry about workers getting sick or needing rent money in advance or forming a union.
I dunno, it's sort of like when photography and cameras killed the need for artists to get paid by rich people to realistically paint their likenesses, or how Disney and other companies killed off big-budget 2D animation around the 2000's and now we all have to get good at computer-generated 3D regardless if we are passionate about that type of animation. Or especially when the car replaced the horse-and-buggy, where it was obvious from the start that gas cars would be a disaster to the environment and our lungs, but we can't live without them now. Or it could just be like NFTs and "Metaverse" where the Scum and Villainy of Twitter end up killing AI art's reputation with all these scams and it will fizzle out in a year or two as a result like those tech fads, regardless of whether the technology itself is the problem. We just gotta adapt and hope to high heaven governments have a plan to avoid sending the world economy further down a bad place...