I finally ventured to the "Forums" section of Newgrounds out of boredom (I normally avoid the Forums because the "Politics" section in particular is the closest this otherwise-lovely site comes to sucking as much as all the other communities) and to maybe get some differing opinions on AI art, which I've been privately and constantly flip-flopping on whether it's just another tool to allow me to make higher-quality independent art faster or a detriment to my hopes and dreams of doing this for a living.
I was not fully aware until now that perhaps the biggest problem that artists and even Tom Fulp have with AI art right now is that it just kinda scrapes the Internet for images and uses them to create derivative art without any regard to licenses, consent from the artists, or copyright law in general. Stable Diffusion and its many forks seem to be the worst offenders. This seems like such an easy problem to fix, like maybe just training the algorithm exclusively on public-domain ClipArt (I bet you could make quadrillions of different unique art pieces just from free CC0 art and assets alone), or better yet, pay consenting artists a decent wage to use their art in the training algorithm, but considering we started talking about AI art almost immediately after it became clear that NFTs and crypto are not coming back in their current form and no one knows what the fumbling fish-sticks a "metaverse" is supposed to be, I'm starting to think this is just yet another attempt by tech bros to steal and profit off our art while turning public perception even further against the "snooty" artists that make their scams possible in the first place.
Thus, my experiments with Stable Diffusion will pretty much start and end with that "Crazed Hippo Man of the North" piece I made recently, at least until I get assurance this isn't just another poorly-thought-out cryptobro scheme that makes it harder than it already is to make a single cent posting art online. Sorry for scaring some of you.
Speaking of the sheer difficulties of making money doing what I love, Check Out My Ko-Fi!
Noilaedi
I like the concept of using it for improvement but everything else is just way too much baggage for me, especially the whole possible theft aspect.
jthrash
That’s exactly how I used it on that one Art Portal piece, “The Crazed Hippo Man of the North.” Even then, I’m now worried about accidental plagiarism whenever I try to use AI art as reference, so until that is fixed I’ll just use image search engines where I can at least quickly learn where the art originated from. Again, this could very easily be fixed by training algorithms exclusively on CC0/public domain art or paying artists properly for their consent to use their art for the algorithm.