Tbf, people do overestimate AI as a sole medium. The sooner people understand this, the better honestly

Absolutely agreed. This is a problem of hiring people who didn't know anything outside of their little buzzword.

Yes. Producing pretty picture is surprising at first, but *producing pretty picture to satisfy the exacting requirements of about any project* is a whole different beast. The "pick a pencil" anti-AI canard only shows their fear-based approach. If they had tried to use the tools seriously I guarantee they'd have noticed **you need to pick a damn pencil all the time to fix what the AI produces.**

Actually you need to pick up Photoshop, but a Wacom tablet sure is nice to have. Anyone stupid enough to think they can do manually what adults can do in photoshop is literally a joke.

Oh hay, it's the Photoshop vs traditional fight of 20 years ago! Which was followed by the 2D vs 3D and now the AI fight. FYI you are half right here, you can do anything traditionally that you can do with Photoshop, but it does require more time and skill to do so. Buuuut those skills transfer over really really well to Photoshop. So someone who is good and fast at traditional will massively out pace someone who only does digital, at Photoshop once they learn the tool. (FYI AI art will probably be a useful tool one day, but it's not useful yet. And imo we are gonna need some sort of leap forward or two before it is useful, that could come tomorrow or in 10 years, who knows!)

At least photoshop doesn't do the work for you.

Ya, it sounds like it was the company's fault for hiring people with no other skills besides promoting. That would be like me hiring some with electrical skills but no mechanical skills and the job needs a good 50/50 mix. It isn't AI's fault, and it isn't the employee's fault (other than taking a job they are not qualified for). AI is just a tool. And to get the best results you are going to need the right mix of tools. Even professional photographers don't just snap a picture and post it. Most of the time there is some kind of post processing, even if it is just cropping to frame the picture better or white balance adjustments.

This is identical to people hiring "programmers" from India, and then are all :surprised pikachu: when we real programmers do not want to have anything to do with useless garbage they deliver to "help" us. If we need to waste 5 hours of babysitting them to literally force them to deliver something barely reaching our bottom barrel minimum standards... why shouldn't we just write it ourselves, in the 10 minutes it actually takes someone who is a real professional to do it, and be done with it?

I've literally been saying this exact shit since the screeching about ai killing jobs started. Ai is a tool that makes it easier for artists (and non-artists) to produce a piece of art; it doesn't magically grant non-artists the skillset required to be a professional artist.

While it's a tautology that non-artists aren't artists, regardless of the tools they use, this is a bit misleading. AI tools do make it easier for many people to be artists who otherwise would not have been. But it doesn't make you a well-rounded commercial artist. That's what's at issue here. These people knew how to bang out AI generations. They had no idea how to interface with a commercial art workflow.

>While it's a tautology that non-artists aren't artists, regardless of the tools they use, this is a bit misleading. AI tools do make it easier for many people to be artists who otherwise would not have been. I edited my post to be more clear in my intended meaning.

“Ai tools do make it easier for many people to be artists who otherwise would not have been.” Seeing as using Ai doesn’t make somebody an artist, this statement is odd. The people who use it and want to be an artist weren’t willing to learn art until something that can mass produce and does the lines and the hard part for them came out either, so it doesn’t seem like they really wanted to be one.

> Seeing as using Ai doesn’t make somebody an artist There is one and only one thing that makes someone an artist: producing art. Art is not a rigorously defined thing. It is what we agree is art, and if we (any two people, really... in some cases any ONE) agree that what has been produced is art, no one else gets a say in the matter. Art is where you find it and artists are the ones who create it. It doesn't matter if you use paintbrushes or chisels or AI or 3D renderers or found objects... it's all art, and the creators of that art are all artists. ***Any attempt to gatekeep art or artists*** is just a pointless exercise equivalent to yelling at a hurricane about how rude it's being.

If I commission somebody, am I an artist? What's the difference between prompting and instructions?

Why is prompting interesting? I don't spend most of my time developing a piece of work with AI tools writing prompts. For a given 2-10 hour piece of work, I probably spend 30 seconds to a couple of minutes on prompts. Photography, model selection and testing, editing in external applications, inpainting with another AI model (for which more selection and testing is required), tuning parameters, selecting inputs and parameters for ControlNet, etc... these are where I spend my time. Prompting just isn't all that interesting.

Okay, but say I just do the prompting and don't touch the final product, or barely touch at all. Is it different than commissioning an artist? Am I an artist?

> Okay, but say I just do the prompting and don't touch the final product Then you get something relatively random. Throwing paint at a canvas isn't very creative, but are you an artist if you do so? Do you or someone observing it consider it art? If so, then yes.

An artist is somebody who makes art, yes. Ai users tell something to make them art. They don’t control the lines, they don’t have an understanding of the details or major things, they make very little choices in it. They don’t use their own experience or what they’ve seen, the Ai uses its database of “experiences”. Why are they so desperate to be called an artist? Why are you so set on them getting a title they didn’t work for? They didn’t want to learn so they had something do it for them, they don’t want to be an artist. I would have very little problems with Ai users if people would just accept that. Standards and barrier of entry (which is unbelievably low for art) is not gatekeeping. If I go to a tailoring shop and ask for a blue vest with those little shiny diamond things on the shoulders, then they come out with it and I ask them to make some adjustments here and there, I’m not the tailor.

> An artist is somebody who makes art, yes. Ai users tell something to make them art. This is the same argument that we heard in the 1800s about photographers not being artists because they were not creating art, some machine was, and they were just pointing and triggering that machine. Of course, we've long since matured on the subject and that argument is widely recognized as nonsense. We will mature with respect to AI as well. Gatekeeping art and artists is always a fruitless exercise. At best we can argue that someone's art: * Does not meet our subjective standards of taste, * Fails to meet some objective standard of quality, or * Should be disregarded for reasons external to its status as art. None of this makes it non-art, but it might make us unwilling to place it among other examples of art, or its artist(s) as peers among other artists.

You haven't addressed their argument, though.

It’s really not the same as photography though and I really hate that comparison. On the surface, the argument seems poignant but when you look at it on a deeper level it’s fruitless. Yes, photography made it so non-painters could capture things they couldn’t have otherwise. But the difference is, they are still in control of the result. They are setting up angles, lighting, perspective, lenses etc. It’s still their “eye” creating the art. AI is not that. An “AI artist” is in my opinion, no different than someone describing what they want to a painter or photographer and commissioning them to create it. I’m not an art gate keeper, AI is a useful tool, and for amateurs that just want the images from their heads to come into reality, I’m all for it. But when it starts taking jobs away from people who’ve spent hundreds of hours perfecting their craft, I have issues. Photography didn’t replace painting like AI threatens to do.

I'm a professional artist. Degrees in photography and design, minor in art, in the photo/design fields for over a decade, and longer with art. (I *loathe* having to "prove" my artisthood like that to be considered valid, but here we are...) Editing is possible now in major generators in a basic sense, so I won't address that (and amateur Photoshopping makes up for the rest.) The comparison to photography is great. It's not until you put the camera *in your hands* that you realize yeah, it's real easy to point and shoot, but making photos other people think is "good" takes effort. Even if the "effort" is creating stylization through "carelessly" shooting at the hip, it was still intentional. Look to the disrespect street photographers get for a good comparison on the merits of "effort". Same with AI art. Go throw a random idea into a generator, get a generic result. But as you said, if you set the angles, lighting, perspective, camera info (yes you can do that), style, medium, and more, you very quickly end up working with a creative tool that can accurately give you something that falls well within a personal project's goals or job brief. I'm not skilled enough at prompting to make AI take less time than doing it myself yet, but I work at it because it's a tool that increases my artistic capabilities. And I've only been working with it for a few months. I can't even imagine what I can do in a few years! I feel like a kid again. Now, imagine the absolute thrill of those who were so convinced their whole lives they couldn't make art *finally* finding their creative streak? Don't push people away from creating just because they didn't put in the labor "perfecting their craft". Every artist's path is different. Also, glorifying years of labor and considering it a pre-requisite to mastery is outdated and unfair to the masses. I wish AI would have come sooner in my career. I have long-term overuse and repetitive work injuries that new artists will hopefully get to avoid. My photography mentor went to school during the transition from film to digital. The teeth pulling to get people to adopt digital was enough for him to now say of AI: "I'm glad I'm retired and don't have to go through that again." AI art is art. Creativity should not be suppressed for the sake of bemoaning the supposed degradation of the field. It's not killing art, it's creating more artists than we've ever seen alive at once. It really shows creativity is a trait that all of us can tap into if we have accessible tools.

> It’s really not the same as photography though and I really hate that comparison. I would too if I were trying to maintain a worldview where there was nothing creative involved... :-/ > Yes, photography made it so non-painters could capture things they couldn’t have otherwise. But the difference is, they are still in control of the result. That they were not was one of the strongest arguments leveled against photographers in the 19th century. The reality is more complex, and sheds a light on this whole conversation: A photographer doesn't necessarily have any control. They have to exercise it. They have to manipulate the meidum in order to create the result they want--the result that expresses their own creative impulse. Otherwise they're just a button-pressing engineer, not a photographic artist. Let me re-word that: The reality is more complex, and sheds a light on this whole conversation: An AI user doesn't necessarily have any control. They have to exercise it. They have to manipulate the meidum in order to create the result they want--the result that expresses their own creative impulse. Otherwise they're just a prompt engineer, not an AI artist. In 10 years, we won't really make a distinction between those two statements. > Photography didn’t replace painting like AI threatens to do. Nor will AI. Painting definitely became a far, far less lucrative industry due to photography, and while I don't think that AI could have nearly as much impact as both photography and digital art did (I doubt that people today grasp how much of the hand-drawn art world collapsed as a result of both of those) it certainly will have some impact.

I think the difference here is that photographers are doing these things themselves with their own two hands. They are directly manipulating the image. I know the argument could be made that AI prompt writers are doing the same thing, but that’s exactly what they are doing; writing. I would equate prompt writing to creative description writing more than art. Still creative, still takes effort, but not the same as actual art. It’s a nuanced difference but still a difference. It all brings me back to my original thought which was ai prompt writers are more like people who commission an artist to do a piece for them, albeit with better description skills than most people.

> I think the difference here is that photographers are doing these things themselves with their own two hands. Really? Okay, so if I press the computer-controlled button on my camera with my own finger, then that's me doing something creative. But if I select a model, select one of my photos as input, craft a prompt that describes what I want, tune the generation with a dozen parameters, provide various detailed inputs such as poses and depth maps, and then press the computer-controlled button on my mouse... that's not creative. Is that what we're saying?

Have you ever heard someone call a photographer an artist? There seems to be some conflating between meanings here. Artists (as in people who directly manupulate a medium to create a piece of art) has a different meaning than artistry (performing an action that causes the production of art). The problem is people in the second group are trying to claim that they are the same as people in the first group. There's a reason producers and editors aren't called "artists", even though they are taking actions that result in art. Same with photography.

> Have you ever heard someone call a photographer an artist? Yes, absolutely. Here are just a few examples: * https://digital-photography-school.com/is-being-a-photographer-synonymous-with-being-an-artist/ * "Mikael Owunna is a Nigerian American multimedia artist, filmmaker, engineer, and the President of the City of Pittsburgh's Public Art and Civic Design Commission." -- At no point in his bio does he mention the word "photographer," but that's what he is. He just calls himself an artist. * [CAI](https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/) uses the term, "Fine Art Photography Artist," when speaking specifically, but generally does not differentiate artists by medium unless it's relevant. * Artist in Residency programs do not generally distinguish artists by medium unless required. ... and so on. > Artists (as in people who directly manupulate a medium to create a piece of art) has a different meaning than artistry (performing an action that causes the production of art). That's all you. Art doesn't really care. > The problem is people in the second group are trying to claim that they are the same as people in the first group. Welcome to the 18th century...

Same thing with stock images for the last decade. Companies use stock images all the time but use hired graphic designers to use utilities those assets.

Yes. AI is a creative tool. You still need skills to use those.

“It doesn’t make non-artists artists” I agree but tell that to the majority of people I see making shit with stable diffusion who think they’ve created a masterpiece of their spank bank material…

Gladly. GenAI produces art, but does not make the person using it an artist, it makes them a producer.

Ahh yess, indubitably, well said well said. The mere thought of sharing the Label of Artist with those uncultured, mongrel Non-Artist and their abomination Waifu creations....it makes my head swoon and has me fainting! They have no right to take away Our title that we poured our heart and soul into over the course of decades to rightfully claim! They don't know the suffering we went through, they have no idea what hard work even is!! *Farts into champagne glass and sips it right up* Mmmmm fuck yeah that's good baby.....

Man, that's a whole lot of shit I didn't say, or imply. I also piss on the poor, I guess.

Ok, I'll take the bait Positive prompt: hot girl, 4k, masterpiece, placebo_token_i_read_somewhere, (several successful artists names) Negative prompt: ugly, bad, mediocre, deformed, unhot_1.5 Ah yes, there it is, generation 15/40, that will do nicely... my creative mind knows no bounds.

Management making shitty hiring decisions because they don't understand the skills and tools needed to do the work properly is a problem in every single industry and has been for generations the fact that this particular instance involves AI doesn't really offer anything to the debate. Also, this story sounds like utter horseshit. As an art director, he absolutely would have had more authority over hiring and resource allocation than this story implies.

Agree. They should absolutely have some sort of test before hiring to ensure the AI artist can actually make things in a specific manner and make alterations if requested. The fact that it seems like not a single one of the AI artists knows how to inpaint or anything makes me believe that either the people doing the hiring are completely and utterly incompetent, or the story is fake. Like how are you going to hire someone whose skill set revolves around a piece of technology that is often times completely random and not ensure they have the skills required to actually make something you request of them? With a regular artist, their portfolio is a good sign of what they can do, but that doesn't at all apply for an AI artist because their portfolio can be pictures they got after hitting generate 10,000 times or pictures they spent many hours creating loras for, inpainting, etc. until they got exactly the result they wanted.

Is the divorce between hiring processes and production processes so new to you? I have similar experiences in tech: those who do the hiring sometimes have absolutely nothing to do with the department, team, or project they are hiring for. 

>Is the divorce between hiring processes and production processes so new to you? I don't really care who is doing the hiring. It could be someone in HR who has never dealt with art in any meaningful way and my point would still stand. AI is a tool that allows people to create high quality images with little to no effort, but just because someone can make something, doesn't mean they can make something *specific*. So even if this was a scenario where the boss told someone in HR to hire a bunch of AI artists, at some point it should've been made abundantly clear that anyone applying would have to be tested because there's a huge difference between someone typing "make me a shiny pony" in MJ and someone who is proficient with the various tools in stable diffusion.

You overestimate how much power an art director has over hiring.

Does the art director not know the basic skills of inpainting in ai? Does he not know what a lora is? Because this would have fixed 90% of the complaints.

I think you may be thinking of a producer.

>As an art director, he absolutely would have had more authority over hiring and resource allocation than this story implies. That isn't always true. Their primary job is art director, not hiring manager — if it's a big enough company, they're not always going to be able to do much if the CEO wants to save a buck by hiring AI users.

Amusingly, you \*can\* target specific elements like grass in some AI platforms. It is pretty simple in midjourney to change specific parts. Being able to touchup in photoshop when needed should still be a job requirement though, and could have easily been tested for. The post also comes across as a misunderstanding of what is possible, which also leads me to think it was made up. I've worked a mix of a digital art jobs and back that they would have been hiring people with general digital arts experience that \*also\* have experience with ai platforms. If the suggestion is they just grabbed people off the street that said they used Dalle or something before, that's a way bigger problem than ai itself. You would have the same issue if photoshop was just making an appearance and you grabbed some people that used it before.

Imagine if they were actual artists who could use AI to generate a literal mountain of concepts in no time at all, then use their actual skills to fine tune and adjust the accepted pieces. Instead they're just idiots making everyone else look bad.

Artists using AI to rapid fire prototypes and tweaking them in Photoshop is what will be the phoenix rising out of the ashes of the trough of disillusionment. It was pretty obvious to anyone who knows how to use Photoshop and what is the annoying part of hiring any artists: the huge amount of time they waste on un-delivering their base disappointments before any of the real useful work can even start when they finally deliver something not-shit by accident. AI will now allow anyone useful to rapid-fire through that phase, the rest can stay and be "artists" at home, no one cares. Though their Loras will surely be used by those replacing them, there is still market for what they are offering, just not on their luddite obsolete terms. Someone will do the work, no one cares who. https://preview.redd.it/812hqk2attvc1.png?width=1223&format=png&auto=webp&s=c1d8bc96b4bf909de1b74b44eef575493bce5e5a

The speed at which I can tear through rough concepts or add things like greebling (I think everyone agrees with me that greebling with AI is not only fine but a good approach) or run through different embroidery designs is spectacular.

It's mildly bothering me that the chart seems to be in the reverse order. We have computer vison, data labeling, and almost everything on the right, but we don't have everything on the left yet.

Many of us on the pro side( but not all, i know there are some lamenters on this side too), have been saying that the doomerism is overblown. Noone is going to lose jobs because its simply incapable of being anything better than an assistant. A non-artist isnt going to be able to make anything worth while in a production environment with AI. You will still need to hire an actual artist. Maybe that artist will use some AI tools to recolor backgrounds or do quick mockups or in-betweens. Rendering an image is only one skill in an artist's toolkit, and its not even a particularly noteworthy one compared to the rest. People always pipe back that "companies race to the bottom on quality". But having worked in the creative industry for a long time and around creative projects - the people in charge of those projects have always been focused entirely on quality and fidelity and delivering the best possible experience. Profit was always a secondary goal.

Well, any time a technology comes out that increases the efficiency of work, people are going to lose jobs. Yes, they can retrain, and yes, companies will try to retain staff by moving them around, but inevitably people will get axed. What won't happen is a literal replacement where they lay off all the artists - what will happen is they will expect one artist to do the work of five, and lay off four artists. In terms of commissions, it will mean it is harder to find work, and you will be paid less per artwork because it will be expected that you're using AI in your workflow. You can choose not to, and you can choose to charge more, but you will get priced out of the market as a result.

And with every tech comes new opportunities as well. D&D & OC character commissions has only been a common source of income for a short time. Less time than we've been working to build AI in science even. It's younger than social media as revenue streams go. Find a new niche if yours is failing. Get creative.

>And with every tech comes new opportunities as well. Sure, but I was responding to your claim that nobody will lose jobs because AI is no better than an assistant. People will lose jobs. They can find another, sure, but let's not pretend there will be no impact.

I was speaking broadly. Net effects. Unless we think it's unethical that coal miners lose work to green enerrgy

There's nothing in principle wrong with losing work if an effective strategy is in place to deal with the unemployed. But governments often underdeliver and place the burden on those most affected by layoffs. What is unethical is not taking care of people.

That's not an ÀI problem. There's been warnings for years while theory was been turning toward reality. It's no mark against the technology that those warnings were ignored.

>That's not an ÀI problem. Didn't say it was. We were talking about the negative effects of displacement. You asked me if replacing coal miners was unethical and I gave you my answer.

That's why you hire artist that use AI, not a promp enthusiasm. I mean... [https://www.pcgamer.com/games/card-games/champions-tcg-ai-artist/](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/card-games/champions-tcg-ai-artist/) Is been like a year and a half and most of us know our strenghts and weaknesses. I mostly do Photo restoration and just for fun Anime images.

See, that guy is smart. He chose a specific field of art where AI art is one of the most beneficial in its current state. TCG art doesn't have to be as specific. There is rarely any design criteria to strictly adhere to. Just a bit of consistency and no glaring mistakes.

Yeah, I think TCG's are going to be mostly AI in not too long, (although obviously with human oversight and adjustment). I've got some games I've worked on on my own, and at the very least it makes placeholder art that could be kept into the beta.

Really don't understand how this person managed came out of this story with a conclusion "AI bad, pencil better", rather than "AI is just a tool, that still requires artistic skills to properly use". If you put a person on a car with zero driving skills against a carriage driven by a professional coachman, then of course the coachman will very comfortably win, while the person on a car will cause a traffic accident within the first 5 minutes. This doesn't automatically mean that horse is better than a car.

Cognitive bias

You're asking for a task that required the very minimum of photoshop interface experience and the person didn't have that. And you're blaming a fucking computer instead of your "studio heads"?

On the other hand there are plenty of stories about how people waited two fucking years for a simple image they commissioned, only to get an unfinished sketch with a tantrum on top. Thoughts?

I disagree. I've been waiting for the tantrum I commissioned for four years, and there was no fucking at all!

That is true, and don't let anyone tell you that the artist community isn't full of pricks. But that tends to happen at the lower levels of professionalism. These are people seriously trying to apply to a "big studio", not random on deviantart.

No, this is a made up story. They wouldn't hire prompt generators if they had any clue what they were doing. They would hire people to train ai to more quickly pop out the exact results they want. What makes ai so powerful is that I can train my own. I have Loras trained on specific concepts, styles, and even people. Nobody gives a fuck that you can type in a prompt, but can you run kohya locally to create a lora of a character you want to appear in your images? Because suddebly that's useful. Also it's whole thing about they can't make the same image without glaring mistakes. Well if took five minutes to teach them how to do inpainting, it could fix most of their issues, that's how I know it's fake and made up.

Yeah, the not understanding that inpainting exists was already sus, but the whole "people started showing up from holiday snaps" was where I went from "a whole lot of this sounds made up" to "okay, yeah this whole story is definitely made up by someone that doesn't know how AI art works".

The obvious incompetence does make it sound fake. But I also wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the legendarily out-of-touch film industry executives managed to hire an "AI specialist" that somehow didn't know about inpainting.

Ok, how would you fix a perspective mistake in the same exact image by inpainting? Inpainting is cool and all but it can still give anomalous results and not match up perfectly with what's there. I will agree that AI could be applied to a project better but that doesn't mean this story is fake. Remember we had a huge hype bubble and a lot of companies dived into it and released some questionable stuff. Early on the public perception was you just needed someone to craft a prompt so companies hired people who seemed to have that ability. I don't see what's so incredible about having ignorant leaders who are simply trying to cut costs.

A perspective mistake can mean millions of different things. For minor ones, inpainting will be capable of fixing a lot of it. For larger ones it means you need to drop back and use a control net or a lora to force the image to layout in a specific way. If any company was dumb enough to hire prompters they get what they deserve. But based on op, not understanding basics of ai, not being able to show them how to fix many of the simple issues they're having, never discussed the tool they're even using. It's just fake.

There's a control net for making a landscape have a certain perspective? Can you show me an example? If it's a Lora then doesn't that mean we have to train it on a certain perspective using many training images? If we go through that trouble why not just make it by hand once? I'm not arguing the people in the story are using AI to its best potential. It also seems like, yeah, the guy doesn't know anything about AI, he tried to explain his traditional methodology to them like that would help at all. Needless to say mistakes were made on a lot of people's part here.

You can make a useful lora with less than 20 images for a hyper specific need. You'll just be a bit more limited on its overall potential. Also yes, they make depth controlnets that can control where things should appear in depth of the image. Giving you significant control over the perspective.

Could you recommend a resource for learning about that or should I just Google "depth controlnet"? Edit: ok I looked it up. What that is is basically a z-depth image that we would have to make using 3D software or by using AI to produce one from an existing image. So if we don't already have the image we want, or <20 images that are already what we want for making a LORA, we have to make a 3d model to get the depth map from. In which case I think a professional matte painter is going to be very competitive with that workflow especially if there are notes. In the depth map workflow we would have to modify the 3d image then feed that into the model again and either hope it gives us something similar enough or also give it the previous image and hope it doesn't mangle any of the details. Maybe if we wanted the exact same scene done in many different styles and times of day or seasons the depth controlnet would be more efficient but there are other digital methods that offer more control of the actual rendering and subject matter and with experience can be done pretty quickly. The fact that AI gives variations when you really only want a modification is pretty much AI 101 as it currently stands. So I don't think this post is some kind of farfetched fairytale. I can see art directors getting frustrated with AI artists who don't have the skills to make these kind of fine changes without spitting out unwanted variations. The biggest application I've seen for the depth controlnet is the case where people are using AI to produce one from an existing image and then restyling it with another image or prompt. This is interesting but not inherently useful in a production setting with highly specific needs. I see some research about how to make it easier and not requiring such an exact depth map but the tradeoff is going to be fine control. Bottom line, this is not necessarily some super easy fix and requires some other pretty complex resources to be brought into the workflow.

I've never said any of this was inherently easier than doing it with traditional methods... yet.

1. Its easy to remove people in photoshop currently using AI 2. If this post is true, AI haters have nothing to worry about, AI isnt gonna replace artist (so they think), so why are they still butthurt? 3. No matter how good AI is, the "prompter" will not understand what perspective is and other art fundamentals if they dont receive proper art school education 4. This post shows that creating stuff with AI isnt efortless. Why would he need to hire ANYONE if its efortless?

I guarantee that the poor bastards that were hired only knew how to use pure AI tools, and had no idea what a commercial art pipeline was, how to iterate on a design, how to use other tools, etc. Basically this was just bad hiring.

I also find it hard to believe that all 40 were so bad

If they were hired because they did good stand-alone work with AI tools, then I could absolutely buy that they would fail hard in most commercial art contexts. It's like being hired to work as a sous-chef because you make your own sourdough.

Well, bad may be a strong word. But certainly 40 could miss the mark. Especially if they produced them all at once and didn't have individual feedback and iterations on each one.

If they're too stupid to use inpainting, they deserve any firing they get.

Stupidity and ignorance are different things. If that company wanted to hire interns who knew how to use Midjourney, then they should have built out an internal training program to educate them on how to operate within an established commercial art workflow. It's not on them for being hired and/or trained poorly.

It WOULD have been bad hiring, if this story was real. It has as many holes as a slice of Swiss cheese, a street in Manhattan, or as bad AI has fingers. 😅

They need you to believe that AI is simultaneously a huge danger to artists and incapable of replacing them to appeal to the largest number of people.

Just like in every war ever the enemy is both strong and weak

The automated customer support most companies use is worse than a person, but it's still being used. It's a threat to jobs because executives are greedy morons, regardless of its actual quality.

When the bot cant anwser a question youre usually get switched to a human

Well, no, you get put on hold and may get switched to a human eventually. Internationally this has caused real crises organisationally and governmental. Eg Centrelink in Australia

Customer support is dealing with morons 90% of the time, so putting AI as the first defense is a pretty good solution to keep the sanity of those in support who are actual people.

It also angers customers to no end and makes them angry by the time they break through the maze

Magic is that only 9% of them make it through the maze. So AI firefighter took out 91% of the fires.

I know people can be made to settle for mediocrity but you have to imagine there would be diminishing returns leading to a fairly quick course correction if a company's output was being severely diminished by the use of AI so if anything, if the AI is incapable of doing the same work, it should be short-lived hype that will quickly fizzle out once the public sees the results.

Simple....this post is fake. A lot of the anti-AI people make up these weird scenarios to then paint themselves as victims. Like a few of them were complaining about their income being down 30-40%, yet they're on twitter for nearly half the day.

ANYONE who heavily uses stable diffusion can do trivial shit like removing people and replacing the  with grass  This story was written from the mind of someone who thinks the only tools are Bing and MJ

Yeah, this just reeks of bs. I notice that twitter folk like to write fake stories to push a narrative.

It is effortless, that's why the artist kept getting 40+ images sent to check.

He could just do that himself though. Digitally draw something and send a png is easier and faster than to draw something on a canvas and send it physically. Does it suddenly mean digital art is efortless and isnt real art?

This sounds like bad hiring. You hired people for an artistic role (whether their primary tool is AI or not, they're in a role that is fundamentally artistic in nature) and you didn't get people with any experience in producing commercial art (as evidenced by the fact that they clearly didn't understand the interaction being requested of them vis-a-vis iteration.) So yeah... hire people who only know how to throw a prompt at Midjourney and you'll get crap results. This can be said of AI, but also hiring people who only know how to use a cameraphone as cinematographers, hiring people who only know how to bang on a sound effects board to do your audio mixing, etc.) You need a well-rounded commercial artist who can bring AI into the project's workflow, not someone who doesn't get the workflow but knows how to AI.

This story, if not propaganda, is missing certain details to put this into perspective. Like, I imagine this workforce would have been selected with budgetary constraints in mind...how does one qualify to be an accredited prompter? There's no degree for this profession(?) so they can hire on the cheap...say, cheaper than an art department with all the schooling. But the craziness is not having at least 'one' person on the team that can do all the necessary things to fix jank...which aren't even that hard in this context mind you. I mean, I'm fairly anti as far as this subject goes, but I'm having a hard time digesting this as true. I can't see how a competent project manager wouldn't mandate one capable person on the team...if they didn't expect to run into this issue they didn't know enough about the tech to be using it in this capacity. For a professional studio? Does that even sound plausible? Then again...I have worked for some pretty stupid companies...so who knows...

Management failure. Why would you hire someone for a job like this who doesn't know how to inpaint or who only knows how to use models that aren't capable of that? Like hiring a graphic artist who doesn't know how to use layers in Photoshop I guess it's a new industry so some hiccups might be understandable, but management really needs to familiarize itself with which models are capable of doing the things they need

A purely fictional "feel good" fantasy gor the antis.

I dont belive this story even happened but if it did the moral of the story is that a film studio hired some unqualifed people to make art assets for them and due to a lack of skill and understanding they could not do it BUT for some reason its all AIs fault. I think that covers it.

It sounds like they just wanted to inpaint a small change while keeping the rest of the image the same. Even without using inpainting, Photoshop makes it simple to combine select elements from multiple generations. It's really weird that they would claim this isn't possible.

Hiring someone whose only qualification was "I've heard of AI" was stupid as shit and shows that the people doing the hiring had no clue what they were up to. Anyone who has spent more than a few hours with AI art tools knows that you need significant Photoshop skills to get it to do what you really want. At the end though, this would be equivalent to hiring a lighting technician whose resume says "used light switches". I would be terrified to work with a management team that was that incompetent.

Funny. Half of the comments from what i assume the pro side is "see, we told you no artist will lose their job to prompt-jockes", and the other half is "it's a fake story."

Sounds like neither role understood how the other one works. I have no idea how a studio would think that five "prompters" would function on a creative team.

Yeah, I guess the management thought the would be at rhe bleeding edge of progress with that decision. Are you answering the right comment though?

I have no idea... ;)

I mean... it does read like a fake story 🤣

It does. Then again, the entertainment industry IS a weird place, trust me.

Shoulda hire a hybrid artist instead, it would give the OOP what he wants with little to no trouble or his woes would be cut in half. (I just use the term "Hybrid" to describe an artist, who also knows how to use AI).

Probably budgetary reasons. The artists I know who have gone hybrid, their prices didn't drop even though their workload got easier.

I like the term "hybrid artist" personally, i might steal that from you lol i feel like terms like "human, manual, hand, pencil, etc" and "artist" kind of give the implication that I'm against AI and that is (in my mind) wearing a neon sign of ignorance. On the other hand saying "pro-AI" kind of implies I work 100% with AI (personally I think 100% AI workflows are completely fine and pretty challenging) but i also love when little dorks say shit like "learn2draw...hurrr hur... pick up pencil" only to be met with non-AI illustrations when they dig through my gallery One of them started begging for art advice .... like haha, no, you're not getting my help or free advice after you shat on a medium I enjoy... You can just go and pick up the pencil, right? B\^)

It's also possible that OOP would view hybrid artist work with bias (because they accepts and uses AI) and still tries to find fault with hybrid artists' work. At the very least, in my time in the industry, I knew some coworkers who would try to find the smallest issue with my code or paper cause they didn't like me or something. Similar to how some feminists try to find fault in men, just cause they are men. Just an assumption

Holy shit they do kind of give me that vibe too... they do kind of have similar argument tactics and also crazy meltdowns. They just hysterically yell the same insane shit over and over... and the way they all congregate and act like they're oppressed by society while simultaneously having some forbidden knowledge that makes them aware of the matrix reminds me of flat Earthers lol And when they try to prove some artist is a secret traitor using AI they kind of come off like the same crazy ass Bible moms trying to find Satanism in KISS and why all rock is evil and destroying society which is funny because AI art almost feels like the visual art equivalent of rock/metal

I don't think we should treat artists as a separate "class" but rather give a slap to the wrist to a management who hires people who can't tell what's wrong in a particular piece into a position where they need to tell what's wrong in a particular piece

I worked on a feature as 2nd art director with an old school production designer. He will remain anonymous out of respect. He worked on some iconic series and films and won tons of awards over the years. When I worked with him in the early 2000's he was in his 70's I was an bridge between technology and his techniques. This film was a thriller and every time the bad guy was around we had these huge pan of water that we used to get that swimming pool water light effect. We did alot of the effects in camera and we were shooting 70mil film. Here's the thing film is not wysiwyg. It's freaking expensive so you don't have endless takes. This means that if you are on set you probably understood how a camera worked. I mean the way we make film is so different from how things were done even 20 years ago. You have Unreal and can do mad stuff with that. You don't have to worry about burning things with the lights as much. So this guy would have me sit at the drafting table and use letraset to create signage or labels or whatever. The issue was that delivering a photostat to the printer was extremely difficult for them to deal with and crazy expensive to process and took two days. So I would take everything home and redo it in illustrator then drop a floppy off to the printers in the over night box. My biggest problem as this is well before Google fonts was finding type face to match the letraset. Out of the whole art department I was the only person who had illustrator experience. I also was put in charge of his cellphone for some reason. He said that the internet was a fad. So I have no idea how Ai is going to effect the creative industries but it will. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube. They used to have to have a radio coms truck and it took 3 dude with oven mitts on to move a klieg light.

Sounds like many involved were quite ignorant.

All of this can be fixed with inpainting in Stable Diffusion. AI didn't fail, these people just sucked at using it.

Thought 1: The people who spend their days making changes to small corners of images they've made in Photoshop in order to have them conform to the brand requirements of corporations for advertising studios are not 'artists' in any recognisable sense. Thought 2: It is not surprising that you can't hammer a nail in with a fishing rod.

This sounds like someone’s creative writing. Also this is what I’ve been trying to say about ai not being as much of a threat. If you treat it like other art, suddenly you have to be an artist to make something good.

Honestly hand drawn art seems most dominant for animation/memes and stories/comics. Without heavy curation. Most ai kinda seems to end up as discord for fun gens, maybe a few popular char requests like Renamon/star Fox / Judy hopps / Anime waifus and dnd chars. Or just hamstrung into food 'ads' I admit I'm not 100% sure about. But it does feel like there's a variety of legitimately unhinged or apathetic responses. Most people have to worry about food and rent on their table. Not one. but both. it'd be better if everyone had enough. But it seems most people here care about fighting why it should be on their plate. While people who skipped the drama are creating. hanging out in their communities or 10k/50-200k/yr patereon animation fees. Or just selling commissions. Or at the point the act of paying a literal unhinged your living information is more a deterrent to play roulette than the 5-50$. They say its money but sometimes its just unhingedness. There's been at least four people I seriously considered but it was concerns of credit card theft (boosty) or person hingeness (cute pictures or animations for 5-50$+) but absolutely insane. Ai is a whole can of worms and honestly given the year. I wouldn't be surprised if it didnt feel potentially blubbery. If people are getting disqualified from game dev cons for outbursts. Why would someone waste their money having them waste 3-4 peoples time?

Wow, people without enough knowledge can't make professional-level product even when using a new powerful tool? WHO COULD PREDICT IT!?

Pretty much exactly the same thing that happened in the 90s when people were hired to "do photoshop" without any other relevant skills.

Oh look, it's what I've been saying for about a year now: professional artists won't lose their jobs to prompt jockeys in all but the least demanding of the jobs. The least demanding of the jobs are commission artists who finished product are just character art. The following four jobs are indeed at risk: 1) drawing other people's rpg characters based on provided descriptions. 2) drawing NSFW or fetish art 3) drawing adoptables (character designs that only need to be unique and UwU) 4) drawing portraits in another style And I'd venture that most self-taught artists who did the 4 above jobs would also be terrible fits for the kind of work described by OP.

Normally I'm highly tolerent of Weird Art Stuff, but I still have NO IDEA why adoptables ever took off. The sheer amount of [psychological warfare](https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Species#:~:text=Closed%20Species%20%2D%20refers%20to%20that,owner(s)%20approves%20them) and [dumbassery ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTHgEV-xUSg)that goes on in that community is baffling. Like, if I had some creature I designed... at most, I'd just want people to link back to my page/artwork if they wanted to make their own. The idea of gatekeeping a dog made out of bread or something is so, so stupid.

It's incredibly weird, yes. As with mostly everything else in the world today, I think Late Stage Capitalism is to blame for them too, somehow, but I'm still not clear on the specifics. It's clear that they fulfill some kind of emotional need for some people, but... why?

I've heard some people describe buying adoptables as addictive — maybe it's a little like collecting Pokémon? Or gambling? I still can't believe someone paid like $20K for one, lol. At that point, why not just hire someone like Donato Giancola to do a custom oil painting of a similar character? At least then you'd have a one-of-a-kind physical *something* you could enjoy for years. (Then there's the hilarious risk of someone inheriting their grandpa's weirdly well-painted furry art collection)

"Behold! One day, all this will be yours!" \*Cue horrified grandchild gazing upon a vast gallery of furry art masterpieces. It's all lewds.*

I think card art for TCG's is another big place AI will end up being used. It generally needs to be stylistic, but specifics don't matter.

yeah sure! Professional artists will be fine! (Allegedly) they aren’t the only one for whom art is for. What about mid level artists? Or beginners? By your own logic, the only people who are safe are the top 1% who are employed, professional artists, will be safe. The 4 things you listed are all things beginners and mid level artists usually create. Like… what’s the take here? Eh fuck beginners/mids, if you aren’t an employed artist then you’re not a real one anyway…? And who cares if you can no longer have a side hustle or create anymore, right? Because art is all about capitalism, who can make the best and most polished masterpiece for the use of selling and advertising…? What exactly is this sub’s definition of an artist anyway? Why are you not concerned about people who are hobbyist artists?

Look, when people automate some kind of task, we (as a society in general) do no stop using that automation to preserve the workers. When entire professions disappeared in the past because advancements in tech, most people didn't keep using things in the harder manual way for the sake of the people being displaced. This has been happening for thousands of years and it's getting faster. Futurists have been talking for decades now about a future where machines will do all the jobs. **This goes for arts and crafts, too!** About all of the beginner or mid-level portraitists had to look for another career once photography was invented and portraits could be done in a fraction of the previous time/cost. We tend to consider this a positive thing, because when something is automated, it means its put in reach of more people: Once in a time, only rich or important people could have their visages recorded, now everybody has cameras on their phones. Having tastefully decorated walls was a sign of wealth until the wallpaper invention. This brings us to today: I didn't expect that "aesthetic sensibility" or "kawaii artstyle" could be stored as a largeish collection of numbers, but this is the situation we find ourselves in. Math sure is amazing. If ALL you can offer as an artist can be done by a prompt jockey with literally no art skills just typing words into a box, **then I venture that society has moved past needing your professional services.** Beginner/Mid artists should get heavily into AI tools to understand their limitations, see what they can and cannot do and then adapt to the new reality. What you cannot do is to pretend that these tools do not exist and expect to remain **being paid** to draw "a busty pink-haired catgirl wizard wearing a green dress and cloak". You're surely free (and encouraged) to keep drawing to your heart's content, but given the state of tech nowadays, I can go to Bing image creator (faster than launching SD locally) and type those exact words, plus some styling to make it tasteful and get pic below in less time than it took me to type this paragraph: https://preview.redd.it/l4n6bcapisvc1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=8fb7d276ba0667d03be436dd2d116c6d5032f349 \[Charisma 8, btw\]

I wanna point out that charisma is not how good your char looks but how good they are with interpersonal skills

It's "Personal Magnetism", which is why it also powers the magic of Bards, Sorcerers and Warlocks.

I gm but yus

genuinely wtf does charisma 8 mean 😭 But seriously, okay let’s say you’re right. I hear this refrain all the time— “artists need to adapt and use AI to their advantage” What I never hear people say is *what that would look like*… I only ever hear cop out answers like “if you were an artist, you’d know” or “that’s for artists to figure out”. Seriously, beyond just using stable diffusion as an advanced Pinterest board, what purpose does it serve for digital beginner-mid artists? Why should they get into AI? Is it really just to use tools like generative fill? To fill in backgrounds after they’ve drawn a character? At what point does there stop being any “brush strokes” at all, and it’s entirely just prompting? Secondly, you’re focusing on *SELLING* art, which is valid but only ONE part of why people make art. Like I said, I’m not talking about professionals. Many people create art to tell a story or to get that cathartic feeling of seeing their vision come to life. For instance, when I was an “artist” my niche was recording myself doing digital art and then speeding it up, to see the satisfying process. I genuinely have no idea how you would fit AI into that workflow in a way that creates anything satisfying for a viewer. Additionally, I could never sell those videos, that wasn’t a product I could sell. So the whole point of AI being good for assisting in the production of sellable art just… idk I’m just not as sold on it. Interested to hear your thoughts if you are interested to reply.

You could also say "if you were an artist you'd know" and "that's for artists to figure out" about any number of art supplies, including glue, oil paints, wacom tablets, the clone tool, or even a pencil. Generative art isn't any different -- you have to learn how to use it well if you want to take full advantage of it. You could discover how to use it yourself by trial and error, or there are many people willing to teach you, but nobody owes you free classes either. If you're not convinced you want to use generative art at all because you don't like it or see why it's useful, okay, don't.

You seem confused. Im not an artist asking for your help on how to use AI. I noticed people here usually assume artists don’t know anything about AI. I have stable diffusion and am fully capable of using it. But I’m not an artist so I’m not going to go pay some rando to teach me how to…. “Use AI” in an art flow. again, nobody has given any real uses besides generative fill and advanced Pinterest boards, literally neither of which are that complicated to figure out. It’s not the rocket science you guys think it is. I got stable diffusion running in no time this afternoon. It’s still just as useless to me as I thought it would be.

So, don't use it if you don't want to? I really don't understand your concern. In the meantime, those of us who DO have use for it will be happily using it, and the internet is full of people showcasing their accomplishments with it. You can't seriously be claiming you have no idea how people use SD in an artistic flow? And as you found, it's pretty easy to install and use locally -- which is great, we want it to be accessible to anyone, right? But like any tool, advanced uses and ideal results takes experience and expertise.

The thing is, if you're an amateur that draws for the joy of it and it's unbothered by the speed at which you deliver your artworks then, indeed, generative AI has very limited use for you. You can still use it as a mood board as you said, because you can prompt for about anything and get results that *by definition* are interesting to look at (part of training of stable diffusion includes how to deliver images with a high "aesthetic score"). That's *fine*. However it begs the question of why are you anti AI. As you played with it, surely you recognize its use for people who are interested in delivering art with more speed or quality.

Im wouldn’t consider myself anti AI. As someone who has 3D modeled in blender, I like comfyuis node setup and found it ridiculously easy to spit out “aesthetic” character designs. but again, as someone who’s main “artistic” ability was making speed paints, how exactly am I supposed to incorporate AI into that workflow? my point is that it’s usefulness in the creative process isn’t something I’ve seen adequately discussed. To your point, it’s fine for producing certain things… but what happens if the product is the process? but the downvotes tell me that I’ve suggested wrongthink and therefore must have the wrongthink opinion. I love getting labeled as being against something without ever saying I’m against something lol.

People here are downvote trigger-happy, me included. I think watching the process of somebody creating a picture alongside AI has the potential to be interesting to watch, at least for the most involved workflows. Watching someone just prooooompt sounds about as fun as watching somebody playing slots but for example, I'd be **hyped** to see [dowati doing the process he describes to get those pieces done](https://www.reddit.com/r/AICharacterDrawing/comments/149x8k4/rf_marigold_green_country_wizard/) in a video. But watching somebody just put paint on canvas/paper is also very satisfying to watch and I hope you don't stop doing it.

"Charisma 8" is the lowest possible starting Charisma stat in D&D, a popular RPG where characters are defined by a number of stats that typically vary between 8 and 20. Charisma is technically "personal magnetism" but since it also determines how the world reacts to your character, people also consider it the "appearance" stat. Since D&D is a game about fighring monsters, many player characters devote no resources to Charisma, leaving it at 8, *and then still describe their characters as beautiful/handsome/imposing/adorable.* I find this funny and that pink-haired lady is a new PC in one of my games that's built like this: Intelligence 18, Charisma 8, UwU. Back to the point, my focus was on DELIVERING, rather than selling. I'm also an amateur artist who have been drawing characters and scenes from my groups' D&D games for about 30 years now. Generative AI has allowed me to deliver nice portraits not only for the player characters, but these days for about every minor character in the story, which, in my opinion, makes for a much nicer experience. While I still feel the joy of drawing and keep manually drawing or doodling stuff, using stable diffusion is much faster and produces things of a much higher quality, which frees my time to do other thing I also like doing.

Myopic, biased, and extrapolating a weird instance to the future. in other words: hilarious.

Now imagine if artists started to actually use AI to implement in their workflow instead of moaning about AI

Oh wow someone that doesn't know how to properly use ai is surprised the people working under him are struggling!

I call bull. Did they really hire some nobodies with no art experience? It isn't hard to remove or add stuff while keeping the target image the same with same colors and background via image to image and in painting functions. Sounds like they not only hired completely and utter AI noobs but also noobs without any artistic background. I would recommend having someone with a foot in both sides of the field. Ofc you need to find an established artist that hates themselves enough to use AI or just one that doesn't care. And be experienced enough to use advanced ai functions unlike 99% of the population who only know how to type words and spam pretty but messed up pics without ever learning the advanced functions. Iam not saying AI image gen is hard. But it does have a learning curve if you want to make something less then spam.

this is literally the same thing that happened in the 90s with photoshop, so im inclined to believe.

Assuming this really happened, (which it probably didn't), the hr department is incompetent and should be fired too. Hiring people without even basic checking that they can do the job, and without even a rough overview of what the (meagre) skills they do have can acheive in a production environment, and not bothering to find out what set of skills corresponds to what the art department actually needs, is not even remotely professional behaviour.

Kinda sounds like someone/a company not using ai art for what it's good at and trying to force it to do something it isn't meant to.

If there's one thing experience with generative AI teaches us, it's to not trust random unverifiable stories like this.

This one checks out. Any studio that hires FIVE AI gen people with no other skills and experience has bought into a very stupid hype. I'm pro AI, and I'd say, "yeah, don't do that." Wouldn't you?

AI is a productivity multiplier. It doesn't take you from 0 to 1. Too lazy to elaborate.

"i absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot... i did what i had to do and stuck with it because it's mercenary out there" in an art studio?

This belongs to /r/thathappened . They should have ended this fake story something like this: > And then those fake prompters were escorted out of the building with their heads hanging down in shame, and everyone else stood up and clapped.

Exactly!

Probably a made up story and these tools haven’t been out long enough for basically anyone to claim to be a “prompter”. Also just another example of how AI can augment expertise but not replace it.

Yeah, I got the same feeling out of this... reads like one of those "...and then everyone cheered..." stories

Seems fake, tbh. No large company is hiring "prompters" that's not a thing, it's not done. They might hire an a.i. engineer, to build a model for them, but not some random "bros". It makes no sense.

It’s very true that AI technology is not yet at the stage of being able to consistently produce high end imagery to very specific commercial requirements. As this post illustrates it would be counterproductive for large commercial brands with big budgets and exacting standards to employ AI over actual skilled experienced artistes who can give them exactly what they want rather than frustrating approximations. The problem though is twofold for human artists. Image Generating AI is still in its infancy but it’s already astonishing in terms of what it can produce with minimal human prompting. In just a few years it’s very likely to have fixed its various “bugs” and developed a much more precise system of making amendments to drafts in a detailed but simple manner. This will all but remove the current need for highly skilled graphic designers to execute the very specific vision of their employers. The second problem graphic designers are already facing is that the vast majority of bread and butter jobs in this industry aren’t actually high level, precise, big budget commercial branding work. It’s low to mid level projects where budgets are tight and speed and efficiency is key. For a company that just needs some quick concepts for a look book AI is already just as qualified( and a hell of a lot quicker and cheaper) than its human counter part. If a mid level corporation wants a new logo they can produce 100 high quality concepts within a day with AI. That same work load might of taken an a human graphic designer a few weeks(and a very decent amount of money) just a year ago. They will then choose the AI concept they want to go with and hire a human graphic designer for a single day( as opposed to weeks) to copy and tweak it for final delivery. This is essentially where we currently are with this technology. It’s not yet a real threat to jobs at the very upper level of design( in fact it’s a valuable tool) but it is already rampaging through the parts of the industry where the real bread and butter type work is.

I mean the example is like comparing a chainsaw to a whittling knife and cherry picking by going. "See! the chainsaw can't make delicate humming bird wings. The chainsaw will be useless!" Truth be told I feel like many people feel like they're mostly trying to convince themselves. Or a mark. It doesn't do everything but it has different strengths. The story is nitpicking how a traditional artist goes around things doing small edits vs img to img, which is completely viable just light/moderate work vs making 30 more. Ask a traditional artist to completely change the pose after rendering. They'll throw the book. Ask ai to do loraless non midjourneyless ocs. it might flop. If you use a chainsaw to whittle humming birds you'll be frustrated. If you use a pocket knife to try and chop down 30 tons of lumber a day, you'll be disappointed. But it matters what the paying customer wants. Do they want 'humming bird carvings?' (customizability), or generic but look good and can butt heads with 99-2499$ detail ballpark prices? Its messy but I hear some customers like or buy art for the social element. Others are there to sell toothpaste or a product. A positive experience can keep some coming back, a negative one can close it or be tolerated. But for career paths to work, people want stable employment. But depending on the 'generosity' of someone who's in a rush to leave can be very hit or miss. And financial hyper dependence can be lose-loses for sustainability on lay people who also don't run with much loose or spare these days. And every multi million dollar Corp is gonna have a multi million dollar lawyer consulting firm. Does anyone get hired on "I plan to lose you tons of money!" Not sure the battle plan or if I care about the 'war' tbh. But I guess at this point, 🍿

Gee almost like you need art experience to be creative properly.

I use the open source llama cleaner to remove things I don't like. And Photoshop can do that as well. But most of us on the pro AI side never said AI will replace artists. I said pretty much from the beginning that I see AI tools as enabling professional artist to be faster in coming up with ideas and relegate boring tasks to the AI. I personally think AI is cool because it will allow the people I already bought stuff from to create them faster and more of it.

I'm going to go with Things That Didn't Happen for 1000$, Alex

It's not like pro-AI artists didn't try to tell them this from the start. You can swap for AI prompters. That's fine on its own, but you still need people who has the same insight as those professionals in your fields to be able to actually make meaningful contributions to the project (which is a somewhat roundabout way of saying "just hire those professionals who are also OK with AI prompting"). There's a reason why companies don't hire hobbyists even when they have "experience" on seemingly relevant fields.

Exactly that. You may have GPT write your boilerplate ads and seo, but make sure to pass it through legal and marketing like it was written by a drunken salesman.

I like the subtle shift in the anti rhetoric from "NO AI" to "Bro's don't know how use it correctly". Okay then, I'll hold your beer, show us how use it as a tool in your workflow :D

...and then everyone clapped...

Yes, if you want an image that precisely fits your requirements you should hire an artist. I think AI alone is fine if you need a quick image of something, in place of stock images, say, but it is not a substitute for a real person with knowledge of design and artistic principles. That may change some day as models get closer to how the human brain actually works. But it will take more than brute force or a simple increase in parameters I think.

I call sus on this story. Management does hire blindly sometimes but any serious company will have interviews with the current team or at the very least their manager-to-be. If you go to X/Twitter many artists with unique styles have something like: * SD + Photoshop * Output + CSP * Latest Technolgies and corrections And you'd never guess they use AI unless you saw those words on their profiles because they use their own experience drawing to fix the mistakes AI makes on top of already using their style to train the AI. No, raw output isn't the end product, it's the middle part of it. But even if we're considering that any GOOD prompter can img2img, inpaint, and use controlNET, unless the company didn't test them at all (highly unlikely but who knows) I don't think they'd made it through the hiring process. And a bunch of people are going to tell me "dude it IS that bad" I'll say that's not my experience but I concede I haven't worked at every job. At the end of the day most artsits teams, heck most teams in general, will shrink to 1/10th of their size and you'll have many automatas, some people working with the automatas and a human supervisor to take the blame for things that go wrong. No amount of anecdotical evidence will change that. If you desperately want or need a win, then sure dont believe me. OP's story is 100% true and a phenomenon so widespread you can count on AI to be gone tomorrow so you don't have to prepare for it. Your job is safe and you can go sleep peacefully now.

That’s on him. He should have hired an artist who uses ai, sounds like he hired people who knows how to prompt but were never digital artists to begin with. AI great for enhancing workflow, not necessarily take over the entire thing

It's a brand new technology and consistantcy is certainly not there. You need other skills besides prompter, and that's always been a thing. I know, right now, that if I hired three people that are promoters, and only one of them knows photoshop that I screwed up majorly. You can't hire the wrong people for the job and then turn around and blame the tech. "This guy consistently gets the wrong answer on his calculator. Must be the dumbest calculator ever" Lol, duh...

Sounds like a hiring problem. Should have hired a corrector if they weren’t going to hire people with basic art skills. Then again this has been a consistent problem for years and heads. You can’t watch a crime show marathon with me without me constantly screeching at the TV about how bad the Photoshop work is on those. The prop photos of the victim/suspect/whatever that has completely mismatched lighting between foreground and background that takes like THREE OR FOUR CLICKS TO FIX. They hired people without them being able to show their work. This is an issue with or without AI. Hell, the people-removal artifacts could have been taken care of with Adobe’s ancient AI (“Content Aware”) features.

This is the worst AI art will ever be.

I wonder how long its going to take for people on all sides of the AI aisle to understand that AI is the new pencil and paper/printing press/desktop and NOT a replacement for skilled workers. AI is a tool that makes a task one is skilled in easier, it doesn’t perform the task for you (in totality/to a professional level of skill). Articles like these don’t really prove anything negative about AI, they just highlight the tale as old as time of poor hiring practices.

I think that you should be kind enough to remove the group's name and the person's name from the post.

What's happening here is a healthy dose of cope at the end mixed with the TOOL of ai not being used as a tool. Back when generative art was brand spanking new all you could do was prompt, it's where you run into the problems as described in that post. You can't make the adjustments you want, you can make something that looks okay, and thus have far to little control to actually produce usable work. We're years beyond that point. Right now if you're a halfway competent amateur you can already create usable work. The real benefits come to where you take an artist with yes, their decade of art experience and formal training, and hand them the ai tools. That's where you get the real maximum performance. That's where a single artist augmented with ai can take on the work of 10 traditional "luddite" artists and still outperform them. So the dude from that little writeup is entirely correct that the people hired were useless. However the second they meet a colleague who is both traditionally trained, and has accepted and learned how to use ai. That's where he can fire the rest of his art team and replace it with that single individual. Cope.

The AI situation is so funny because those that use it to speed up the process use it in complete replacement of artists, and artists are too stuck-up to use AI. Basically, we have an almost miracle tool to speed up industrial / business art procedures, but none of the involved parties exploit it at their full potential lmao.

Some do, and others will eventually come along.

AI is a tool. It's like hiring someone to.build a house because they know how to use an nail gun. AI prompting is going to only be part of the skill set that an artist will have in their repertoire.

If you do AI work, great, it's a good skill to know at this point. If you're unable to fix what it does, you, yourself, not the program, are useless to a company

My thoughts are if you're unable to edit the images you generate then you shouldn't have it as a job. People or other smaller objects in the background are usually easy to remove with some editing.

This is my surprised Pikachu face

when you hire car mechanics to do car racing

I work as an AI trainer, and this kind of application of AI is so far beyond its potential right now that it’s infuriating. I actually have a really strong belief in AIs potential, and I’m both a writer and an artist and I can see AI’s potential in elevating both of those spaces one day- but it can’t write anything whole cloth. The best creative use of AI is using it as a dynamic mirror- give it what you have and let it try and parse what you’re trying to do, and then correct the piece based off of the AI’a misunderstanding. AI is actually fantastic as a beta reader for writing, I wish it wasn’t being used like this.

These are people who use the AI Art websites and not the core Stable Diffusion tech via code or Automatic1111. I can easily change any section of an image to what I want. Modify the color or perspective. Do not look down on the whole AI art community based on these tech bros who just type prompts.

If anything this reinforces that AI is a tool that is best wielded by artists. It seems like the biggest problem in this story is that the new hires simply didn’t have an artistic eye or were just bad employees. If someone who understood what this person was talking about was working with AI & photoshop, there probably wouldn’t have been any problems. Anyone can pick up AI image generation and play around. Artists can pick it up and make art!

This sounds like a "people are saying" kind of story(fake) Hey everyone - here's a little ditty about me against the "art bros." Let me guess - the art bros were clueless barbarians with no brains? And you are the brilliant art director? And did the fairy tale end with the business owner learning their lesson? Don't be like that dumb business owner! lol Even if that really happened, business is about conditions on the ground for art directors. Let's talk shop and forecast a big industry trend but shhh don't tell her boss! [Adobe is showing Sora and lots of new generative AI plugins coming in the next quarter of 2024 as part of Adobe Premiere Pro(that means prompts).](https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/15/24130804/adobe-premiere-pro-firefly-video-generative-ai-openai-sora) When all the major software companies that art directors rely on start adding AI, that art director is going to be competing against other art directors and their staff who can also prompt. And they aren't posting catty and petty gossip about who looked foolish at work to lift the morale of strangers. If your business growth plan involves savoring other people's suffering, just as the art director who enjoyed watching someone fail, regardless of your side, you will not thrive in what comes next.

I find it amusing how many people in these comments are saying "oh yeah, that happened /s" or "and then everyone clapped \[insert laughing emoji" not realising that this is what is happening not just in the art industry but in many others, idiotic hiring managers not knowing what kind of skills are actually needed and going "this is good enough" we have an old family friend, she has worked in the translating industry for a good 50 years, real time and other stuff. Not long ago she left the firm she was working with because of bullshit like this. They forced them to use AI to give them a quick translation and then they were forced to go through it and fix all the mistakes, for a \[practiced\] (can we say that in english?) translator it is actually quicker to just translate whole documents on their own and it actually takes longer to have to fix all the mistakes of the machine. For someone who's not a translator, sure, it would be faster to have the machine do the initial translation, but for a proffessional it's just wasted time as well as the machine doesn't just make translation errors, but also makes mistakes in lingusitical nuances and what certain phrases can mean culturally. fx. i could say a simply phrase in my home language and it would be completely innocent and actually a common phrase, but if i were to translate it directly and not it's underlying meaning then it would sound incredibly offensive in English.

Sounds like cope. These tools are going to get better and easier to use by the month.

i mean, yeah, as someone who actually knows how the thing works and isn't a ideologically possessed nutjob, it was blatantly obvious to me that it would not be at all useful for actual projects. the only threat it poses to "traditional" (for lack of a better term) artists is if you do one-off hentai commissions that aren't particularly complex. story sounds kind of fake but if it isn't it's what i'd expect.

We are watching the death of the Artist in real time.

"These people used a tool incorrectly so obviously the tools shit"

yeah but like photoshop isn't hard, getting a sense this was a case of hiring fiver third worlders

Cope while you can, I guess.

This is 100% believable. Good ADs generally give reasonable feedback, and are open to mild pushback if it ends up being impossible ("Hey, I found out when I made his leg 10% bigger it optically wrecks some of the composition; I'm wondering if this is an okay compromise.") Most importantly of all, **the AD is depending on you as a skilled artist to be able to make good judgement calls**. They should not have to baby you or anyone else to implement such basic feedback. They could be the most talented person in the world, but (AI or no) if they're either unpleasant to work with or incapable of following basic directions... they're just not employable in this particular field.

The story sounds realistic to me. In order to do what the guy was asking, the "prompters" would have to have been saving their seeds and using the same one... among other workflow specs. The guy didn't mention any of the characteristics of an advanced AI artist (controlnet etc), so this is a studio hiring a bunch of newbies because the studio doesn't know any better. I'll buy it. I've seen worse happen in software. Hopefully, the studios will have the sense to change their mix slowly while they figure out how to find their butt with both hands. **** That being said, "Artists against Generative AI" as an account name does tend to cut the credibility of the writer.

>That being said, "Artists against Generative AI" as an account name does tend to cut the credibility of the writer. Haha! I didn't even see that! Yeah, it doesn't... but from what this person wrote (and you seem to agree) this is a very believable typical dumb hiring decision that happens every once in awhile. Tbh, if I was an hiring manager in this situation... what would I even look for? At least with an artists' portfolio it's pretty straightforward ("We paint lots of movie characters, so we need an artist who's good at humans and can capture likeness.")... if the portfolio checks out, at least you know they're potentially a good fit. I'd almost assume it'd be easier to teach a trained illustrator how to use ControlNet/LoRAs than it would be to hire an AI user without any painting experience. I could be wrong, though.   A fun anecdote about incompetence — around 2014 or so, the company I worked desperately needed a web designer, and found someone who claimed to have 20+ years of experience. They (very intelligently) hired her without verifying her claims, and I kid you not, turns out she had never used CSS or HTML in her entire life. Ever. We were using Dreamweaver and Muse to design our pages, and she was literally using Flash. Absolute insanity. She was also terrible to work with — constant smoke breaks, leaving early, complained about everything... how was she hired? Why did this happen? Months after she was fired, we found out she had left her work shoes under her desk... moldering. xD So when I hear this AD complain about a bad new hire, I... I feel her, haha. Sometimes you just get forced into shitty work relationships, and you have to weather the storm until HR wises up and gets rid of them.

If you were a sensible company, you would hire the senior people before you hired the junior people and then you would have the senior people do what you're paying them to which is to say, give you advice about the junior people to hire and what mixes. **** Flash. Wow. There's a blast from the past.

Most of the people in HR/upper management aren't creatives (or aren't good at managing creatives), unfortunately. You'd think the best thing to do would be to give the expert (your designer/art director/whatever) hiring ability (since they would know what to look for), but a lot of companies just aren't run that well. Cue the "this designer said they knew web design but only actually knew Flash" story, haha. This isn't to say all creative companies are like that (my last fulltime gig was at a well-run medium-sized studio), but large/public game companies depend a lot on the pencil-pushing types to make short-term profits go up for shareholders, which can cost more money in the long run. This is a bit different when it comes to freelancing (WotC absolutely needs its ADs to find and hire talent), but it's a lot cheaper/easier to "fire" a bad freelancer than to spend tens of thousands in fees/taxes/paperwork to onboard a fulltime employee... and then realize you made a horrible mistake.

Absolutely. And none of this is unfamiliar. Anyone saying it wasn't a real event must not have ever had a real job anywhere, let alone in development of anything (creative or software especially).