AI vs Hand painted - should I give up?
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- AI art is still quite a big topic on the internet. There are still many artists who are understandably worrying about being replaced by AI. Aside from all the ethical debate surrounding this topic, I’m not a big supporter of using AI to create a painting. So, I did a bit of an experiment, and I want to share the process with you today.
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You hit nail on the head. "AI cannot replace the joy of painting"
Plus the skills you learn and the process you go through by actually producing an image, be it through painting or drawing, are much more valuable, as the AI is only focused on an end result. It lacks any kind of satisfaction, much in the same way as looking for stock images.
but it does affect the actual art industry and the ability for one to monetise their skill
@@tsh3083 This is true, I used to be hyper focused on making a career in the field but now I am dropping it back down to a hobby and focusing on my current "boring" career.
Joy of painting? I dont want it to replace the joy of getting paid.
Problem is, if you can't get paid for it, you will become a hobbyist. And no hobbyist will ever reach mastery. Have you ever heard a virtuoso pianist, violinist or guitarist, who were mere "hobbyists"? That's right, they don't exist. Because reaching mastery requires absolute dedication. And absolute dedication requires getting paid for what you do
This AI assault on human creatitivy will lead into degrading quality of art. Humanity will be reduced to hobbyists, there wil be no masters anymore. You can't become a master at anything, when it's your hobby
Joy? Sure. But joy doesn't pay your rent
Eric, your painting is 100%, and 10 times better than any AI photo etc 👍🧡
I'd never pay money for AI art but I'll pay money for art made by a human soul.
Same here.
Exactly. IfS it Ai made. It kinda ruins the point, if its an artwork.
I have generated thousands of AI images and I have also been a traditional artist for the last fifty years. You are on the right track. AI will never achieve the artistic merit and ingenuity of human made works of art. I find generating it fun and inspiring. But it has no "soul" (imho). It can come close, but it is not as good as human made art.
Sure you do, okay.
I'd pay for a fart!
Please continue making videos. I just started painting and I bought brushes and paints as you instructed. You're a great teacher. I've also introduced your videos and a few others to low-income students who are interested in the arts but who cannot afford private lessons, or waste money on the wrong supplies. What you're doing is so valuable. Please come back.
I'm so glad to hear it. I will indeed continue my video here. I am taking more rest this year but I won't leave youtube :)
@@Cafewatercolorplease don’t man
Painters gave up because photography? no. There's no reason to feel threatened to give up because AI exist. I found that its existence only has given more value to the process. Since everyone can have the final piece in few seconds we start to value what AI can't give: The artistic experience of the process, the pain, the struggle to find your own view and make it show up in a canvas. If someones gives up because AI exist, that person never truly loved art in first place.
💯
Eric, please don’t leave. You give me inspiration to paint.
Painting is all about joy, satisfaction, relaxing and focusing. Not one single AI will bring it to me. So I'm totally with you, only painting by myself can give it to me.
Yes, it just will not bring you money for life.
Never give up. Never surrender.
exactly! AI will only win over human art if we all give up. the more we encourage people to get into art, the more choice companies and studios will have over AI
👍😄 💯
I am so glad that you made this video and challenged AI produced paintings. You reminded me so much that the reason I wanted to become an artist was not to reproduce but to express the feelings invoked by my subject matter. This often is a matter of light vs. dark, contrast and feeling! That's one of the reasons I don't wish to paint photo realism. I want the viewer to catch a glimpse of what I saw that made me want to capture it in watercolor.
Why else would anyone want to paint! Thank you for expressing what every artist should hear in the face of AI.
I agree with you, you cannot get the same fullfillment & enjoyment painting it yourself.
Art and artists are evolving as they always have and always will. Stay Creative!
This has been a huge discussion in some groups I belong to on Facebook. I get being upset about folks buying AI, but.......there will still be waaaaaay more willing to aquire a hand painted creation! But also, there will be many that won't be able to know the difference😒and fall victim to buying "fake" art. Very frustrating. I adore your videos and art! Please don't stop🤗
Don't be upset. There are already a lot of people out there buying photoshop(p)ed pictures, cards, posters. There'll always be a lot not knowing, not seeing the difference between fake and real creative art. Don't get frustrated and think of artists like f.e. Paul Cezanne, who was struggling so hard for many years. Or Henri Rousseau, or, or, or... so many great artists who were underrated for a long time.
Keep on painting/drawing and have fun with it - that's the deal! 🙂
@@schragdenker5425 for sure! 😊
I wonder if in a generation or two we'll be so used to AI that no one will know how to do art by themselves and think art is supposed to cost pennies. On the other hand, maybe people will get surprised and say "wow, you did it yourself? with your hands?" and will want to buy the work just because of it.
AI paintings is what will eventually fill target, ikea, Marshall’s, ect. Prints for people that just want pretty house decor.
@@y_s4021 i think there will be a small market for treu handwork, but that might be pricey, ala big art nowadays
Beautiful painting of a place where others want to go, as well as you. The peaceful feeling comes through in your art. I also visited your past videos this morning. There is a treasure trove worth investigating. Maybe others don't know about this, but I hope they take the time to explore. Follow your heart and enjoy your beautiful family. I only hope you miss your UA-cam family a little because we'll certainly miss you.
I've been to Japan several times, stayed near Shinjuku, but traveled to the country on weekends... Tokyo itself is surprising in its little magical corners, unexpected green places... And, getting out, into small towns, or an inn in the mountains, reveals how underrated, or misunderstood, Japan is as a beautiful and quiet destination, not so much as a "tourist", maybe, but as someone who can take in both the natural beauty and the historical elements... And, indeed, many, many "paintable" moments and scenes. But the "AI"doesn't put down a wash, or pull up a bit of pigment, or "feel" any frustration or joy in the process or the result.
Keep on putting passion to paper!
Love your painting, and your painting lessons have inspired my journey as a painter, I too was inspired by anime via Hayao Miyazaki’s wonderful films which so captured my heart I had to pick up watercolors for myself and the calming zen like practice brings me joy every time I pick up a brush. Thank you for sharing your painting journey with us all.
Please never give up! Your painting warmed my heart, thank you ❤️
Love your paintings and I really like the water reflections in this one😊
After watching only about 6 minutes I had to stop and shout a „Yes, exactly, you are SO right!“ I've been playing around on the nightcafe platform a little bit. Yes, it's impressive, and in my opinion AI can be a nice source of inspiration if you don't have a specific picture in your head that you what to paint or draw.
But it can never replace the fun of painting or even replace if you want to paint a specific scene.
What I noticed too: Most people use it for very similiar images like dragons, mystic women or wizards, demons, or comic-like animals. Which gets boring quite quickly.
And now I'll keep on enjoing you video (I just found your channel today). Greetings from Germany/France.
On 30:33: This fits perfect! 🙂
AI will never be able to replace a human artist. I've toyed with AI image generation for a while now and have found it to be more miss than hit. It all comes down to this; AI lacks heart and soul. These can not be replaced by algorithms. Art is an expression of the heart and mind in an effort to communicate concepts, ideas, and feeling.
The entire video compares images generated from text prompts, which obviously lack a human touch. However, he didn't try to generate an image directly by drawing and generating simultaneously. In that case, AI would respond to his every brushstroke, becoming an indispensable tool.
Now I agree and you're right, in 10 years it will be as good or better than us.
The emotion will come from the prompt creator.
@@Paopao621 HAHAHAHHAHAHAH good one, yeah a lot of emotion in a prompt HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAH
@@armandogavilan1815 I'm serious, the prompt creator will obviously input the right prompts to show emotion to the Ai generated image. An Inexperienced artist would draw just like an AI, putting emotion on the artwork is a different set of skills that an artist learns after a long time of creating art, since it's a different skill from the technicality of art, the prompt creator/writer could only focus on how they could put emotion to the image ignoring the technical side of art leaving it to the AI.
Hey man keep going! I’m an artist too, I know the joy feeling when doing art, the philosophy too can not be brought without human heart through their hand. That is, the technology has no soul to bring the philosophy right?
I study the cycle of everything, things may lost of interest in decade. But let me say that time will bring back the era of hand painting, the human art.
Keep going my man!
Greeting from Jakarta, IDN
Dear Eric, I no longer work in watercolor as my main medium. Certain handicapping factors in this decision. I am working in pastel, in a loose manner. However I cannot resist watching watercolor demos. I discovered Chien Chung-Wei (the red lantern painting) a while ago so when I saw a notice of his video Painting Nature … I had to watch. The voice-over immediately got my attention. That voice was so familiar. You did a wonderful job with it. The entire video was captivating. I purchased it. You may wish to tell Chien he has a big fan: an old woman in West Virginia, USA. Best wishes to both of you.
I am so glad! it was such a fun project and I learned so much from doing it =)
I wish you well. Pastle is great too! any traditional medium are just wonderful to play with
Your painting is absolutely beautiful. It touches the heart when I look at it. ❤
You are such a beautiful soul and artist, Eric! No AI can compete with you!❤❤❤❤
I long gave up on making money with art in the future, but I will never in my wildest dream give up being an artist, I will create until the moment I can no longer physically make art.
Love your beautiful painting demonstration, thank you for another fantastic video! ❤ I’m with you on AI art, Eric! No matter how good AI artwork may be, the creative process brings me personally so much joy and therapeutic benefits 😊 Plus allows me to connect with loved ones in a meaningful way. So I’ll definitely never stop learning and creating art, especially in an analog, manual way … with real tools like paint, brushes and paper. Love it! 🥰 🎨🖌️
I really like the comparison that you've made between an AI and the human imagination.
As a former illustrator and painter using acrylics, I remember the feeling and emotion that was added to work, an even if it wasn't what I perfect just the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction gave my painting life.
The AI now in this day of age is at its beginning stages of this type of accomplishment, Can we please imagine 10 yrs from now, then 50 yrs from now and so forth.......based on what ive seen and read on the AI learning process will out match our human capacity, but not our soul.
I am so happy to see a new video from you and your painting process, Eric! I feel the same way and do not let AI news affect me too much. Creating art art with art supplies and hands is a very personal, visceral and at times healing experience for many of us ✨Thank you for verbalizing the things related to AI! I hope to see you kore often here!!
this was a very informative video. I am not an artist, but I’m trying to figure out exactly what AI is going to do life in general and my life in particular. The AI images and videos that look really bizarre and alien are quite fun. But I would never choose imitation of art over real art performed by a passionate artist. And it definitely shows in the work. The human hand is simply not there.
Thank you for this inspiring video! I'm a beginning artist who was questioning why I had started painting when AI can do it faster and better. Thank you for giving me the answer. I love your art!
Good luck, and have fun! Enjoy the painting process =)
As a watercolor artist I use Midjourney for roughly 12 months now and I have learned to make beautiful reference images and suggestions for your actual painting. I can understand that people are anxious about AI stuff as it competes with what real people are doing and maybe in future it is even doing it better. You don't get an idea of what Midjourney is capable to do in just a few hours, it takes at least some week. Also the functionality changed much over time as all is still pretty much work in progress and it will change in the future. What is true is that you will always only get an approximation of what you have in mind as AI will never produce the same picture twice. Having said this, I still like the process of watercolor painting over creating a picture with Ai and I believe there will alway be a room for handcrafted original art.
Another very important point regarding A.I. artwork is that the image is only in the computer, and unless you have a giclee printer you are not going to get it onto a nice Arches or Reeves, etc., quality paper. Also the ink in a printer that the general public can get their hands on is not going to lay on the paper, be absorbed by the paint like a quality watercolor paint is going to do. Nor will A.I. generated prints replace print-making, as an art, as the ink from a printing press has a very different viscus quality to modern printers. The inks are not the same composition as the traditional press' inks, whether they are oil based or of a newer water-color base. So the way in which the ink sits on the paper is inferior, and this can be seen by the naked eye, if you look at how the inks sit on the paper. This is also the case with lithography stone printing; which has its own idiosyncratic qualities. So take heart, fellow artists! Until they improve those issues we have job security.
What a great video. It was interesting to see what is possible with AI but I think it only makes real art built on human judgement, skill, creativity and sensitivity more valuable not less. Your painting is real art. And being witness to your creativity process on these videos is priceless. It's so helpful when you explain how you make decisions about how to plan and paint throughout. And then the natural movement/drying of the paint itself makes it more than any machine is worth in my opinion. Please come back to Japan again soon! There are so many great scenes all over the country to inspire you! 😊❤
Great job done🎉 I always enjoyed watching your demos.
“You can feed it with images and ask it to mimic the style you gave.” ie. stealing actual real art from living artists, violating their copyright, and making money off it with no compensation; and all you’re doing is typing in some prompts. A.I. is IMMORAL, UNLAWFUL, SHADY, DIRTY and WRONG.
Goodness, AI cannot interpret human emotion, creativity, experience. Keep going, Eric, don't let AI shadow YOU!
you are naieve, we are only at the beginning of ai, it will be indistinguisable in a few years.
Some AI images already evoke the same feelings, emotional responses. Lot of time you can't even tell if something was AI-made, or a real photo or real digital painting. They have mixed with real art, but it has become a blur. AI-generated image, video and music has evoked emotions in me many times. Sometimes without me knowing it was AI made. Unfortunately. You're mystifying human creations, like they would be somehow always more powerful. Sadly it isn't so. I've already heard songs made with Suno and Udio that are better than anything on Spotify Top 40. Evoking more emotion. Same thing can happen with art. If I don't know it was AI made, it may evoke an emotion without even realizing it
Amazing video and result. So calming to watch. Keep on arting!
取代不了的除了畫作中表達的你內心的美感以外，在繪製的過程還參雜了很多的“獨特”在內，內心的心情、情緒是很影響任何行為、活動的執行過程，這些是沒辦法具體表達起來且每個人都不盡相同，而這些被影響的過程，正隨著過程而摻入畫作當中，無限細小的每一步，才構成了你的畫作，這不是那些機器能代表，哪怕找其他人來剪貼、縫合你的畫作，根據你一些畫風特徵去畫，也沒辦法代表你，因為它們沒有你的心。
Absolutely beautiful, thank you so much for your three plus hours it was well worth it, no comparison hands down this is real art makes my heart sing and my eyes feel emotion. AI can not and will never compare
I never knew about Al thank you for explaining it , but i love to paint it makes me happy and relaxed. Your work is beautiful.
Excellent demo! Thanks, and keep doing what you are doing!
I really appreciate that you made this video to compare AI vs Hand Painted. As an artist myself, it's challenging to compare my art to AI. Thank you so much for this informative video along with your beautiful painting!
Picasso was worried about photography making portrait artists redundant... it's the reason he started cubism
Eric, Your art was done with something AI doesn't have....Heart and Soul. When I look at your painting I can feel the human touch and hours that went into it. You are a wonderful artist. If I could paint as good as you, I would be a happy artist. I love to paint though.
To be fair, in light of the fact that you ARE so talented and mezmerizing, how can I be sure that you yourself are not AI... :) You sometimes are surreal to me with your soothing voice and expert hand, that alone seperates you from the pack! Never stop painting. As a whole, we the people will find a way to preserve human art! As long as there are humans willing to continue shareing their gifts. Thank you for you!
Eric, I love your work. Would you consider talking about your evolution as an artist? You really are amazing and I love your commentary as you go. Thank you for sharing your talent.
I use ai to to get compositions and to get things to paint in general with the models I can afford to use either being unreliable or not the best, but like everything else that people thought was going to be replaced in the past like hand made furniture, real paintings will never be replaced, people want the personal crafted high end product, ai will replace those £5 canvases you get in supermarkets and some of the digital art.
Thank you for guiding us through your process. Creating art takes time. I enjoy painting for the pure joy of it - it's not my career. Just like any new technology, AI will find its way into our lives whether we like it or not. Eventually artists will find ways to make it their ally, not their enemy.
I appreciate your perspective on this. I would also like to add that we humans are often weirdly particular and specific with what we want to make. Because of this, it's simpler (not easier) to just pick up a drawing/painting/whatever utensil and make the thing. I think that's why fiddling with an AI prompt isn't fun for us. We actually enjoy the act of making things 😂
I love you paintings, your carefull thoughts and skills are very impressive. I always support human artists over AI users who type out renderings using artists images, who don't see a penny for our years of passion and devotion to our crafts.
The thing is, in a recent photo competition, it took 80 hours to generate an AI award winning photo. You can take a lot of photos in 80 hours. same for getting the right painting. By the time you stuff around on midjourney, a decent painter can do the job. and it looks more natural anyway. You have to get the AI image out of the computer and a lot depends on the quality of the paper, the inks, etc. It's really faster to do it by hand most of the time. For some things like 3D generated images, it may be more efficient, sure.
Never forget that as a human creating art you are working from your heart to your hand an act of creation which can never be repeated from a key board to screen.♥
AI art is missing one of the most fundamental aspects of art, the human connection. Without it, it's soulless. You painting in this video proves it. Listening to and watching your creative process, is the essence of art.
Keep painting people, I'm definitely never going to let AI stop me doing what I want to do...unless we get into some Skynet scenario, then I probably won't have a choice...
How do you bottle that ?
That’s exactly right! There’s no point to art if it’s not an artist trying to convey their thoughts, experiences, values or whatever else to another person!
What I find shocking is that on Instagram artists are giving likes and positive comments on AI paintings because they don't realise that it is AI. And that makes me think: are we really capable of seeing the difference between hand made and AI? We want to believe that, but I have my doubts.
Not only on Instagram. It's everywhere. A lot of people can't even differentiate photos of real persons and persons created by AI. I also realized this when reading the comments. This also happens on youtube. It's unsettling.
Artists can tell but think about how some people can’t even tell that pranks are scripted…. So yea
It's not possible to tell the difference. Especially when the original arts are things just made for fun. The only way we can tell the difference now is that AI doesn't understand context or narrative sometimes and can't make fine adjustments yet unless you're really skilled at it.
@@y_s4021 as I said possible for me since I'm an artist the fingers and uncanny soulless vibe is a dead giveaway
the difference is in the objects, not the images: frame, brushstrokes, plein air, human handshake, etc.. digital is done
How about letting AI paint something unique that you can then use as an inspiration for a unique paint? Not unlike targetting a photograph. The former possibly violating a photographer's copyright. I think it's an inversion of the process and another source of inspiration.
Well said Eric.. art is so much more than a pretty picture. It has soul. Really enjoy your videos. Blessings !
I do love the sentence written at the end of your video, short but huge in the meaning.
Yep, it’s the process that keeps me trying, not just the end result. People who don’t like or understand the reward of the process of making art will never understand this difference. Plus I have to agree about what many have already said in that when you buy actual art by an artist, you’re also buying into that artist and who they are, not just a neat-o image.
Prompting is more like being an art director or a fussy client lording over a commission than an artist. Yes it takes an eye for things and some creativity to prompt, but it’s not the same as being the artist. AI is the production artist here. Anyone who has worked on the commercial side of art gets what I’m talking about. 😉
I don't think AI will replace artists at all. AI allows humans to collaborate with machines more and more efficiently. But yes AI generates via inference (meaning best guess). It struggled with consistency from one image to another (due to its inference nature) and this is a very basic thing. The level of interaction between human and machine is also still rudimentary as you mentioned. There is a workstream of AI rendering dedicated to realtime user input eg. Krita or realtime canvas. This will evolve into something where the user can draw on a digital canvas for the larger objects (available now) then zero in on details for small sections within the image to have AI render finer details. For instance I needed a tie in my photo instead of a bowtie so I was able to draw a straight yellow line and since the prompt includes a tie, AI transformed that straight line into a regular necktie. This saved me a trip to get a headshot (which I would have edited afterwards anyway). Most of the effort thus far in AI has not been to assist artists yet, it has been to allow layers of inference on top of inference. After it gets through its basic stages there will be more tools specifically to aid artists.
Please stay on UA-cam. I love your channel!
i REALLY miss you on youtube. You were my favorite!
Eric, good to see you back…AI, photographs have there place but nothing beats the human touch and expression.😊
I think AI will ultimately backfire and make human creations even more desirable! Keep going! ❤
If no joy went into creating a piece then no joy can be had from it.
As an engineer with rather a lot of experience in neural networks, deep learning, and machine intelligence, I can assure you:
Telling the computer what you want it to do is every bit as hard as doing it yourself. It's just that instead of learning to move your hand in the right way, you are learning to articulate the precise result you want. One of these is a physical skill, and the other is a verbal skill.
However, there is a fairly important issue with the machine: we do not have enough training data to make it very much better at doing what you want. When you are learning to paint, it is fairly easy to become better at (say) painting boats. But machine learning isn't linear, it's exponential. If you want it to get a little bit better, you need a lot more training data.
We are very nearly at the point where there simply isn't any more training data. The machine demands more data to improve than the human race is producing, which will bring progress from the machine to a screeching halt. I doesn't matter how fast or how well the machine ingests data - which are the major improvements that have driven the current crop of generative models - if there is simply no more data to ingest.
Human beings do not have this limitation. The loudly-repeated lie that the machine is going to get better and better and you cannot stop it will, in time, be seen for the wishful thinking it is. Because the machine is NOT going to get better. We don't have and can't get what it needs to be better.
The biggest issue is that the data used to be trained has been done so regardless of copyrights. The fact that so many artists have their paintings used against their will in order to be able to plagiarize their style is hardbreaking. I hope the court cases will be successful ... Algorithms that have been trained with ill obtained data have to be destroyed and ethically rebuilt
@@roxane1237 It's not in the algorithm. It's in a data file, which has in most cases been made freely available for download on the internet, including the Laion5B database that has created the most backlash.
You may as well suggest that every pirated movie or TV show in the world needs to be deleted. Scream all you want, it is never going to happen, and you're never going to stop people from hosting the illegal downloads either.
Every bit as hard? Lmao
@@bhavana6217 Spoken like a true novice who has never had to keep anything on-model.
@@cdarklockno. You are simply fooling yourself, you aren’t creating jack, your “artistic” integrity and credibility can only be as good as the model that steals actual artist’s shit. You are simply putting on the facade of an artist. If you truly thing it’s just as hard, you’ve probably never drawn anything worth a damn in your life, or highly underestimate what goes into creating art
most importantly you are able to want. that's firs step for inspiration and further improvement
I do want to clarify that I'm not necessarily in support of text-to-image AI but I do have a reasonable understanding of the mechanics behind it, so I might be able to offer some information that people involved in this discussion may helpful.
To start with, current state of the art text-to-image generation is typically done with diffusion models (more precisely latent diffusion or diffusion transformer models but I digress), whose "paintbrush" if you will, is a bit like a photoshop filter, in the sense that they "shape" an image towards the desired output in a series of steps starting from white noise.
a consequence of diffusion model design, however, is that they don't really perform visual reasoning to my knowledge, somewhat analogously to how RNNs in text generation don't really perform in-context-learning in their naive implementation.
What does this mean? Well, they don't really produce a piece as a whole, but instead produce likely elements in each region of the image, with stronger relations between nearer components. This isn't that different from if an artist had to draw an entire image completely zoomed in, breaking the work into 16 total regions (for sake of example) and only had a thumbnail to coordinate the different parts of the image. True, it would be highly detailed, but there's no guarantee that it would function together as a whole image.
Secondly, Eric chose to go with Midjourney to show off AI art in this video, in a raw text-to-image workflow, to the best of my knowledge. There are probably better methods to achieve the effect he wanted; Stable Diffusion is an open source AI model, which allows for a lot of customized workflows. In particular, here, I think controlnet would have been really effective, as he could have conditioned the model on the image he wanted to imitate. I personally would have created a depthmap from the photograph, and used that to condition the generation, which would have produced an image much more strongly based on the photograph.
Why does this matter?
I'm absolutely not trying to say "oh he did it wrong, AI is the best!" or anything like that. I think Eric is an excellent artist and absolutely should not be held to a standard where he has to be fully knowledgeable of a sudden tech trend in order to comment on its impact on his work. But I am trying to provide some context that there is actually quite a few more tools for providing very precise control than people outside of AI art probably understand.
It's definitely a rabbit hole, and requires a lot of research to understand, but there are absolutely tools out there to get the results you want out of AI art even today... But the problem is that many of them are obtuse to use, and I think in their current state it feels a bit unfair to artists that this has come completely out of left field, and there's this new competitor they have to deal with which requires a high degree of commitment to see results comparable to their existing workflows, making it hard for them to adapt any of these new advancements into their work.
What impact does this have on artists?
Well, I hate to say this, but it depends. I think there are a lot of artists who will be negatively impacted by this. I think new commission artists will be most severly impacted, while highly respected industry veterans who work in large teams for composite media (ie: working as an art director for a game studio) will be least impacted, at least immediately, but obviously everybody is somewhere on that spectrum.
Ideally, I'd love to see uses of AI art which complement existing art workflows. To an extent Adobe is trying to do this, but I don't really think the answer is "Lol, artists just need to start prompting for their images", and even features that let artists generate part of the final image is a bit dicey in my eyes. The first thing that comes to mind for me, though, is that there are art styles that aren't really practical to animate, such as watercolor, but I could totally see watercolor artists taking advantage of the upcoming wave of animation based models to produce animations; a totally new medium that they couldn't have necessarily done in that way before.
In the same vein, it would be really interesting to see a watercolor artist's style being applied to a video game, where they operated in a role closer to "art director" as opposed to "artist", in the sense that they were establishing an overall vibe and filling in the animations with AI models, for instance.
Even this isn't exactly perfect, but I think it's possible we could see a situation where artists were complimented by tools that let them do truly new things they couldn't before, but it's hard because there's so much to learn up front to really get into current text to image generation, so I totally understand that it's not really appealing for artists to learn, and it just feels like this monster in a black box that's getting closer and closer while AI bros just kind of stand by and laugh.
Where is AI art going?
Well, the hard part is long range dependencies, basically. It's really hard to get information from pixels that are far away from eachother, because it's too memory and computationally expensive. With that said, I think in the next 8-12 months we'll see an architecture which can do planned text based reasoning (ie: "X artist's watercolor style is characterized by A B and C. Please incorporate those elements in an image with a cool color palette and leading lines").
I also think that we'll have stronger visual reasoning and anatomical knowledge. This might come from just larger models, or it might come from new architectures (revisting VQGAN models in modern Transformer architectures seems promising at the moment, but we'll see), but the point is that you could image a model that might be able to think "There's splashing water in this part of the image, so maybe the character's clothes should be wet here, here, and here, so they should be colored differently and move differently", or "the human body has these parts that can be at this this and this degree from eachother" and so on. It would probably be implicit reasoning, but recent advances in grokking in Transformers for language can probably be adapted to these areas in visual models, though it's tough to say how far.
My suspicion as well is that animation will be possible in a very big way in the next year, based on recent advantages.
Is art doomed?
I don't particularly think so. I'm relatively involved with AI, but I still enjoy watching long form content of people producing art. I still like to view art by artists, and I still gush over animations done by animators I particularly like. I still get emotional when I experience a good story, and I wouldn't want all of the artists, be it any of the media I mentioned, to stop producing art.
But, I'm also excited about new things that are possible. It's kind of fun to toy around with some text-to-image workflows to try and visualize a scene from a novel I'm reading, or to imagine the new kinds of media that might be possible in a year or two's time. Or, to imagine an incredibly large number of small teams that can do what we needed 500 people to do a decade ago, giving more people an opportunity to bring about large projects that we might never have gotten to see, otherwise. Would Treasure Planet have been killed if AI art were on the horizon 30 years ago?
I think certain types of art will become less economically viable, but then, how many of us still pay someone to deliver ice to our ice box? I would imagine most people reading this probably just use a fridge. I do think that new things will open up in the near future, and artists who are passionate about their craft and have the skill to match will find that there will still be things humanity needs from them, up until our economy completely changes in the next decade or so.
In the end, I think there's always a larger mountain to climb, and if there are any artists reading this, if it's all the same, I'd still like to see you climb it, and support you along the way.
It also depends on the prompts
When l saw your painting l could feel your memory of that place,time of day, weather. I could feel the emotions.
AI does not provide that and never will as it has no soul. It has no feelings, that is the difference
I can never feel anything when looking at AI product
AI art is for people who only care for the shallow "pretty" aesthetic of something without understanding that the soul of a work comes from the artists' craft, emotions, and lived experience. They're terrible people-- they want art, but dont care to appreciate/pay artists.
I was googling some Anders Zorn watercolors the other day to learn his technique, and the result contained a bunch of AI paintings. It made me so mad.
Your art is beautiful and inspiring - everything AI is not. So glad to see your video. Thank you. ❤️
THANK YOU , that was beautifully said, it was a conscern I had.
Art is about the making. What is significant is what happens to a person when they create. It doesn't matter if a computer can paint "better" than you, there's a person who can paint better than you also. That never stopped anybody before. Art isn't about the thing that is made. It is about the effect of making on the maker. The pieces are like footprints that only record the progress of the walker. The walk from point a to point b is the actual work. It doesn't matter if a computer can also make "footprints".
I am a retired computer engineer and I started painting recently: The joy of painting, of actually creating something unique, which also is not perfect ( and not meant to be perfect from my side) is without comparison to me. Okay, as joyful as creating somtheting from a certain material, I admit.
Maybe professional painters will get into problems with AI replacing part ot their work. Their/Your view may be quite different from mine, because you have to live from painting and earn money.
One reason for me to not become a professional musician, is you have to sell your product AND maybe adapt it to what people like. Play music you do not like or as a painter paint pictures just because they sell, although you dislike them somewhat.
So, the opinion of a hobbyist like me may divert considerably from that of a professional.
There are AI tools that give you all the control you need. ControlNet for Stable Diffusion is one example. You can use a depth map, a line drawing and other things to control the AI generation process.
But it does not have the same value as a real human made work of art. you still need the human eye and mind to compose the scene. One problem with AI art (which is probably a good thing) is it seems hard to claim any kind of copyright as most copyright laws are written so that a human must have been involved in the process of creation.
people care more about the artist and their story than the art anyways. this is the first time in history the public can get to know/support the artist directly. ai will eventually be better than everyone at everything so we're all in the same rickety tourist boat fortunately.
What is valuable in a paint is the feeling behind the scene. In a way, liking a painting is expressing empathy with the author. I don't think a program can transmit feelings, because it is too perfect. No human bias. Buying AI generated art is like buying prints in a low cost store. It mught be nice but does not induce any feelings
All he had to do is run the original image through a filter (with adjustments.)
Took me about 5min to create similar image to his actual painting; very similar.
And no AI is involved.
Just ran it through watercolor filter, adjusting it accordingly, with given settings.
Then ran it through oil painting filter, at lower percentage.
My results were not much different from his hand drawn art.
No, I DIDN’T put my heart and soul into the image, to “recreate it” because it didn’t matter to me much, but I very much could have, if it was the picture I took.
I would also spend a lil more time making it the way I really want it, using digital tools, that are available out there.
It wouldn’t make it less of an art, as I would still be using my creativity to get the desired results; while having fun doing so.
I think this AI generation will bring about a renaissance of human art and a renewed appreciation for it. And I also think we will become very good at telling the difference between human and AI artworks. Also, I think people will turn away from computers and the internet en masse in the coming decades.
Never give up! I would not even pay a penny for AI. AI which stands for artificial intelligence says it all! Keep on panting! I love your style of painting as a genuine and bonafide human being! 👏👏👏👏👏
Really, like the way it relays piecefulness
For the artist it’s about the fun and joy of creating something that’s a challenge. The making of the art should be the reward for the artist. AI art is sometimes close to perfection, and we as humans are not perfect, which shows in handmade art.
I think AI art will be used extensively for commercial purposes, where 'vibe' is the focus rather than nailing down a very specific detail. So for commercial artists, AI art is really going to largely replace/displace/shrink the industry significantly. Where art is created for the personal experience, or the personal story, where the art is connected to the artist who specifically makes it, then AI won't be able to replace that kind of art, because it comes from a personal desire to create.
Don't give up, in my opinion real is always more impressive than fake!
Besides AI adds too much detail, leaves nothing to the viewers imagination. The real painting does. That's not art, just electronic cloning.
AI paintings don't have any value, because, they are the same as searching for something on the internet and downloading it, but, you can search for something as a paragraph (prompt).
I really like the one you painted with your hand. ❤
I really wouldn’t worry about AI as a traditional artist. I got back into gouache from digital and there’s really no contest. You can’t show someone paintings in your sketchbook if it’s all AI generated.
AI-generated imagery can not replace an actual painting in terms of value. Just as a photo can not replace a hyper-realistic painting of the same subject.
A similar comparison can be made with music generated by AI to music played by a human. They're just not the same.
Fine art is more than just the end result. It's the years of learning and development that the artist has put into it. The journey of their process from all of the previous pieces they have painted before this one.
If you're not concerned about having a print of a painting on your wall, then an AI image or not shouldn't make a difference to you as they're often indistinguishable.
Art, any form of art, is the expression of the human soul. Dancing is an expression of the soul.
Singing, playing music, is an expression of the soul.
Painting, drawing , inking is an expression- they all convey human emotion in a surreal way, you can communicate a hundred emotions with any form of art, and AI lacks that. It has no hard work poured into it, it has no soul, people live on through art , the dancer relives it every dance done by someone else and the painter lives through what he he puts into a canvas. AI is just soulless numbers computing into some algorithm. It may look technically pleasing, but It’ll never have the blood sweat and tears a human leaves behind in their work through years of passion for their art.
Big difference between looking at an image on a phone/screen vs seeing a hand painted piece in person. Likes on instagram do not always correspond to emotion conveyed by a piece in person. AI can help in the composition process before a human makes a mark on a canvas. What are your thoughts on aiding in part during composition?
as an oil painter, I think in the future I should try to paint thicker, to make it more obvious that oil paint is on the canvas, make it a more physical thing in itself, something AI so far can't achieve
Great Perspective, love the painting!
Keep your hand painting going for sure.✨🌈🙏
Not going to lie, the emergence of AI art has made me hesitant about learning how to draw. However now that I have started learning again and stopped being so focused on the outcome, I find the process itself very rewarding / relaxing. There is value in human made art beyond the outcome.
There are artists and there are non artists. A non artist is someone who never learned the basics of art. Which is composition, perspective, proportion. The use of the medium and the tools to work on it. An artist must have something clear in mind to start a painting, yes.
If he is not clear towards what he aims at, what he'll end up with, is coincidence of using medium and material. It can happen that an already skilled artist gets a truly impressive result by being un-aimed. It can happen that a non artist gets an impressive result when he puts his heart and soul into a painting. It might be out of proportion and out of perspective but at least it would appear as well composed through coincidence. The chances that this might happen, are very low though.
I would think that artists, compared to non artists would always have better results. Since they train themselves to use the brush in a confident way and make safe strokes instead of unsafe ones. Non artists fiddle around, artists un-learned to fiddle.
So, it's non artists who like to produce AI-generated works, calling it "art". The results appear as artful and impressive, but what is the point in telling a machine the specifics since - how you rightly pointed out - no matter how specific you get, the AI won't generate what you have in mind because it's not a mind reader. So, logically, as someone who wants to produce a piece of art through AI, I have nothing really specific in my mind but un-specific, and I let myself being impressed by the result, since I wasn't expecting its outcome. I enjoy the randomness as a surprise, for example.
What I then am, is not an artist but a typer of text commands. The less commands I give the machine, the more I leave it to coincidence. The more commands I type in, the more specific I become. If I type something, the machine generates something, I'm not satisfied and type more, the machine generates something, I might come to the conclusion that I've learnt to become more text-specific. That's not a bad thing if you train yourself towards achieving a precise messaging.
But that doesn't make me an artist and it doesn't turn the AI result into art.
What it does do is make me realise how to communicate with a computer program so that instructions are understood. It's quite helpful when you notice that you can also talk to people better if you use definitions correctly. On the other hand, it gives me a sense of power because the AI obeys my commands.
Ultimately, art loses its meaning when it can be created in abundance and in just a few minutes. The sheer mass of results of computer-generated images and texts runs away from all contemplation if contemplation is limited to a second's viewing and then the next click makes you forget the whole thing.
In order to find out whether a work was created by a person or a machine, it is now only accepted that the process itself is documented on film. This means that people record themselves creating their work. But even this can soon be simulated, so that no one can ever be sure whether they are seeing a human or a machine. The only way to find out is to leave the internet and enter the physical world.
I just heard the first couple of seconds of your video.And my opinion is homemade hands down all the way
AI does not, and never will, know how to add subtle details and nuances to convey emotion. Original art, made by human artists, will always be valued.
Just wait a couple years )
Ai can provide inspiration for an idea, a launchpad of sorts, but however good the image, it's still an empty vessel. I can see a time when art, music and literature will require a declaration from the artist that no machine intervention was used in the creation process. To claim that I would never buy computer generated art would be a non-starter for me. I did in fact buy a computer drawn sketch for £5 from Harold Cohen at a museum exhibition in Cardiff, Wales in 1984, then it was a curiosity and a far cry from the quality we are seeing today. I still have it.
"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I have a unique perspective because I am professional in "both" worlds (AI + Traditional commercial hand painted art), and my livelihood depends on the outcomes of both. Whoever is reading my comment please take it to heart with some weight. So with that being said, what was see today with the release of current AI models at its core had these capabilities three years ago, yes three years ago, but were just recently launched to the public.
So what does this mean for the long road ahead? Always be aware (with eyes wide open) of what you see on UA-cam, forums, blogs, etc are already being done "better" with more accuracy in a AI development environment. Knowing this, plan ahead, think ahead and in the new world we are approaching. This momentum will not go away, it will continue to grow so we must (even for myself its difficult) to continue to grow with it.
My mindset for my unique situation is to always 1. Understand "how" these various models operate and behave, the more you know the better you can do the second thing. 2. Knowing how a model works, think of ways of "uniquely doing it better i.e. AI can not replicate X" or "using it for your personal gain i.e. I will make AI do my bidding by doing X". Good luck to all the creatives out there, and be mindful the value of "pure" and "genuine handcrafted artwork" will always have a place special place in our lives, it will take time (years - give it time) for this wave of AI noise to settle, and for true artisans to emerge as highly sought after.
There have always been and there will always be frauds and con artists (no pun intended) in art. I think AI is just the newest tool for them to achieve their sale goals. But as you (and many others) said, there is excitement, joy and challenge in painting that AI doesn't provide. Painting is a process. I don't know where I will end up when I start. AI art is just a type of "decoration". A true painting has something to it that is no part of its physical properties and it gains very quickly an emoitional, social or cultural meaining for the owners. I would never give my children my old posters or replications but I will pass on my cherished watercolours and a small landscape painting in oils.
I cannot replace you as a painter. Within every man made painting is the easence or mark of the human soul that made it.
A1 art = cubic zirconiums. Watercolour art = diamonds