Since Grot said they were unable to get many visual artist responses, I thought I would add my thoughts and observations on AI in respect to that scene, at least as someone who draws WG anime-style pinups and illustrations and has had discussions on the topic with other artists of varying levels of skill and popularity. I’m primarily a hobbyist, but I do have a fair amount of experience with the commission process on both sides. I am also approaching from the creative angle, NOT as a programmer (despite my best efforts) so do not assume anything I have to say applies very well or at all to that field.
I spent like 20 hours working on bits and pieces of this rambling mess oh god im also not a writer
I’ll say upfront I don’t support AIGC use in general for the usual concerns. But pretty much everyone reading this will have already planted their flag on those issues and I’m not gonna change their mind so I won’t go any further there, and will try to not let it colour the rest of my response too much. Instead I’ll talk mostly about the product, and as it relates to the “mono-media” of visual art rather than only a component of games.
I’ll be talking about GenAI use fairly neutrally, but I don’t want that to be any sort of endorsement. I consider anything you make yourself, regardless of quality, infinitely more valuable than the output of an AI model.
Imagine that as a large watermark over this whole post periodically.
On the consumer side, At best I consider AIGC to be filling the role of an artist who always has “free requests” in their bio. Before AI came around people would trawl sites for those two words together and then scattershot reply with their preferred character to any and all instances, regardless of if the artists main body of work was even relevant to them. And I know a couple of those individuals who happily made the jump to using GenAI as their personal “fat of she” machine once it became viable. If you’re okay with the house style and all you need to be happy is your favourite character with huge tits, belly, and ass in a pose and outfit with enough tags on danbooru to provide decent training data, knock yourself out. And people do.
Since opening the floodgates to AIGC on their platforms, searching Deviantart and Pixiv for a specific character will return results that consist of single account posting dozens upon dozens of slight variations of the same prompt’s outputs, drowning out almost every other result. And there are hundreds of those accounts, all uploading images with absolutely zero inherent value to anyone but themselves. Why should what they post be of interest to anyone else who’s also fine with that kind of content if they too can go to the AI for their own free requests that can be tailored to their specifications.
Even for accounts that post more curated generations, it’s so easy now, so many people are doing it. We’re undergoing hyperinflation (And not the kind some people here would enjoy) for generic pinup art. It’s the aisle full of Buzz Lightyears for accounts with their on-the clock daily post of a thighs-up, front-on or 3/4 view of popular gacha/anime character in some meme outfit with her cleavage pressed together, all rendered in slightly too much detail. As you start entering the niche fetish sphere a lot of those images become even more interchangeable as the number of relevant images for training data decreases and people use the same small handful of available models.
All that is annoying to navigate, and because social media algorithms prioritize regular and frequent content uploaders to bolster user engagement, the accounts using the content generator are happy to supply. While I’d prefer that it not get posted at all to clog up my feeds, that’s what curation tools and the block button on my end is for. While I’m never going to be actively hostile to anyone, It’s not worth my time interacting with those types of images when I’d rather share and encourage the works of people who are engaging with the artistic process.
Things become deeply more cynical once money becomes involved.
Art IS a luxury. It takes time and effort to develop the skills required, and to do so for something relatively niche like fetish content is almost exclusively an act of passion. Even though many artists do commissions, the vast majority (and I include myself) continue to greatly undervalue their services when it comes to commission prices, subsidizing it with that passion. In a niche community you’re far less likely to find a “whale” willing to pay what fairer rates might be, and so having some money is still better than no money.
I think among a lot of prolific commissioners and other artists they understand the merits of the effort, skill, and unique personal contributions in a work, and want to support it, even if there’s no illusions of being able to make a living off it for most. It’s why there’s the joke about artists having the communal $20 bill they pass around to commission each other with. We want to support a craft. If I hired a cabinet maker, and then found out all they did was assemble the same Ikea flatpacks I could have done myself at home, I would feel cheated.
So seeing accounts pop up that advertise their Patreons or Deviantart paid pages for AIGC should frankly be insulting to pretty much everyone. It’s always brought up how AIGC lowers barriers to entry and all that for this type of content, and I agree! It’s fast, easy, and free! It’s not worth any amount of money when you can do it yourself and get essentially the same product. If you wont spend the time learning to draw, spend an afternoon downloading Stable Diffusion and your favourite character LoRas. Treat yourself with a nice POV blowjob image set. I would BY FAR prefer somebody generate content themselves than give money to glorified parasitic middlemen to do it for them.
And finally is the biggest boogieman of them all: The scammers.
I call the community “niche”, but it’s not nearly as small as it was ten or even five years ago. Some folks have even been able to make a living of it, and if not then still decent supplemental income as a broader group of people willing to spend money has developed. Incredible art gets posted on a daily basis, and it’s no longer possible to keep track of all the active artists like it once was as the community grows, subdivides, and develops increasing fringes. Tracing and ghosting commission scams have always been a recurring danger and are now easier than ever, trying to take advantage of those who genuinely want to be supportive of community members. I’ve fallen victim to it before myself.
In those cases it is straightforward what to do when they are identified. Name and shame. If you’re confident enough to make that accusation, you must have the proof. If they traced, show the original. If they ran with the money, show receipts. It is unambiguously a good thing to make sure that others do not fall victim to a liar trying to abuse the assumption that they are putting in the same effort and passion as any other artists to cheat people out of their money. Obviously this isn’t foolproof, there have been misunderstandings, but I don’t think anyone would call this type of vigilance and standards to be overreacting or witch-hunting.
Which is what makes AIGC traces so much of a painful topic.
AIGC creates a unique image for them to copy from, and that obfuscation makes it basically impossible to be sure of a source. The only time anyone was successfully called out for tracing AIGC was because they were doing it with someone else’s publicly uploaded images. Which is baffling to me because, again, doing it yourself is fast, easy, and free.
There are a handful of artists, big and small, new and old, that I am almost certain use AIGC to trace characters and backgrounds for their images, without disclosing it, while taking money from people I imagine most of whom think they are giving it for honest and fair work.
And I bite my tongue, because being ALMOST certain, is NOT certain.
While I may not have a following comparable to some of the heavy-hitters, I do have a following, and it is a weight I have to be mindful of throwing around. Many artists I talk to express how excruciating it is to see someone that you strongly believe is tracing AIGC for their posts open commissions again, and all you can do is stay quiet. Because you want to warn people, make sure that they are actually getting their money’s worth and supporting someone deserving, but there is a chance, however slim, that person does just draw like that. And now you’ve gone and torpedoed them.
I want to make sure that our community grows. Every new artist is a unique voice to be celebrated. And the best way to do that for most of us is to not scare them off by being paranoid and trigger happy lunatics.
So holding all that in and enduring the very possible presence of deceitful members among our own community, to then see some random asshole go off arguing AI somewhere, or worse make an actual false accusation and allow folks to turn around and make the prevailing sentiment into “Those Anti-AI people are working themselves rabid over nothing”, it can feel incredibly frustrating.
Okay I have spent too long on this, I have so many more tangents, but I need to call it.
I dont have much for closing thoughts. I guess if the plan for this site is to stay the course and let people approach content on their own terms, then you NEED too put the tools into their hands to curate it. I’ve expressed my frustrations with how discourse handles those sorts of things before, and other people seem to share the sentiment. Buttons to hide/block/report threads and users from the main pages.