I am genuinely trying to get better at art. I’m not there yet (likely never will be), the lying machine is still better than me.

The context:

This is my sketch.

And this is what the ai output.

I like to think I poured my heart and soul into it. I know there are people who will tell me that I’m terrible for using ai at all. I’m also sorry if this is the wrong community to ask this question (ask reddit would delete my post instantly if I tried to post there).

Again, is this slop? I am not an artist. I drive a forklift real good, that’s my skillset. So if I were to use the ai upscaled version for my book, well, I’m asking for opinions.

  • Sandbar_Trekker@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    15 hours ago

    I wouldn’t consider this slop.

    Let’s compare this to photography. If you use a camera to take a picture of something, sure, the machine is doing most of the work, but the photographer is playing a vital role in this.

    Now there are photographers that spend a lot of time composing a shot. They’ll mess around with shutter speed, aperture size, ISO, zoom, depth of field, etc. They’ll also figure out the subject matter and may add some other elements to it. Afterwards they’ll make adjustments to the picture with something like Lightroom or Darktable, and maybe touch up some things with Photoshop.

    Then there are people that take pictures with their phone of a computer screen showing something cool happening in a game and post it on Reddit.

    On one end of the spectrum I would consider the photo to be art, on the other I would consider it to be slop. However, there are many degrees between one end of this spectrum to the other.

    With AI tools it’s not much different. The machine is doing a lot of the work, but how much of it is guided, reshaped, or directed by a human? With Image Generating tools you can tweak the seed, the steps, the cfg, the sampler, denoise, etc. You can choose the base model, add multiple LoRAs and embeddings, or train your own if you’re looking for a certain style.

    Then you have users that go to ChatGPT, type in a prompt and have ChatGPT do everything else.

    Like photography, on one end of the spectrum I would consider it art, on the other I would consider it slop.

    But this all begs the question, what is art? How do you draw the line between what art is, and what it is not?