I’m very against Gen AI images. I refuse to call them art. But a former friend liked it. I won’t name him, he was my friend, but it was one of the things we disagreed on and talked about a lot. I sent him the sketch of Xeno’alis I worked on and he asked if he could put it in ChatGPT. I didn’t like it for various reasons, it got details wrong. But, even worse, it makes him look menacing. He’s supposed to be a dashing swashbuckler like Zorro or a Musketeer. But, it doesn’t even show his grin.
I’m not saying my art is great. I never think my art is good, I’m very critical of my own work. I’m a perfectionist, it drives me to always improve my skills, but I’m also never very satisfied or happy with art I create. I see flaws in everything I do. I have to try to look at it as good enough, the results my best work at the time. Next time will be better, next even better.
But, even at my worst my art was better than Gen AI, because it was created by a human being and not generated by a souless program.
It’s not slop from a database of stolen work. It’s art.
My sketch of Xeno’alis was very basic, stage one of a book cover. That AI generated image generated from that sketch, that’s not Xeno’alis. It looks “realistic” I guess. But, I don’t go for realism. It doesn’t capture Xeno’alis’ personality.
Another thing is, it got the fasteners of his waistcoat wrong. They’re not buttons, I call them toggles. There’s a bit of metal that sticks out and a loop of fabric goes around it to fasten it.
Gen AI lacks what’s essential to human art. Imagination. It turned my toggles into buttons. It turned Xeno’alis, the heroic wanderer, into a menacing monster. So, instead of persuading me to like Gen AI, this AI generated image made me hate it even more.