Was super skeptical about AI art tools until last month

I always thought using generative fill was cheating, but I tried it on a piece I was stuck on in Procreate. Had this weird lighting issue on a character's face and the fill fixed it in like 20 seconds. Took me 3 hours of manual painting before that with no luck. Anyone else change their mind on a tool they used to hate on?

3 comments

3 Comments

gavinlopez28d agoMost Upvoted

Wonder if that guilt you mentioned actually stops people from learning fundamentals though... I've seen beginners jump straight to AI fixes for anatomy and lighting without ever understanding why those problems happen in the first place. Three hours of frustration taught you something about light, even if you didn't get the result you wanted. The AI just gave you the result without the lesson. Not saying you're wrong for using it, but for a new artist, isn't that like skipping straight to the answer key instead of figuring out how the math works?

kelly_west7419d ago

Jumping off what Gavin said, but I gotta push back on the "stolen art" thing that was mentioned. That whole narrative gets thrown around way too loosely, and it's not really accurate for tools like generative fill (the one I used). It's not pulling from a database of specific pieces like some of the older AI models did, it's more like a really advanced algorithm trained on general concepts. Doesn't mean it's perfect or that there aren't legitimate concerns out there, but calling it outright theft every time kind of shuts down the actual conversation we could be having about when these tools actually help or hurt. It's like saying every digital brush is cheating because it mimics a physical medium, you know?

cooper.phoenix28d ago

The tool didn't fix your lighting, it just saved you from three more hours of being frustrated with your own work. Cheating or not, that's a win in my book. But hey, if you ever feel guilty, just pretend you used a really fancy blending brush that happens to be sentient and powered by stolen art. Makes the 20 second fix feel a lot more earned, right? Sounds like a fair trade to me, your mileage may vary though.