Taking My Stance
Might as well make my protest an effort to show people how I think we SHOULD be using AI. Examples are helpful, right? For this piece, I took a hand-drawn texture and used it as a style for AI to project upon the protest sign we're using. Both the input and the output are made by me, and/or royalty-free. No prompt-generated images were used in this artwork.
I am not against AI as a tool or a step in a process. But I am against text-generated art being featured on a platform for human professionals. We need a way to prove our processes, and filter such work thoroughly. This will be a massive undertaking as far as overhauling platforms and may be near impossible to implement by ArtStation alone if we can't get the AI apps to work with them, but if it isn't, sites like ArtStation will be useless to people who are trying to build careers - even the "AI artists." Most of them just don't realize that yet.
I believe sites that allow non-coders and non-artists to play with prompt-generated images should prohibit their commercial use. This means that artists who want to use AI to generate textures and stock should have the technical knowledge to actually create their material.
AI art will destroy our industry if it is monetized and treated as human talent/skill. Anything created by AI should not be protected by copyright as it is reshaping an amalgam of other resources that should belong to everyone anyway. To be able to copyright protect a creative concept as one's own, it should contain elements made by the human publisher that goes beyond a word prompt. This gives studios a reason to hire humans, if they wish to truly own an idea.
I'll give ArtStation some time to figure out how to overhaul their site to maintain it's usefulness, but if it becomes apparent that AS isn't going to heavily moderate AI, then I will be joining the exodus and deleting my gallery.
Here is the result from using the protest poster as an input and my own black and white styles. I had to convert this to a heightmap with PS and Substance to sculpt with it in ZBrush. No prompts were used.
Quite insightful and I agree. Demonetizing AI art is a temporary emergency option, but we truly do need to redefine what is considered original and fine-tune copyrighting down to the foundations for this transitional period not to cause catastrophic harm.
AI itself has concerns and can see how it's being unethically used at this point. It's not AI's fault that humans abuse it.
Normal map texture in ZBrush.
An unedited base render in ZBrush.
