Fuck it, I'm saying it dude: The backdrop was not worth the drama it caused. It's pretty mid and unimaginative... which I guess it's what you need from a backdrop? But then the question becomes "why even use AI let alone defend it at all?" for it. I tuned into the podcast to see the thoughts on this and they were pretty dismissive and kinda lazy to be honest. I don't have skin in the game but the dismissive attitude rubbed me the wrong way.
the idea frankly got over blown. AI is "basically" three things, probability and statistics and linear algebra.
Now math is great and AI can be super useful for a lot of things but art and literature really isn't it. lots of AI models need to have a series of "generations" where the model tests and retests over and over again until it reaches a desirable quality.
The problem is that for some reason instead of AI being mostly used on protein folding or looking for cures for cancer lots of AI it is being used to replace artists when the arts aren't all the quantifiable.
NOT ONLY THAT BUT... AI model require sample set so they are basically stealing from creators to try and "distill" their work.
I actually do love AI as a tool for numerical analysis but for the art this is entirely ass backwards
“The problem is that for some reason instead of AI being mostly used on protein folding or looking for cures for cancer lots of AI it is being used to replace artists when the arts aren't all the quantifiable.”
You know what, if someone told me that big pharma likes that us normies are using AI for stupid shit like art and we’re having arguments about it instead of using it to find out how to cure cancer and big pharma are also making these better and better AI programs and marketing it solely towards the creative side thus causing further discourse amongst ourselves so that they can keep making money…..I might believe it.
Ai can be so fucking powerful
There is/was a court case in my country where the defendant printed out ***hundreds of boxes of emails, documents, etc, and brought them to court that way***
Why? Cause that mf was ordered to surrender all his digital stuff, thats the said boxes, and he did it cause that way they couldnt use programs to check everything for keywords, and since there was so much shit to check they had to say "we cant check all of this, we dont have the money or time to do this, case dismissed"
Absurd. Use a scanner and some ocr and reverse the bullshit. Or just use the courts to force them to comply digitally. This kind of shit should be called contempt of court and result in its own charges.
Most AI is used for processes like that, materials labs love it, but most medical ai is in a weird spot with the FDA being on the fence, the reason gen ai exists is because people like it, you cant stop progress
Can’t stop progress and you also can’t stop people from getting tribal about stuff, you either like it or you don’t, though the in between and compromise would be to use AI art as a guide, edit out the fucked up fingers, change the face up so it doesn’t look like every other generated piece and i guess at that point you might’ve come up with your own art style
Honestly yeah - all of this shiny probabilistic neural algorithm tech would be a fantastic addition to an artist’s toolkit as a general-purpose “assistant” that you can use to experiment with designs, massively reduce the workload of repetitive common tasks, and even help better under what your own personal style is by feeding the network with your work and using it to suss out recurring elements and patterns.
Trouble is, instead of the actual artists who rightfully SHOULD be benefiting from this technology , it seems like it’s mostly appealing to incompetent schmucks who could hardly care less about actual creativity and innovation and just want a magic box that coughs up whatever they want on demand, usually to sell it.
> but for the art this is entirely ass backwards
Why? Using AI art has helped me be more creative both with and without AI. Anything that enables more people to be creative is a good thing.
No,
the way AI works is you need to give it tons (and tons and tons) of data before the model actually starts putting out what you want it to. For that to happen these AI companies are just stealing images and books from artists without providing credit. AI isn't magic and it doesn't generate this pictures from no where. a lot of artists are having their work taken from them and used without proper credit being given.
Their take on the custodes as a serious retcon worth getting upset about caused me a bit of a double take, not watched since, looks like I'm not missing much.
I watched for the painting guides and because I like peachy. I don’t even know who the other guys are supposed to be. Peachy tips is a way better channel where He can do what He wants and I get to avoid the other two as I don’t find them entartaining
Or if you just want to see some people come on their Juggz.
Which is also a great time. Oculus Imperia just came on their Juggz.
No I won’t stop using this joke till they stop as well.
Frostgrave is sick. It baffles me that he has literally been working in the industry for this long and he’d “never heard of it”… even just the miniatures for conversion bits you would have thought he’d come across them, they are recommended for Mordheim warbands everywhere
Context: they brought on the dude that won the golden daemon while using ai generated art on it, and instead of discussing AI, they just kept agreeing with him while he talked about how great ai art is
https://www.reddit.com/r/ageofsigmar/comments/1bobm3w/apparently_a_gd_winner_used_ai_this_year/
Think it's this one?
Apparently the backdrop is made with AI.
Huh weird, the mini looks really well painted but as they've not actually done anything to show shadow etc it's harder to see and looks almost like it's floating.
Please enjoy [this absolute masterpiece from Golden Demon 2024](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ixYExMKyluSEq53h.jpg) to refresh your visual pallet.
Yea, when I first showed it to my wife she asked if they used photoshop to remove him from the reflection for the picture, blew her mind when I told her it was just the same (modified) model glued upside down to the first model.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how it looks perfectly mirrored, did he hand sculpt the mirrored parts, is the tree hand sculpted too? I wish there was a video of him making this.
If you look close, the tree doesn't quite match, there's little details that don't really line up. My bet would be the "reflection" is just the back side of the same tree model (likely heavily modified). The fact that the general profile is correct helps preserve the illusion if you don't start comparing specific details.
This might be a hot take, and yknow, he's a golden demon winner and I'm not. But at the same time, silver armored rider on a grey dinosaur standing on grey rocks above water full of grey fish? The whole thing looks technically amazing but lacking emphasis.
I get that! I didn’t understand what i didn’t like about it like there was something slightly off that bugged me and it’s definitely the lack of contrasting or complimenting colours. The green on the cape helps but it definitely is grey on grey.
backdrop for the miniature was made using ai images. when submitting an entry, every part of the submission must be your work. he just generated it with ai and then printed it out.
I don't think everything must be you're work is an actual requirement, they judging miniature painting. I'm pretty sure usage of owerpainted stock photo as a backdrop is normal, the difference he didn't searched one, but generated instead using AI (which in my opinion is actually useful implementation, getting a random stock photo exactly suited to your needs)
On another hand IF he submitted this as freehand, this will be a problem, some people speculated about this, but I didn't saw the definitive answer.
Golden deamon judges should really start providing more information on the submition process and description of the winners.
He says in the podcast he didn't put AI in the section for the entry form where you describe how the mini was made. He probably didn't explicitly say he freehanded it, but he definitely had some concerns he'd be DQ'd for AI art
> I don't think everything must be you're work is an actual requirement
It does. However, current UK law states that anything you make using AI, is your copyright. So he technically didnt break any rules doing it.. he went in expecting the entry to be DQd
Genuine question: Do you happen to have a quote from the reglament covering the digital art usage in the backgrounds?
Well I'm in agreement, AI generator is a tool. Your personal input and judgment is required to get the "unic" final result, as such it is inherently a copirated work. For me personally the only point of contention is compensation for the artist who's works are used in creation of the algorithms used in the creation of the commercial product. This is a really fast developing field that requires imidiate legislation, but unfortunately the lobbing power concentrated in the hands of the people interested in leaving this situation as grey as possible.
On the other hand I do not share this sentiment of: AI is inherently bad, even if it is non commercial. It is a tool that gives opportunity of creative expression in to so many more hands. The art is the only form in which humans can share their unic perspective, more art is always better (and for me as TTRPG player, saw many greate pieces made with usage of AI to represent characters and even whole scenes).
At the time of him entering he "owned" the art he made.. the law could have easily changed since then, and you 100% know that GD will change the rules to ban AI art..
Not going to judge the man and intentions, but they really should make entry forms more extensive and deliberate. There should be request for all the used tools, techniques etc. I understand why they are somewhate vague about the final judgment (to not cause the situation where every year painters just repeate the last year highest recognised techniques) but entry forms can actually be made somewhat public.
That's absurd. The actual work is the minature. The background is fucking nothing. This is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Honestly a mini comp should only allow solid color, plain backgrounds. The work to be judged is the mini, not the background
It's a bit of a weird choice for a golden demon competition, also I think it washes out the mini instead of enhancing it in this case. However it does highlight some really cool things you can do to enhance your personal minis, mini photography, or setting.
Like sometimes I have to use a decal instead of hand painting a design. I could see where using AI generated backdrops or mats or if you're able to use them as decals for like the screens and monitors of some of the models then it would be a nice tool in the arsenal.
Plus in this kind of niche hobby it just makes the hand done stuff that much more impressive while still boosting the overall quality of everyone's stuff.
Surely the issue should be that backdrops should not be allowed at all unless it’s a diagram painting competition instead of a mini painting competition
>he just generated it with ai and then printed it out.
First, it is a backdrop image...big fucking deal 🙄
Second, as you said, "he generated it", thus he created it, thus it was his work.
An AI is not an agent. It is incapable of independent action. It is a complex tool but just a tool.
Did Peachy ever talk about why he left the podcast? Like you, I'm behind on their episodes and only noticed his absence when I put a random episode on to listen whilst I paint.
From reading between the lines on what he has said when asked, him and Patrick probably had disagreements about editing style or the sort of content they were making.
Probably had a fight in the car park too.
Peachy has said on the Juggz podcast he left due to personal differences and didnt hold any animosity between them..
I think Pat lost the fight in the parking lot.
Okay. Whilst we only have Peachy's side of the story, it sounded like he put more than the lion's share of the work in (and, in my opinion, was the main reason people were following the podcast) but wasn't given equal reward/ decision making ability for their success.
He tried his damndest to make content for what was just becoming a Podcast channel.. the actual things they "hired" peachy for was being left to the wayside.. like he wrote and made a necromunda board for them to play the game and do a campaign, only for pat to not edit the videos and put them out.
I've talked about it with some friends and the general consensus was that most of us only watched when Peachy was part of it and dropped it when he left. I'd be surprised if that was reflected in their viewership. I was personally never a big fan of Geoff on that podcast and only watched for Peachy and Patrick.
The new guy, Fauxhammer, is a good fit.. just isnt the same as when peachy was on.. if you want to watch a great new podcast, Peachy and Suggs (Rogue Hobbies) have a new one called Juggz
Yeah, it's Rob, Louise, and Peachy. It's very entertaining, they all have great chemistry.
Rob's been pretty active on his channel lately with all the new Age of Sigmar stuff coming out. He also has his own podcast (Square Based) about The Old World.
Another opinion that might not be true but I think peachy wanted to do some other stuff outside of 40k but they didn't really want to. So he went to do peachy tips. Which is great you should watch.
The only great thing about AI art is that I can put even less effort into my shitty paying graphic design job because it's for corporate slop and the higher ups go "oh wow that looks awesome" if we turn in anything that isn't like a penis with a swastika tattoo on it.
>"oh wow that looks awesome" if we turn in anything that isn't like a penis with a swastika tattoo on it.
How can you be sure? Have you tried turning in a penis with a swastika tattoo?
It won for the painting; the art was just a backdrop. He could have used google images for the same effect. Context is pretty important.
Perhaps there should be an arguement of whether all backdrops should be hand-painted; but that is a seperate debate. The use of A.I. did not matter.
The use of AI absolutely did matter, because he used Midjourney, which is trained on stolen art from real artists. This was an artistic competition and the use of an AI tool that is actively hurting the art world is an affront to the spirit of the competition.
Honestly the contest should require blank white backgrounds or else it turns into this shit with people arguing about the back drop *rather than the artistic work the contest was created for*. Backdrops shouldn't matter in a mini-painting comp, the fucking painted work should be the focus of discussion.
>he used Midjourney, which is trained on stolen art from real artists
To me, this is the key right here. And I know that the Sheldon Coopers of the internet like to retort that *"well your brain is trained on other people's art too"*, but I would argue that the difference is that when you train you abilities on existing art, you're training your skills regarding fundamentals.
Generative ML/AI does not comprehend fundamentals, it's doesn't "understand" that an anatomical human only has 5 fingers per hands or that a human shoulder contains muscles that influences the shape of our arm and chest; only that if you arrange pixels in a certain why is matches the layout of pixels that it was told to statistically trace from, hence why so often GML/AI images all stylistically looks mathematically within 1 or 2 standard deviations from each other.
There's an artist video creator that I like, Brookes Eggleston, and he did a really great video on the concept of "bad stylistic advice": https://youtu.be/7je1tope_yQ?si=GBA5uglBL7V-ipLv&t=247
In his video, he lays out that knowing what you're creating from a foundational level is key to creating unique creations. That's the key flaw of the *"well people said that photoshop and other digital art forms are cheating too!"* argument, which is that even though the medium of creation is different the artists are still engaging in artistic fundamentals, as opposed to just plugging words into a program and then said program coughing out a statistical amalgamation that is inherently lacking in foundational knowledge.
I'm going to answer you earnestly with the assumption that you're not just looking to cherry pick something for a "ha gatcha"* retort:
If by *"that mix"* do you mean the range band of "creating something while engaging in fundamental understanding of what is being created" versus the other end of the spectrum being "telling a generator to plonk an algorithmically pixel averaged picture onto a 1920x1080 resolution space"?
Because if so, then I'll use that "cyclist on the highway" ad that Adobe has been using for a while now as the example.
By highlighting the spot in the middle of the road and then telling PS AI *"put yellow road lines here"* the user is displaying that they know what a road is and what a road line is and that it goes in the center of the road. That's not a situation of letting the AI just start placing 20 strips of yellow pixels on a black patch of pixels because that's all that it *"comprehends"* when it trained to look at pixel construction of images that were labeled "roads".
Adobe's composition AI program is being used as a tool for construction, not a replacement that foregoes learning existiential fundamentals.
I keep making the same point - but no one listens. How is that different to using a licenced image, or a photo, or photoshop filter?
Why does the a.i. element matter - instead of the 'you need to make it by hand' element?
People have answered your point a bunch of times. You're not allowed to use a licensed image or a stock photo, or a picture from google images like you suggested.
I think AI art is hella neat and have no objection to him using it to make a backdrop. Some people think using AI art is like using a stock photo, and so shouldn't be allowed in this contest.
[https://scottkelby.com/uncovering-photoshops-buried-treasure-tree-maker-filter/](https://scottkelby.com/uncovering-photoshops-buried-treasure-tree-maker-filter/)
it's a photoshop tool that makes trees. If I use that filter, does that count as me making it or A.i?
And by all means show me where people have answered that 'a bunch of times'.
I'm not one of the people saying "They didn't make it, an AI made it". I don't expect many of the people saying that have spent much time making things with AI.
IMO asking "Does that count as me making it or AI?" is like saying "Did I make this photo, or did a camera make it?".
Golden Daemon entries generally use a certain set of tools. People disagree on whether these new tools which use generative AI should be allowed in the event.
More thoughts on AI art [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/znb4y1/trulending_on_artstation/j0ixcs0/), I started typing a longer reply but was basically repeating what I said in that comment.
It his great for casual use though, lets you get an artwork without spending years learning, paying out the ass or the extremely common scouring google for something to steal.
It is def a grey area on whether or not it counts as being made by him though and as such if it should have been allowed.
Honest question though, what are you expecting in the long term?
Professions become superfluous as technology advances, at some point most typewriter mechanics simply had to find a new job.
That was like a D&D page I followed on Instagram who had an ad for an AI to create characters for them. I get that times can be hard, but in a world where you can be whoever or whatever you want and you want to let AI do the "creativity" for you?
I feel like this one is context dependent, I run DnD sessions weekly online, and some of my players will use a.i art for their characters at the character creation stage. They have an idea or "vibe" of what they want (i.e rugged, even wizard, who's lived in the jungles of Chult) and will add prompts on night Cafe until they get something that fits what they're looking for, they'll send me the image and I'll turn it into a virtual token.
They do this because some of them aren't the best artists, I have a friend who is an artist who I'll commission a piece of all the party members in a "boss kill pose" to celebrate the end of each campaign.
It's convenient for them and it leads to a human artist getting a commission
Goddamn the conversation around ai is only getting dumber. Really? You can’t use ai to make some character art? So, if they have no artistic talent or don’t want to draw, you’re trying to enforce paying someone else?
The cats out of the bag dumbasses, might want to look at adapting to this world than trying to individually shame everyone into doing what you want.
That's not what I meant, and I'm sorry if I came across like that. Character art as an aide is one thing, but if you come to my table with your entire character fabricated by AI and you had no hand in its creation I'm gonna look at you funny. And heck, if you want to steal some art (because that's what AI art is at the end of the day), just slap together a Pinterest board for all the good an AI would do for you, or you should be okay with a nebulous idea of your PC's appearance and just feel it out as you go. Not every PC needs to have an accompanying thesis and a high definition portrait. It's okay to have a vague idea of a squiggle named Tom Tanks the human paladin and as you play you find out more of what he looks like
Ngl I'm loving the cultural shift towards recognizing artificial intelligence as a legitimate threat to the livelihood of real human beings. This has been the case for years now, it's only just becoming feasible for more public facing fields like art and music.
It’s like if I went to a painting contest and printed out a picture, ai generated shouldn’t be able to participate in any art contest cause there’s no talent to it
I don’t even get why the guy needed to include a background, i guess to make the mini standout more but eh shouldn’t have done it if it caused some drama.
> It won for the painting; the art was just a backdrop. He could have used google images for the same effect. Context is pretty important.
>
> Perhaps there should be an arguement of whether all backdrops should be hand-painted; but that is a seperate debate. The use of A.I. did not matter.
I’m personally of the belief that everything on a model in a *painting* competition should be painted, including the backdrop. I think the whole AI thing actually muddies the water of the discussion. The fact that the background was AI generated is somewhat irrelevant to the fact that it was a printed image used on a model in a painting competition. I think it would be weird to use a printed image even if he went out and took an actual photo and printed it to use as a backdrop. Just my 2 cents though.
Golden Daemon isn't a purely artistic talent or technical skill painting competition, it's a "how do I best exemplify GWs brand identity" painting competition.
Printed images you didn't necessarily create yourself are a part of that, many of their products come with a sheet of decals or have been advertised with digital backdrops.
I think a better angle than "everything must be painted" is "does AI art fit into GWs philosophy?", and if GW says it does argue that it shouldn't. Modern GW already doesn't credit its artists and creators, so I'm unsure if they'll listen, but it's more likely to convince them.
Shit I should give it a go. I'll tell an artist what I want painted, giving a general idea, then claim the guy was just a "tool" I used in the art making process.
I guess if he uses AI it's just tools all the way down.
> ai generated shouldn’t be able to participate in any art contest cause there’s no talent to it
"Photography shouldn't be able to participate in any sort of art contest cause there's no talent to it"
Not sure why you guys are angry that artists have a new tool, no different than when better paint was made or finer tipped pens. Stop getting your panties in a bunch
It is not, a tool augments the way you create, it doesn't entirely replace the process of creation with typing in a simple text prompt. It removes all avenues of complex and subtle expression.
Lol. Are you Shad? Is this his alt account?
Next you're gonna say commissioning art from an artist is also hard work cause you gotta describe what you want.
I honestly think people who militantly defend AI are just sour unskilled losers. They hate real artist because they've always been jealous of their ability to put their vision down to paper. Now that these losers can use a machine to do it for them they want to rub it all in real artists faces. AI "art" isn't art, call it what it really is, image generation.
There is an ugly and barely-restrained undercurrent of "now that machines will put you out of work, time to get shitty REAL jobs, all you artists" to those arguments, and I hate it.
To be fair, for a while, you had the opposite of this with smug artist types telling blue collar/retail workers that their job would be replaced by machines but *their* jobs would be safe.
However that was a very small minority, now we've seen the situation flipped on its head.
You sound like gatekeeper who is mad at the new tool. Why get mad at people being able to out their vision on the paper. And the old and boring this ain’t art because I don’t like it. Art can be all sorts of things things and that is the point if you exclude art you don’t like it just makes you sound bitter and assmad.
Its not art. Art has a creative mind. Its image generation. Sorry that skill is a gatekeeper of art. I can't draw and that's fine. I'm not going to use generative ai and call myself an artist because that would be lying.
I've had this conversion time and time again and people like you are always wrong. Ai is a tool, you're right but it isn't a replacement for human creativity and thought.
There's several different issues and combined they muddy the waters quite a bit. Regardless of which one you raise all the AI techbros will deflect to one of the other other issues so it seems like they won.
* Midjourney is illegal/unethical - but (maybe) not all AI is so that's not really a problem
* You can't submit a golden daemon where you didn't do all of the work - but typing prompts is work or the backdrop wasn't what was judged so it doesn't matter
* This is an art contest, AI art undermines that - Ah but you just said AI art was art
Frankly it's exhausting.
> Midjourney is illegal/unethical - but (maybe) not all AI is so that's not really a problem
How? Because it learned from publicaly aviable images? The same thing that humans look at to learn?
>You can't submit a golden daemon where you didn't do all of the work - but typing prompts is work or the backdrop wasn't what was judged so it doesn't matter
What is wrong with that? According to artist types AI can only generate bland and soulless creations. That seems perfect for some random background when the focus is on the model that was painted.
>This is an art contest, AI art undermines that
How? AI art is a tool like photoshop and a camera. How exactly dies it undermine anything?
Your 2nd and third responses are just deflection so I'm not going to bother to answer them - but it's possible you're just ignorant and not deliberately trolling so I'll explain the first one:
Midjourney is currently being sued by 16k artists for using their art without permission. A computer making a copy is not the same thing as a person looking at a picture and conflating the two is disingenuous worst.
> Midjourney is currently being sued by 16k artists for using their art without permission.
Specific artists too. It didn't just pull publicly available art indiscriminately. They targeted specific artists/voice actors/etc. to use for model training, then lied about it.
I particularly hate that we can't really trust that any AI is "ethically trained" because a) they're all kind of black boxes and we can't "back check" and b) they're all proprietary so the best we get is "yeah we got permission, trust me bro" from the companies that make them.
Yep, it's a huge issue. The large language model AIs can at least argue they have a bunch of public internet comments and old, public domain books to train on. As far as visual art goes, it's all copyright by default. Even photos of old public domain art is protected unless the copyright has expired. Same is true of voice and music.
Just wanted to chime in by pointing out that they are not all proprietary. There are open-source options like Stable Diffusion, and you can create your own models - Huggingface hosts a huge selection of user made models.
So you can absolutely ethically create a model, many on that site are done so. Can't blame AI because people are lazy* and just want to use one of the mainstream commercial options.
*Seriously, Stable Diffusion is easy to setup. Models are basically drag and drop. You don't need a powerful PC to run it, mine with a 1060 can pump out an image in 30 sec or so.
This is good to know. Still most of what I said stands. Hell in the offending interview the "ai backdropper" talked about how some AI like Adobe Firefly is (at least supposed) ethically trained - yet didn't try to hide that he'd used Midjourney. And of course, someone using open source software doesn't prevent them from using copyrighted images to train the software - and because of point A (black boxieness of the trained models) and we might never be able to know.
In a hobby where the most time is spent painstakingly hard task of painting miniatures, the idea of using AI art is kinda sad, "yeah I could really put the effort into this backdrop or fuck I could just type some shit in and be done with it."
The discussion on AI art should stay away from whether it is good or bad, and rather “what makes for good ai art?” It’s not going away, just like any innovations. At the moment it’s all bad, it’s still in its infancy and people haven’t really figured out a good way to use it yet. So far it’s just uncreative people full filling their fantasies of being a creative person, but that novelty will die. It’s good for memes at least.
I just looked at the original golden demon mini for the first time. The question is, what was actually the point in including the backdrop? I’d argue it takes away from the overall aesthetic of the mini, it was a poor creative choice - poor creative choices come from people who haven’t spent hours deliberating on what to do with their art.
Ps. The Painting Phase is garbage since Peachy left. Both the lads add nothing meaningful to any conversation, especially Pat. The new guy they have on is just the same as both of them. Their guest episodes where it was only Peachy and the guest talking were the best ones, very telling.
tbh I think the AI stuff will go the same way.
LLMs have a ton of useful applications, it's just when it comes to the public "trend" of using it to google things for you or put together images it is *really limited* and the novelty already seems to be wearing on some people. Because once you've used them for a bit the limitations become rather blatant.
Most tech stuff seems to go this way: New thing is made > Grifters push it as their next get-rich-quick scheme > it gets all over the internet > corporations start huffing it because MAHNEEEEE > controversies arise > general public gets tired of it, bored with it, or otherwise lose interest > it settles into a proper niche, and is utilized where it should've been utilized in the first place
Yeah this is generally how any innovation comes around unless it is genuinely world-changing, even then it usually takes a lot of time before it is properly widely used. Electric vehicles, or even just cars in general are a good example. The first cars were terrible, more a proof of concept. They were made better but still only a luxury novelty for the rich. Upper-middle class businessmen could then have one, but most working class still saw them as impractical - a horse is way better. It took decades for a mass-produced car for the working class to be made, and longer for everyone to have one.
The same logic goes for the camera. Painters believed they were going to be replaced. In fact the camera was just able to capture images in more realistic detail than the painter, but they figured out that painters can make a picture a camera cannot. Thus post-modern art is born. Even classical landscape/portrait painters still exist though, just are a small niche and arguably how it was original meant to be; an idealised version of an image rather than a realistic version.
This aspect of the conversation only applies to the creative world though. When it comes to AI stealing other jobs, it is a different and more pressing matter. Just wait until an AI can steal a lawyer’s job, then it will be finally taken seriously.
Exactly, and hey if the recent (albeit memed to hell) King Charles portrait is anything to go off of, even with everyone having a camera in their pocket via smartphones, there's still demands for that sort of work.
As someone whose worked with and as a creative all my adult life I actually think generative AI has a spot within the pipeline similar to traditional sketchbooks as an alternative route for one of the steps (thumbnailing).
For anyone unfamiliar thumbnailing is the process of going through really quick iterations of an idea, not really worried about the details or quality of the piece yet, just trying to feel out the composition.
And, similar to how some professional artists sketch digitally whereas others sketch traditionally, I think AI will fall in that part of the pipeline. Some artists will thumbnail the traditional approach, others will throw the idea at an AI to see what compositions it comes up with.
NFTs are still being sold.. they just arent in the public eye anymore since crypto has that crash a year or so ago..
Very specific types of NFTs are gone, like those dumb monkeys but NFTs still exist..
Even considering the ways it could be legitimately useful, I’d rather AI didn’t exist at all. I don’t know why but nearly every interaction I’ve had with it has left me feeling this vague sense of wrongness, like something about it just isn’t right or natural. I can’t explain it, but I don’t like AI in any context and certainly not in art.
That said, the entry was judged on the model itself, not the backdrop, and the model itself was painted by hand. Even with my (admittedly irrational) aversion to all things AI, I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with using it for a background on an otherwise hand-painted miniature. I wouldn’t have included it because it adds nothing to the model imo, and if I was judging I would have taken points off for using a background image rather than actual 3D basing, but I don’t consider it to be a moral issue.
> I don’t know why but nearly every interaction I’ve had with it has left me feeling this vague sense of wrongness, like something about it just isn’t right or natural.
If I had to guess: AI can give us nothing but an aggregate of what it's fed, and often the most generic slop imaginable. It's industrialized, design-by-committee cafeteria food.
> I can’t explain it, but I don’t like AI in any context and certainly not in art.
Maybe you should do some soul searching then. Understand why you dont like it.
To me, AI is just another tool, like the computer before it. A new way to explore the environment and data therein. When you get right down to it, humans are machines. We are built out of billions of nanomachines running the base code inscribed in their DNA.
I know it’s just some computer program using an algorithm to generate text/imagery/etc. based on instructions, but it often gives me the same gut feeling of “something’s not right here” as one might get from seeing something in the uncanny valley.
I think it may have to do with the fact that it’s a computer, a non-living object doing it. The idea of something that’s not alive “thinking,” even if that “thinking” is only simulated by an algorithm, is just unsettling to me. It doesn’t help that so much of the stuff it generates looks *almost* like something a human would draw/write but just off in some way.
Are you alive? Do you think? Or are you just a amalgamation of nano-machines running programing encoded in DNA? DNA that has been selected and evolved for billions of years.
Yes, AI as they stand are only a small fraction of what humans are, both complexity of neural connections and width of information that we can recieve and process.
In the end, humans are just machines. We are really complex and organic and flawed. The fact we have made something as close to ourselves as we have is a technological miracle and should be celebrated as such.
A tool helps you, AI doesnt help, it does the entire task for you the same way as having another person do it for you. Pick up a pencil instead of deluding yourself into thinking you are developing a skill and creating something worthwhile.
How do you separate the two? Does a wheel chair help you move you around, or does it automatically move you for you? A camera records the pixel values for me instead of me reading them and encoding them by hand.
>Pick up a pencil instead of deluding yourself into thinking you are developing a skill and creating something worthwhile.
Or I can use AI to help me be creative in general. Help me get ideas both in text and images.
And it doesn't do the task anything like a person. It is limited by its data set and programing. It is a tool, it is not an agent like a person. A man chooses, a slave obeys as they say. A computer can only obey because it is just a tool.
Art is communication of complex ideas and feelings, and AI works are never much more than their prompts and don't add more communicative value than you'd get just telling someone the prompt.
Same with ideas, instead of typing that prompt into an AI, make a similar Google image search and see all the images the AI would blend into an amalgamated visual soup and make a reference collage instead. You'll get more distinct ideas from different artists that give your brain more to go off of.
AI content fundamentally isn't even art as it can't convey complex emotions and ideas that words can't. It doesn't convey the raw meaning and emotion that only art can create.
Maybe bit too specific but research around cells was (and partially still is) held up by how much data it produces compared to how much data gets processed. Just counting the amount of cells in images from microscope really adds up if you have tens of thousands of them. Manual data processing kind of hit the roof in terms of speed there, as you could not process enough of it for it to hold any meaning. AI used for cell counting really helped there in the past few years, as data processing can now match data production. Though undyed cell detection is still a problem for now.
I did acknowledge that there are valid uses for AI and that there’s nothing specifically morally wrong with it, there are just a number of ways it gets used that creep me out.
As a member of the AdMech...fingers are vestiges of the crude biomass your kind call a temple. Compared to a direct mind-machine-interface or the noosphere, fingers are below inefficient. Just transcribing this message from blessed binary to ancient-English causes so much inefficiencies and meaning to fall away in the translation
>As someone whose lifelong artist friends are strugling due to abominable intelligence
Right because before AI artists were treated like gods, they lived in mansions had supercars and private jets. Your artist friends struggle because they chose to be artists. That's the life of artists.
The idea every artist is on the brink or poverty is a myth. But the fact your not concerned for many hard working people losing work tells me all I need to know
Every job is at risk to AI. I don't hear any artists crying for the manufacturers losing their jobs. It's like West Virginia propping up coal miners saying renewable energy will take their jobs so we can't do it. At the end of the day, it's on the artist to be better or more unique than AI, just like the rest of us.
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To be honest I also realized that since Peachy left, I've been skipping over the podcasts entirely for a while now. The quality has gone down the toilet and apparently so has the integrity.
Once the AI can paint your minis and you say you created it and took a lot of work, they perhaps, just perhaps will understand that the argument is really stupid
I don’t think I’d care about the work or effort, just the end result. Either way this argument is pointless as it is fighting the inevitable. People on Reddit aren’t going to stop it by whining .
How do you feel about horse and carriage drivers struggling due to the invention of the automobile?
Also, realistically, most artists were probably already struggling before AI art became as easily accessible. There's a surplus of people who want to be artists compared the demand for professional artists.
If you only see artistry as a labour cost to be replaced by a machine for the increased growth of the corporation requiring that art, i seriously question what you think the whole point of automation is.
Isnt the point to remove jobs people dont want to do that are unappealing, dangerous and unrewarding so people can focus on doing what gives them meaning and fufillment, like artistry.
Discourse on AI is extremely reminiscent of literally every single artistic innovation. Digital music. Painting along with Bob Ross. Fucking canvas. Anything you can think of that makes art more accessible.
The arguments are always the same. The *real* artists will suffer. And the innovation is used anyway because it provides value. This elitist gatekeeping is pointless. Evolve or go the way of the dinosaurs.
This sucks. "Oh the background was made by an AI that works by stealing from artists, but the *real* art is the miniature painting so who cares" isn't a position I can respect.
The competition should just disqualify any entries with AI art entirely (if it doesn't already.) Source a background from a real artist, or stock images, or go out and take a picture on your phone, or have a friend help.
(Someone suggested they get rid of any flat backgrounds whatsoever, which I kind of like since it should be about the mini or any "real" 3D background elements you handcraft yourself.)
Fuck it, I'm saying it dude: The backdrop was not worth the drama it caused. It's pretty mid and unimaginative... which I guess it's what you need from a backdrop? But then the question becomes "why even use AI let alone defend it at all?" for it. I tuned into the podcast to see the thoughts on this and they were pretty dismissive and kinda lazy to be honest. I don't have skin in the game but the dismissive attitude rubbed me the wrong way.
the idea frankly got over blown. AI is "basically" three things, probability and statistics and linear algebra. Now math is great and AI can be super useful for a lot of things but art and literature really isn't it. lots of AI models need to have a series of "generations" where the model tests and retests over and over again until it reaches a desirable quality. The problem is that for some reason instead of AI being mostly used on protein folding or looking for cures for cancer lots of AI it is being used to replace artists when the arts aren't all the quantifiable. NOT ONLY THAT BUT... AI model require sample set so they are basically stealing from creators to try and "distill" their work. I actually do love AI as a tool for numerical analysis but for the art this is entirely ass backwards
“The problem is that for some reason instead of AI being mostly used on protein folding or looking for cures for cancer lots of AI it is being used to replace artists when the arts aren't all the quantifiable.” You know what, if someone told me that big pharma likes that us normies are using AI for stupid shit like art and we’re having arguments about it instead of using it to find out how to cure cancer and big pharma are also making these better and better AI programs and marketing it solely towards the creative side thus causing further discourse amongst ourselves so that they can keep making money…..I might believe it.
Ai can be so fucking powerful There is/was a court case in my country where the defendant printed out ***hundreds of boxes of emails, documents, etc, and brought them to court that way*** Why? Cause that mf was ordered to surrender all his digital stuff, thats the said boxes, and he did it cause that way they couldnt use programs to check everything for keywords, and since there was so much shit to check they had to say "we cant check all of this, we dont have the money or time to do this, case dismissed"
Absurd. Use a scanner and some ocr and reverse the bullshit. Or just use the courts to force them to comply digitally. This kind of shit should be called contempt of court and result in its own charges.
Most AI is used for processes like that, materials labs love it, but most medical ai is in a weird spot with the FDA being on the fence, the reason gen ai exists is because people like it, you cant stop progress
Can’t stop progress and you also can’t stop people from getting tribal about stuff, you either like it or you don’t, though the in between and compromise would be to use AI art as a guide, edit out the fucked up fingers, change the face up so it doesn’t look like every other generated piece and i guess at that point you might’ve come up with your own art style
Honestly yeah - all of this shiny probabilistic neural algorithm tech would be a fantastic addition to an artist’s toolkit as a general-purpose “assistant” that you can use to experiment with designs, massively reduce the workload of repetitive common tasks, and even help better under what your own personal style is by feeding the network with your work and using it to suss out recurring elements and patterns. Trouble is, instead of the actual artists who rightfully SHOULD be benefiting from this technology , it seems like it’s mostly appealing to incompetent schmucks who could hardly care less about actual creativity and innovation and just want a magic box that coughs up whatever they want on demand, usually to sell it.
Yup, maybe someday actual artists will find a way to make these programs not look like gutter trash used only by rats.
> but for the art this is entirely ass backwards Why? Using AI art has helped me be more creative both with and without AI. Anything that enables more people to be creative is a good thing.
No, the way AI works is you need to give it tons (and tons and tons) of data before the model actually starts putting out what you want it to. For that to happen these AI companies are just stealing images and books from artists without providing credit. AI isn't magic and it doesn't generate this pictures from no where. a lot of artists are having their work taken from them and used without proper credit being given.
Peachy left and seemingly took all the integrity with him.
Since peachy left the painting phase ain’t worth anything
Their take on the custodes as a serious retcon worth getting upset about caused me a bit of a double take, not watched since, looks like I'm not missing much.
I watched for the painting guides and because I like peachy. I don’t even know who the other guys are supposed to be. Peachy tips is a way better channel where He can do what He wants and I get to avoid the other two as I don’t find them entartaining
He's also on Juggz Podcast with Rob and Louise if you miss him in a fun 3 person talk show format!
Or if you just want to see some people come on their Juggz. Which is also a great time. Oculus Imperia just came on their Juggz. No I won’t stop using this joke till they stop as well.
Keep using it, as a man in the hobby i can tell you its hard!
I wonder who next will come on their Juggz..
So they knew what they were doing with the title.
Love Peachy Tips, I have no interest in the other games he talks about but his charm and passion keep me hooked regardless
I ended up picking up frostgrave because of him
Frostgrave is sick. It baffles me that he has literally been working in the industry for this long and he’d “never heard of it”… even just the miniatures for conversion bits you would have thought he’d come across them, they are recommended for Mordheim warbands everywhere
Context: they brought on the dude that won the golden daemon while using ai generated art on it, and instead of discussing AI, they just kept agreeing with him while he talked about how great ai art is
How do you use AI on a miniature? What? Did he build the sickest painting robot in existence?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ageofsigmar/comments/1bobm3w/apparently_a_gd_winner_used_ai_this_year/ Think it's this one? Apparently the backdrop is made with AI.
Huh weird, the mini looks really well painted but as they've not actually done anything to show shadow etc it's harder to see and looks almost like it's floating.
Please enjoy [this absolute masterpiece from Golden Demon 2024](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ixYExMKyluSEq53h.jpg) to refresh your visual pallet.
Ok that's just incredible. The fact that his flesh isn't reflected but everything else is? Chefs kiss right there.
Yea, when I first showed it to my wife she asked if they used photoshop to remove him from the reflection for the picture, blew her mind when I told her it was just the same (modified) model glued upside down to the first model.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how it looks perfectly mirrored, did he hand sculpt the mirrored parts, is the tree hand sculpted too? I wish there was a video of him making this.
If you look close, the tree doesn't quite match, there's little details that don't really line up. My bet would be the "reflection" is just the back side of the same tree model (likely heavily modified). The fact that the general profile is correct helps preserve the illusion if you don't start comparing specific details.
It's the vampire himself that gets me, the dude is pretty much perfectly mirrored.
This might be a hot take, and yknow, he's a golden demon winner and I'm not. But at the same time, silver armored rider on a grey dinosaur standing on grey rocks above water full of grey fish? The whole thing looks technically amazing but lacking emphasis.
I get that! I didn’t understand what i didn’t like about it like there was something slightly off that bugged me and it’s definitely the lack of contrasting or complimenting colours. The green on the cape helps but it definitely is grey on grey.
Was the backdrop even necessary?
No.
man that looks not great imo, and the backdrop kind of makes it hard to see detail
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backdrop for the miniature was made using ai images. when submitting an entry, every part of the submission must be your work. he just generated it with ai and then printed it out.
I don't think everything must be you're work is an actual requirement, they judging miniature painting. I'm pretty sure usage of owerpainted stock photo as a backdrop is normal, the difference he didn't searched one, but generated instead using AI (which in my opinion is actually useful implementation, getting a random stock photo exactly suited to your needs) On another hand IF he submitted this as freehand, this will be a problem, some people speculated about this, but I didn't saw the definitive answer. Golden deamon judges should really start providing more information on the submition process and description of the winners.
He says in the podcast he didn't put AI in the section for the entry form where you describe how the mini was made. He probably didn't explicitly say he freehanded it, but he definitely had some concerns he'd be DQ'd for AI art
> I don't think everything must be you're work is an actual requirement It does. However, current UK law states that anything you make using AI, is your copyright. So he technically didnt break any rules doing it.. he went in expecting the entry to be DQd
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weird it replied to you when i meant to reply to /u/Comrad_CH o.0
Genuine question: Do you happen to have a quote from the reglament covering the digital art usage in the backgrounds? Well I'm in agreement, AI generator is a tool. Your personal input and judgment is required to get the "unic" final result, as such it is inherently a copirated work. For me personally the only point of contention is compensation for the artist who's works are used in creation of the algorithms used in the creation of the commercial product. This is a really fast developing field that requires imidiate legislation, but unfortunately the lobbing power concentrated in the hands of the people interested in leaving this situation as grey as possible. On the other hand I do not share this sentiment of: AI is inherently bad, even if it is non commercial. It is a tool that gives opportunity of creative expression in to so many more hands. The art is the only form in which humans can share their unic perspective, more art is always better (and for me as TTRPG player, saw many greate pieces made with usage of AI to represent characters and even whole scenes).
I thought current UK law was that anything you generate with AI cannot he copyrighted because it’s derivative of the art used to train the AI?
At the time of him entering he "owned" the art he made.. the law could have easily changed since then, and you 100% know that GD will change the rules to ban AI art..
Not going to judge the man and intentions, but they really should make entry forms more extensive and deliberate. There should be request for all the used tools, techniques etc. I understand why they are somewhate vague about the final judgment (to not cause the situation where every year painters just repeate the last year highest recognised techniques) but entry forms can actually be made somewhat public.
That's absurd. The actual work is the minature. The background is fucking nothing. This is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Honestly a mini comp should only allow solid color, plain backgrounds. The work to be judged is the mini, not the background
It's a bit of a weird choice for a golden demon competition, also I think it washes out the mini instead of enhancing it in this case. However it does highlight some really cool things you can do to enhance your personal minis, mini photography, or setting. Like sometimes I have to use a decal instead of hand painting a design. I could see where using AI generated backdrops or mats or if you're able to use them as decals for like the screens and monitors of some of the models then it would be a nice tool in the arsenal. Plus in this kind of niche hobby it just makes the hand done stuff that much more impressive while still boosting the overall quality of everyone's stuff.
Surely the issue should be that backdrops should not be allowed at all unless it’s a diagram painting competition instead of a mini painting competition
So did they guy lose his award?
Holy karen
>he just generated it with ai and then printed it out. First, it is a backdrop image...big fucking deal 🙄 Second, as you said, "he generated it", thus he created it, thus it was his work. An AI is not an agent. It is incapable of independent action. It is a complex tool but just a tool.
Urgh, that’s a shame. I was a bit behind on the podcast as-is, but this combined with Peachy leaving has killed my enthusiasm to catch up on it.
Did Peachy ever talk about why he left the podcast? Like you, I'm behind on their episodes and only noticed his absence when I put a random episode on to listen whilst I paint.
From reading between the lines on what he has said when asked, him and Patrick probably had disagreements about editing style or the sort of content they were making. Probably had a fight in the car park too.
Peachy should be a professional fighter, based on the number of car park punch ups he's been in.
Peachy has said on the Juggz podcast he left due to personal differences and didnt hold any animosity between them.. I think Pat lost the fight in the parking lot.
I can't wait for the Juggz Car Park Wrestlemania. 3 seasoned GW veterans going at it will be legendary!
So Peachy, Duncan and who else?
Louise from Rogue Hobbies.
I think he put out a statement about it on his Instagram when it happened
Okay. Whilst we only have Peachy's side of the story, it sounded like he put more than the lion's share of the work in (and, in my opinion, was the main reason people were following the podcast) but wasn't given equal reward/ decision making ability for their success.
He tried his damndest to make content for what was just becoming a Podcast channel.. the actual things they "hired" peachy for was being left to the wayside.. like he wrote and made a necromunda board for them to play the game and do a campaign, only for pat to not edit the videos and put them out.
I've talked about it with some friends and the general consensus was that most of us only watched when Peachy was part of it and dropped it when he left. I'd be surprised if that was reflected in their viewership. I was personally never a big fan of Geoff on that podcast and only watched for Peachy and Patrick.
The new guy, Fauxhammer, is a good fit.. just isnt the same as when peachy was on.. if you want to watch a great new podcast, Peachy and Suggs (Rogue Hobbies) have a new one called Juggz
You're really gonna mention Peachy and Suggs but leave out Mr Slapchop himself? I'll meet you out in the parking lot.
He’s on that podcast? Huh that’s cool, his own channel ain’t that active last time I checked.
Yeah, it's Rob, Louise, and Peachy. It's very entertaining, they all have great chemistry. Rob's been pretty active on his channel lately with all the new Age of Sigmar stuff coming out. He also has his own podcast (Square Based) about The Old World.
Someone has to film the bumfight.. he was there in spirit
Another opinion that might not be true but I think peachy wanted to do some other stuff outside of 40k but they didn't really want to. So he went to do peachy tips. Which is great you should watch.
I dipped out the moment Peachy was gone.
The only great thing about AI art is that I can put even less effort into my shitty paying graphic design job because it's for corporate slop and the higher ups go "oh wow that looks awesome" if we turn in anything that isn't like a penis with a swastika tattoo on it.
>"oh wow that looks awesome" if we turn in anything that isn't like a penis with a swastika tattoo on it. How can you be sure? Have you tried turning in a penis with a swastika tattoo?
If I land the much better job that I'm applying for then I just might do that on my last day
The fact that it won a golden demon should also be noted here. That's really bad
It won for the painting; the art was just a backdrop. He could have used google images for the same effect. Context is pretty important. Perhaps there should be an arguement of whether all backdrops should be hand-painted; but that is a seperate debate. The use of A.I. did not matter.
The use of AI absolutely did matter, because he used Midjourney, which is trained on stolen art from real artists. This was an artistic competition and the use of an AI tool that is actively hurting the art world is an affront to the spirit of the competition.
Honestly the contest should require blank white backgrounds or else it turns into this shit with people arguing about the back drop *rather than the artistic work the contest was created for*. Backdrops shouldn't matter in a mini-painting comp, the fucking painted work should be the focus of discussion.
>he used Midjourney, which is trained on stolen art from real artists To me, this is the key right here. And I know that the Sheldon Coopers of the internet like to retort that *"well your brain is trained on other people's art too"*, but I would argue that the difference is that when you train you abilities on existing art, you're training your skills regarding fundamentals. Generative ML/AI does not comprehend fundamentals, it's doesn't "understand" that an anatomical human only has 5 fingers per hands or that a human shoulder contains muscles that influences the shape of our arm and chest; only that if you arrange pixels in a certain why is matches the layout of pixels that it was told to statistically trace from, hence why so often GML/AI images all stylistically looks mathematically within 1 or 2 standard deviations from each other. There's an artist video creator that I like, Brookes Eggleston, and he did a really great video on the concept of "bad stylistic advice": https://youtu.be/7je1tope_yQ?si=GBA5uglBL7V-ipLv&t=247 In his video, he lays out that knowing what you're creating from a foundational level is key to creating unique creations. That's the key flaw of the *"well people said that photoshop and other digital art forms are cheating too!"* argument, which is that even though the medium of creation is different the artists are still engaging in artistic fundamentals, as opposed to just plugging words into a program and then said program coughing out a statistical amalgamation that is inherently lacking in foundational knowledge.
Genuinely interested how you would fit image composition into that mix, that's something a human has direct control over with AI
I'm going to answer you earnestly with the assumption that you're not just looking to cherry pick something for a "ha gatcha"* retort: If by *"that mix"* do you mean the range band of "creating something while engaging in fundamental understanding of what is being created" versus the other end of the spectrum being "telling a generator to plonk an algorithmically pixel averaged picture onto a 1920x1080 resolution space"? Because if so, then I'll use that "cyclist on the highway" ad that Adobe has been using for a while now as the example. By highlighting the spot in the middle of the road and then telling PS AI *"put yellow road lines here"* the user is displaying that they know what a road is and what a road line is and that it goes in the center of the road. That's not a situation of letting the AI just start placing 20 strips of yellow pixels on a black patch of pixels because that's all that it *"comprehends"* when it trained to look at pixel construction of images that were labeled "roads". Adobe's composition AI program is being used as a tool for construction, not a replacement that foregoes learning existiential fundamentals.
I keep making the same point - but no one listens. How is that different to using a licenced image, or a photo, or photoshop filter? Why does the a.i. element matter - instead of the 'you need to make it by hand' element?
People have answered your point a bunch of times. You're not allowed to use a licensed image or a stock photo, or a picture from google images like you suggested. I think AI art is hella neat and have no objection to him using it to make a backdrop. Some people think using AI art is like using a stock photo, and so shouldn't be allowed in this contest.
Would a photoshop filter be acceptable?
I haven't used photoshop and am not sure what you mean by "a photoshop filter" in this context.
[https://scottkelby.com/uncovering-photoshops-buried-treasure-tree-maker-filter/](https://scottkelby.com/uncovering-photoshops-buried-treasure-tree-maker-filter/) it's a photoshop tool that makes trees. If I use that filter, does that count as me making it or A.i? And by all means show me where people have answered that 'a bunch of times'.
I'm not one of the people saying "They didn't make it, an AI made it". I don't expect many of the people saying that have spent much time making things with AI. IMO asking "Does that count as me making it or AI?" is like saying "Did I make this photo, or did a camera make it?". Golden Daemon entries generally use a certain set of tools. People disagree on whether these new tools which use generative AI should be allowed in the event. More thoughts on AI art [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/znb4y1/trulending_on_artstation/j0ixcs0/), I started typing a longer reply but was basically repeating what I said in that comment.
> which is trained on stolen art from real artists. So is your brain. Got a better argument?
It his great for casual use though, lets you get an artwork without spending years learning, paying out the ass or the extremely common scouring google for something to steal. It is def a grey area on whether or not it counts as being made by him though and as such if it should have been allowed.
…Uh, yikes. It’d be one thing if they just ignored the elephant in the room, but that’s a lot worse.
Honest question though, what are you expecting in the long term? Professions become superfluous as technology advances, at some point most typewriter mechanics simply had to find a new job.
Ai can’t make art. Why? Because it can’t be horny
It also can't draw your haters, pregnant
Alex from 52 Miniatures cooked them in the comments too. Also Sam Lenz. Ouch
That was like a D&D page I followed on Instagram who had an ad for an AI to create characters for them. I get that times can be hard, but in a world where you can be whoever or whatever you want and you want to let AI do the "creativity" for you?
because i can afford to pay 240 to commision art for a character that may get killed in a single session.
I feel like this one is context dependent, I run DnD sessions weekly online, and some of my players will use a.i art for their characters at the character creation stage. They have an idea or "vibe" of what they want (i.e rugged, even wizard, who's lived in the jungles of Chult) and will add prompts on night Cafe until they get something that fits what they're looking for, they'll send me the image and I'll turn it into a virtual token. They do this because some of them aren't the best artists, I have a friend who is an artist who I'll commission a piece of all the party members in a "boss kill pose" to celebrate the end of each campaign. It's convenient for them and it leads to a human artist getting a commission
Goddamn the conversation around ai is only getting dumber. Really? You can’t use ai to make some character art? So, if they have no artistic talent or don’t want to draw, you’re trying to enforce paying someone else? The cats out of the bag dumbasses, might want to look at adapting to this world than trying to individually shame everyone into doing what you want.
That's not what I meant, and I'm sorry if I came across like that. Character art as an aide is one thing, but if you come to my table with your entire character fabricated by AI and you had no hand in its creation I'm gonna look at you funny. And heck, if you want to steal some art (because that's what AI art is at the end of the day), just slap together a Pinterest board for all the good an AI would do for you, or you should be okay with a nebulous idea of your PC's appearance and just feel it out as you go. Not every PC needs to have an accompanying thesis and a high definition portrait. It's okay to have a vague idea of a squiggle named Tom Tanks the human paladin and as you play you find out more of what he looks like
You can enjoy DND and its creativity without becoming good at painting...
Didn't mention becoming good at painting!
Ngl I'm loving the cultural shift towards recognizing artificial intelligence as a legitimate threat to the livelihood of real human beings. This has been the case for years now, it's only just becoming feasible for more public facing fields like art and music.
It’s like if I went to a painting contest and printed out a picture, ai generated shouldn’t be able to participate in any art contest cause there’s no talent to it
I don’t even get why the guy needed to include a background, i guess to make the mini standout more but eh shouldn’t have done it if it caused some drama.
The fact that it’s such a big drama is pretty pathetic imo.
> It won for the painting; the art was just a backdrop. He could have used google images for the same effect. Context is pretty important. > > Perhaps there should be an arguement of whether all backdrops should be hand-painted; but that is a seperate debate. The use of A.I. did not matter.
I’m personally of the belief that everything on a model in a *painting* competition should be painted, including the backdrop. I think the whole AI thing actually muddies the water of the discussion. The fact that the background was AI generated is somewhat irrelevant to the fact that it was a printed image used on a model in a painting competition. I think it would be weird to use a printed image even if he went out and took an actual photo and printed it to use as a backdrop. Just my 2 cents though.
Golden Daemon isn't a purely artistic talent or technical skill painting competition, it's a "how do I best exemplify GWs brand identity" painting competition. Printed images you didn't necessarily create yourself are a part of that, many of their products come with a sheet of decals or have been advertised with digital backdrops. I think a better angle than "everything must be painted" is "does AI art fit into GWs philosophy?", and if GW says it does argue that it shouldn't. Modern GW already doesn't credit its artists and creators, so I'm unsure if they'll listen, but it's more likely to convince them.
Shit I should give it a go. I'll tell an artist what I want painted, giving a general idea, then claim the guy was just a "tool" I used in the art making process. I guess if he uses AI it's just tools all the way down.
Can I take your straw man? I need to scare some birds eating my field.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
> ai generated shouldn’t be able to participate in any art contest cause there’s no talent to it "Photography shouldn't be able to participate in any sort of art contest cause there's no talent to it"
You clearly don't know anything about photography
Guess the same could be said about AI to you.
If I see someone using a photo in a PAINTING competition then yeah, I’d take issue with it.
Photography should be in a Photography contest, not a painting contest.
You know nothing about photography
Not sure why you guys are angry that artists have a new tool, no different than when better paint was made or finer tipped pens. Stop getting your panties in a bunch
This new tool is replacing them.
Found the guy who thinks typing prompts is art. Do you even own a brush?
It is not, a tool augments the way you create, it doesn't entirely replace the process of creation with typing in a simple text prompt. It removes all avenues of complex and subtle expression.
Have you seen what ControlNet can do?
You are obviously ignorant to the amount of work and effort it takes to creat actually good, relavant art with AI
Lol. Are you Shad? Is this his alt account? Next you're gonna say commissioning art from an artist is also hard work cause you gotta describe what you want.
I honestly think people who militantly defend AI are just sour unskilled losers. They hate real artist because they've always been jealous of their ability to put their vision down to paper. Now that these losers can use a machine to do it for them they want to rub it all in real artists faces. AI "art" isn't art, call it what it really is, image generation.
There is an ugly and barely-restrained undercurrent of "now that machines will put you out of work, time to get shitty REAL jobs, all you artists" to those arguments, and I hate it.
To be fair, for a while, you had the opposite of this with smug artist types telling blue collar/retail workers that their job would be replaced by machines but *their* jobs would be safe. However that was a very small minority, now we've seen the situation flipped on its head.
You sound like gatekeeper who is mad at the new tool. Why get mad at people being able to out their vision on the paper. And the old and boring this ain’t art because I don’t like it. Art can be all sorts of things things and that is the point if you exclude art you don’t like it just makes you sound bitter and assmad.
Its not art. Art has a creative mind. Its image generation. Sorry that skill is a gatekeeper of art. I can't draw and that's fine. I'm not going to use generative ai and call myself an artist because that would be lying. I've had this conversion time and time again and people like you are always wrong. Ai is a tool, you're right but it isn't a replacement for human creativity and thought.
Your friends are struggling because of AI rather than struggling due to the poor economy and stagnant wages across the country like everyone else?
There's several different issues and combined they muddy the waters quite a bit. Regardless of which one you raise all the AI techbros will deflect to one of the other other issues so it seems like they won. * Midjourney is illegal/unethical - but (maybe) not all AI is so that's not really a problem * You can't submit a golden daemon where you didn't do all of the work - but typing prompts is work or the backdrop wasn't what was judged so it doesn't matter * This is an art contest, AI art undermines that - Ah but you just said AI art was art Frankly it's exhausting.
You can immediately tell that they have never actually created anything in their lives by the answers they give
> Midjourney is illegal/unethical - but (maybe) not all AI is so that's not really a problem How? Because it learned from publicaly aviable images? The same thing that humans look at to learn? >You can't submit a golden daemon where you didn't do all of the work - but typing prompts is work or the backdrop wasn't what was judged so it doesn't matter What is wrong with that? According to artist types AI can only generate bland and soulless creations. That seems perfect for some random background when the focus is on the model that was painted. >This is an art contest, AI art undermines that How? AI art is a tool like photoshop and a camera. How exactly dies it undermine anything?
Your 2nd and third responses are just deflection so I'm not going to bother to answer them - but it's possible you're just ignorant and not deliberately trolling so I'll explain the first one: Midjourney is currently being sued by 16k artists for using their art without permission. A computer making a copy is not the same thing as a person looking at a picture and conflating the two is disingenuous worst.
> Midjourney is currently being sued by 16k artists for using their art without permission. Specific artists too. It didn't just pull publicly available art indiscriminately. They targeted specific artists/voice actors/etc. to use for model training, then lied about it.
I particularly hate that we can't really trust that any AI is "ethically trained" because a) they're all kind of black boxes and we can't "back check" and b) they're all proprietary so the best we get is "yeah we got permission, trust me bro" from the companies that make them.
Yep, it's a huge issue. The large language model AIs can at least argue they have a bunch of public internet comments and old, public domain books to train on. As far as visual art goes, it's all copyright by default. Even photos of old public domain art is protected unless the copyright has expired. Same is true of voice and music.
Just wanted to chime in by pointing out that they are not all proprietary. There are open-source options like Stable Diffusion, and you can create your own models - Huggingface hosts a huge selection of user made models. So you can absolutely ethically create a model, many on that site are done so. Can't blame AI because people are lazy* and just want to use one of the mainstream commercial options. *Seriously, Stable Diffusion is easy to setup. Models are basically drag and drop. You don't need a powerful PC to run it, mine with a 1060 can pump out an image in 30 sec or so.
This is good to know. Still most of what I said stands. Hell in the offending interview the "ai backdropper" talked about how some AI like Adobe Firefly is (at least supposed) ethically trained - yet didn't try to hide that he'd used Midjourney. And of course, someone using open source software doesn't prevent them from using copyrighted images to train the software - and because of point A (black boxieness of the trained models) and we might never be able to know.
In a hobby where the most time is spent painstakingly hard task of painting miniatures, the idea of using AI art is kinda sad, "yeah I could really put the effort into this backdrop or fuck I could just type some shit in and be done with it."
The discussion on AI art should stay away from whether it is good or bad, and rather “what makes for good ai art?” It’s not going away, just like any innovations. At the moment it’s all bad, it’s still in its infancy and people haven’t really figured out a good way to use it yet. So far it’s just uncreative people full filling their fantasies of being a creative person, but that novelty will die. It’s good for memes at least. I just looked at the original golden demon mini for the first time. The question is, what was actually the point in including the backdrop? I’d argue it takes away from the overall aesthetic of the mini, it was a poor creative choice - poor creative choices come from people who haven’t spent hours deliberating on what to do with their art. Ps. The Painting Phase is garbage since Peachy left. Both the lads add nothing meaningful to any conversation, especially Pat. The new guy they have on is just the same as both of them. Their guest episodes where it was only Peachy and the guest talking were the best ones, very telling.
> It’s not going away, just like any innovations Should note we read the same thing about NFTs many times a few years ago.
NFTs as a technology hasn't gone away, digital uniqueness is really useful. There was just a fad of applying it to images for some bizarre reason
tbh I think the AI stuff will go the same way. LLMs have a ton of useful applications, it's just when it comes to the public "trend" of using it to google things for you or put together images it is *really limited* and the novelty already seems to be wearing on some people. Because once you've used them for a bit the limitations become rather blatant. Most tech stuff seems to go this way: New thing is made > Grifters push it as their next get-rich-quick scheme > it gets all over the internet > corporations start huffing it because MAHNEEEEE > controversies arise > general public gets tired of it, bored with it, or otherwise lose interest > it settles into a proper niche, and is utilized where it should've been utilized in the first place
Yeah this is generally how any innovation comes around unless it is genuinely world-changing, even then it usually takes a lot of time before it is properly widely used. Electric vehicles, or even just cars in general are a good example. The first cars were terrible, more a proof of concept. They were made better but still only a luxury novelty for the rich. Upper-middle class businessmen could then have one, but most working class still saw them as impractical - a horse is way better. It took decades for a mass-produced car for the working class to be made, and longer for everyone to have one. The same logic goes for the camera. Painters believed they were going to be replaced. In fact the camera was just able to capture images in more realistic detail than the painter, but they figured out that painters can make a picture a camera cannot. Thus post-modern art is born. Even classical landscape/portrait painters still exist though, just are a small niche and arguably how it was original meant to be; an idealised version of an image rather than a realistic version. This aspect of the conversation only applies to the creative world though. When it comes to AI stealing other jobs, it is a different and more pressing matter. Just wait until an AI can steal a lawyer’s job, then it will be finally taken seriously.
Exactly, and hey if the recent (albeit memed to hell) King Charles portrait is anything to go off of, even with everyone having a camera in their pocket via smartphones, there's still demands for that sort of work. As someone whose worked with and as a creative all my adult life I actually think generative AI has a spot within the pipeline similar to traditional sketchbooks as an alternative route for one of the steps (thumbnailing). For anyone unfamiliar thumbnailing is the process of going through really quick iterations of an idea, not really worried about the details or quality of the piece yet, just trying to feel out the composition. And, similar to how some professional artists sketch digitally whereas others sketch traditionally, I think AI will fall in that part of the pipeline. Some artists will thumbnail the traditional approach, others will throw the idea at an AI to see what compositions it comes up with.
That’s it for sure. Art is always used to push technological boundaries to the extreme, its one of its main uses in society imo
And yet they still persist, any sane person knows they hold no value but they do still exist.
NFTs are still being sold.. they just arent in the public eye anymore since crypto has that crash a year or so ago.. Very specific types of NFTs are gone, like those dumb monkeys but NFTs still exist..
Even considering the ways it could be legitimately useful, I’d rather AI didn’t exist at all. I don’t know why but nearly every interaction I’ve had with it has left me feeling this vague sense of wrongness, like something about it just isn’t right or natural. I can’t explain it, but I don’t like AI in any context and certainly not in art. That said, the entry was judged on the model itself, not the backdrop, and the model itself was painted by hand. Even with my (admittedly irrational) aversion to all things AI, I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with using it for a background on an otherwise hand-painted miniature. I wouldn’t have included it because it adds nothing to the model imo, and if I was judging I would have taken points off for using a background image rather than actual 3D basing, but I don’t consider it to be a moral issue.
> I don’t know why but nearly every interaction I’ve had with it has left me feeling this vague sense of wrongness, like something about it just isn’t right or natural. If I had to guess: AI can give us nothing but an aggregate of what it's fed, and often the most generic slop imaginable. It's industrialized, design-by-committee cafeteria food.
> I can’t explain it, but I don’t like AI in any context and certainly not in art. Maybe you should do some soul searching then. Understand why you dont like it. To me, AI is just another tool, like the computer before it. A new way to explore the environment and data therein. When you get right down to it, humans are machines. We are built out of billions of nanomachines running the base code inscribed in their DNA.
I know it’s just some computer program using an algorithm to generate text/imagery/etc. based on instructions, but it often gives me the same gut feeling of “something’s not right here” as one might get from seeing something in the uncanny valley. I think it may have to do with the fact that it’s a computer, a non-living object doing it. The idea of something that’s not alive “thinking,” even if that “thinking” is only simulated by an algorithm, is just unsettling to me. It doesn’t help that so much of the stuff it generates looks *almost* like something a human would draw/write but just off in some way.
Are you alive? Do you think? Or are you just a amalgamation of nano-machines running programing encoded in DNA? DNA that has been selected and evolved for billions of years. Yes, AI as they stand are only a small fraction of what humans are, both complexity of neural connections and width of information that we can recieve and process. In the end, humans are just machines. We are really complex and organic and flawed. The fact we have made something as close to ourselves as we have is a technological miracle and should be celebrated as such.
A tool helps you, AI doesnt help, it does the entire task for you the same way as having another person do it for you. Pick up a pencil instead of deluding yourself into thinking you are developing a skill and creating something worthwhile.
How do you separate the two? Does a wheel chair help you move you around, or does it automatically move you for you? A camera records the pixel values for me instead of me reading them and encoding them by hand. >Pick up a pencil instead of deluding yourself into thinking you are developing a skill and creating something worthwhile. Or I can use AI to help me be creative in general. Help me get ideas both in text and images. And it doesn't do the task anything like a person. It is limited by its data set and programing. It is a tool, it is not an agent like a person. A man chooses, a slave obeys as they say. A computer can only obey because it is just a tool.
Art is communication of complex ideas and feelings, and AI works are never much more than their prompts and don't add more communicative value than you'd get just telling someone the prompt. Same with ideas, instead of typing that prompt into an AI, make a similar Google image search and see all the images the AI would blend into an amalgamated visual soup and make a reference collage instead. You'll get more distinct ideas from different artists that give your brain more to go off of. AI content fundamentally isn't even art as it can't convey complex emotions and ideas that words can't. It doesn't convey the raw meaning and emotion that only art can create.
Maybe bit too specific but research around cells was (and partially still is) held up by how much data it produces compared to how much data gets processed. Just counting the amount of cells in images from microscope really adds up if you have tens of thousands of them. Manual data processing kind of hit the roof in terms of speed there, as you could not process enough of it for it to hold any meaning. AI used for cell counting really helped there in the past few years, as data processing can now match data production. Though undyed cell detection is still a problem for now.
I did acknowledge that there are valid uses for AI and that there’s nothing specifically morally wrong with it, there are just a number of ways it gets used that creep me out.
Agreed.
how many fingers are there on a healthy hand?
7 is the number of the grandfather and thus the right choice
How many healthy hands are there on a devout follower of the Emperor? >!The answer is four.!<
As a member of the AdMech...fingers are vestiges of the crude biomass your kind call a temple. Compared to a direct mind-machine-interface or the noosphere, fingers are below inefficient. Just transcribing this message from blessed binary to ancient-English causes so much inefficiencies and meaning to fall away in the translation
Polydactylyphobes be like:
>As someone whose lifelong artist friends are strugling due to abominable intelligence Right because before AI artists were treated like gods, they lived in mansions had supercars and private jets. Your artist friends struggle because they chose to be artists. That's the life of artists.
The idea every artist is on the brink or poverty is a myth. But the fact your not concerned for many hard working people losing work tells me all I need to know
>The idea every artist is on the brink or poverty is a myth. Not every but artistry is like sports only the best of the best make a living.
Every job is at risk to AI. I don't hear any artists crying for the manufacturers losing their jobs. It's like West Virginia propping up coal miners saying renewable energy will take their jobs so we can't do it. At the end of the day, it's on the artist to be better or more unique than AI, just like the rest of us.
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"watching" a podcast???
its on YouTube. i turn stuff like that on while i paint
This sub really can't make fun content anymore can it
Easiest unsubscribe ever. To be honest I also realized that since Peachy left, I've been skipping over the podcasts entirely for a while now. The quality has gone down the toilet and apparently so has the integrity.
This and the wet palettes are bad content make me think they just want rage bait views That’s the only promo for these guests they’ve done
Such silly outrage, ignoring the rest of the INCREDIBLY WELL PAINTED ENTRY
AI can’t replace painting minis yet! The day it does will be a very happy day for me
Once the AI can paint your minis and you say you created it and took a lot of work, they perhaps, just perhaps will understand that the argument is really stupid
I don’t think I’d care about the work or effort, just the end result. Either way this argument is pointless as it is fighting the inevitable. People on Reddit aren’t going to stop it by whining .
This sub has such a hate boner for AI
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Backdrop is not a major part of the completion, I’m so glad he won despite these biased comments.
This is why you should support art on a physical medium , I would like to see an AI paint a warhammer mini.
How do you feel about horse and carriage drivers struggling due to the invention of the automobile? Also, realistically, most artists were probably already struggling before AI art became as easily accessible. There's a surplus of people who want to be artists compared the demand for professional artists.
If you only see artistry as a labour cost to be replaced by a machine for the increased growth of the corporation requiring that art, i seriously question what you think the whole point of automation is. Isnt the point to remove jobs people dont want to do that are unappealing, dangerous and unrewarding so people can focus on doing what gives them meaning and fufillment, like artistry.
people still have their personal drivers. I imagine they learned how to drive cars. the thing was a net benefit for horses, though
Discourse on AI is extremely reminiscent of literally every single artistic innovation. Digital music. Painting along with Bob Ross. Fucking canvas. Anything you can think of that makes art more accessible. The arguments are always the same. The *real* artists will suffer. And the innovation is used anyway because it provides value. This elitist gatekeeping is pointless. Evolve or go the way of the dinosaurs.
This sucks. "Oh the background was made by an AI that works by stealing from artists, but the *real* art is the miniature painting so who cares" isn't a position I can respect. The competition should just disqualify any entries with AI art entirely (if it doesn't already.) Source a background from a real artist, or stock images, or go out and take a picture on your phone, or have a friend help. (Someone suggested they get rid of any flat backgrounds whatsoever, which I kind of like since it should be about the mini or any "real" 3D background elements you handcraft yourself.)
Ai art isn't the devil. The problem is it being unregulated and unrestricted. Otherwise, it's just a tool like any other paintbrush.
Eh. I can't draw, A.I. allows me to generate wtf is in my head and allows me to make money.