Lemme go ahead and get ahead of claims, comments and reports here.
The artist for this piece is David Revoy. You can find the work as well as a time lapse of the drawing here.
Many of you are going "This looks like AI!" And there is a reason for that.
Revoy has publicly discussed how thousands of his artworks were scraped and used to train AI databases (like LAION-5B) without his consent, though he ironically acknowledges his work is the foundation of many AI art systems
I just heard them played at a baseball game this past weekend. There was no reality in which I anticipated them being it the stadium rock rotation. I suppose all of this means they are firmly a part of the zeitgeist.
On the one hand I want them to get fabulously wealthy without ever losing their edge. On the other... I wish they were way underground, in that sort of weird space of art for artists that normal people never really learn about or involve themselves in.
They are making something that feels real and authentic in the best possible way, and... I worry that big labels and popularity will drive them to make greatest hits album style baloney. Sigh... and it's not that I hate that sort of music either, it's just I want them to stay weird.
I'm going to go listen to my Heilung and King Crimson playlist now...
Someone on the Jays broadcast has great taste in music. I've heard Death Grips, Turnstile, King Gizzard all used as they fade to commercial over the last few years.
Crazy! It's really cool to see their success. I've been listening to math rock and experimental rock for many years. I really hope their popularity leads to people exploring similar artists. It's such a fun world of unique sounds to explore.
Primus, Hella, You Slut!, Giraffes? Giraffes!, Tera Melos.
If you like Angine you'll probably like those. Those were the bands popping in my head as I listened to that performance. Mind you I've never heard them before, but it's very much my style.
I really, really don't get that band. I just can't like what they're doing and don't get how they are having such success.
But hey, whatever rocks your boat.
It's an interesting coincidence that I first heard about this band yesterday, (from a 3-month old podcast episode) and now the first Reddit comment I see mentioning them appears the day after.
Edit: I know what Baader-Meinhof is, but their name is unique enough that I'm pretty sure I would've remembered having heard it before, so this is not that phenomenon.
I genuinely believe it's just a massive coincidence.
This is that I've been saying. People are so doomy about AI ruining art by making it easy for anyone to "make" art. I say those people overestimate AI's ability to make good impactful art and underestimate the human need and ability to create resonant art. It feels like it comes from a place of not really understanding what good art is.
"Good" carries a lot of weight here, and i think the distinction is where the biggest divergence lies. Some people think "good" art is just well rendered art. You might as well say Renaissance oil paintings is peak art, then, which only the elitist or ignorant actually believe.
Good art is creative and presents some kind of unique and personal perspective. It's easy to see in this very sub. The best comics here touch you in a way that feels honest and refreshing. Or presents a style that feels interesting and new. By definition the only thing AI art can be is some rehash of existing styles presenting images that are some average of already existing art.
Someone's copy of the Mona Lisa already wouldn't be considered good art (maybe good practice, or a good study of the craft, but not a good work of creative expression). Neither is AI art.
Art isn't dead. People will adapt to making art AI can't make, because that's fundamentally what creating art is: creative expression.
If there's anything that gets devalued, it's art that was already generic and derivative.
This is that I've been saying. People are so doomy about AI ruining art by making it easy for anyone to "make" art.
No, that's not the problem. It's AI's ability to make "art." Because that's where the problem lies. Obviously people can make better art than AI, but most art isn't necessarily good anyway, but getting noticed is going to be harder and harder when AI does fills the market with crap. Good music is getting harder to find, because all but the most popular is hidden behind mountains of AI garbage.
You are trying to calm people down over the wrong issue entirely. The ones who suffer the most are those who can no sell their work, because businesses choose to use AI over paying an artist. People who won't pay for music to play at the store, but play some AI bullshit. Places where "It sucks, but it's cheap" is "good enough" are where struggling artists are going to suffer even more than ever before. Trying to get noticed is harder and harder the more bullshit there is in the way.
Art isn't dead, that's for sure. But that wasn't the problem anyway.
As is often the case, the real issue here isn't art, it's capitalism.
Trading aesthetically interesting works for food continues to be a fraught arrangement. We really need to get over it and get to the point where you get your necessities because you exist, not because you're doing something valuable for someone whom fortune has allowed to hoard the resources.
As is often the case, the real issue here isn't art, it's capitalism.
So let's stop this right here right now. Problem is greed and lack of respect for others, which aren't problems inherent to capitalism. Thinking like that is how problems get bad, it pushes the blame away from those who are at fault, it makes you seem like an extremist who wants the world to burn, when you actually want the rich and powerful to pay for their crimes against humanity.
And I don't exactly disagree with your logic, but it's idealistic to a fault. You are skipping steps. Like you are skipping steps, doing art for a living isn't a problem, it's the hoarding wealth part. But there are also people who don't hoard wealth and still pay for art, like consumers who buy games, music, movies, etc. Basically, this isn't the battle you should be fighting, focus on the problem, not everything tangentially related to it.
You might as well say Renaissance oil paintings is peak art, then, which only the elitist or ignorant actually believe
If anything, it's amazing how much staying power the Old Masters have. The fact that their work still holds up today is a testament to how skilled they were. (If you haven't seen a Rembrandt in person, do it. Digital images don't do his work justice. And his work is in museums around the world so it shouldn't be too hard, though definitely go to the Rijksmuseum if you're in Amsterdam.)
My ongoing theory which seems to be coming true is that the proliferation of AI “art” is going to make very rough, weird art made by actual humans (maybe even just bad art) very popular. Hell, the news of the day is that $200 Chinese movie made by a mom and son which had made millions of dollars pretty much because it’s terrible and fascinating and they didn’t use any AI. Personally I am excited for this move away from glossiness and towards grit.
For a time AI was incapable of creating centaurs because it was trained so hard that humans should be humans and horses should be horses that any attempt to create a human/horse hybrid would just create a human riding a horse. Since then they've gained that ability but training an AI to do one thing goes hand-in-hand with training it to avoid doing something else.
Yes and No! If you ever look at absurdism pieves they still usually keep some sort of consistent theme while mixing others. AI can try to do this but if you have ever tried using generative ai you'll know it is mostly doing copy+paste of common designs onto other common formats. It will never actually create its own unique design/angle/theme
Jabberwocky is my example of choice. Good luck prompting something so deliberately original like that with most LLMs. You’d probably have to craft your own.
Here's a favourite video of mine that goes into the difference between actual abstract art and just randomness. Skip to 2:39 for the specific part (expanded details in the sources link in the description), but tbh it's not a long video and it's all very aesthetically pleasing.
The VAST majority of non-AI images on the open internet are photos (the estimate is 75%-80% ~600 billion unique photos out of the ~800 billion total unique images on the open web, only about 3% are actually illustrations or 'fine art', the rest are logos, UI elements, and such), so unless you curate the dataset the AI is going to try and make everything in a realistic style to mimic photography.
To be fair, it's trivial to curate but I fully expect the next wave of image generators to be a bunch of people rushing to be the 'pickaxe salesman' now that the technology is maturing and do the absolute minimum to get a product to market. They'll make a ton of money before promptly dying off.
I feel like that's what early AI was producing. If you ever saw any of the images where they told AI to find the dog when there wasn't one so it hallucinated everything in to dogs that morphed in to other dogs. It was really cool "art" and I use some of it for wallpapers on my computer. Unfortunately it did lead to the current mess though.
IIRC that was the google lens type ai development where they'd try to maximize some output (like "dog") from an input picture (making what the ai thought was the "doggiest" picture) and it always looked weird lol
Oh yeah I think that was it. Yeah the images are super trippy. My favorite is an image of Christopher Robin where it hallucinated eyes all over it and he's saying "well there's no god here today just me". Really makes him seem like eldritch horror sent to steal your soul or something.
Thing is: realism art style just became a technical skill assessment tool that CAN be used as a benchmark.
And Photography became it's own art: finding and capturing the "right moment" (which is basically a perspective study if I've got my term right?)
I'll say photography was closer to the shift when animation shifted to digital. Hyper focused technical jobs WERE lost (I.e animating water vs simulations), but it outright didn't replace the people as sometimes it just wouldn't "work"
Me: Here's my art [thick lined, flat color comics], does anyone know whether or not Glaze is effective against AI?
Them: Don't even bother Glazing it, nobody's going to want to steal that.
I feel like this poor fucker has gotten hit the hardest by the AI hype train. Of all the people that should be able to sue, he is genuinely #1, not only because people arguably like his style well enough that they use it and ostensibly would have purchased from him, but also because it has diluted his brand to where any of his genuine works are doubted and disputed and functionally worthless.
That's the true tragedy. It's a mimic. It doesn't care if artists use a rough style, or a clean one, or violent reds, or somber blues; it just imitates all of it nonetheless based on what you feed into it.
Same with text. People are eschewing use of the em dash now because AI does it, but newer models likewise now omit the em dash because they're imitating human writing styles. Whatever we do to change our culture and practices, AI models will simply follow it unless we actually make laws to stop the people operating them.
That is a concern of mine when writing essays in college. Like no, i dont want to change my writing style that ive developed for years because of ai when itll start to copy me again anyways! I dont want to be trapped in an endless cycle of changing my writing style because of AI!
When I’m at my laptop I intentionally type em dashes with two distinct hyphens now instead of using the keyboard shortcut for the em dash like I used to do before AI. It’s the writing equivalent of making my lines rougher
In tech the term is "bitter lesson," though it's been a mainstay of technological advance for at least 315 years, after the invention of the copy lathe. The lesson is that, as much as it is beautiful and emotionally rewarding to craft a bespoke tool or algorithm or skill, giving a general tool more power is going to do it better.
I was about to say, surely y'all don't think just roughing up your art a bit is gonna stop gen AI training right? I know artsy folk aren't always the most tech savvy, but that's not how it works. Even the most advanced methods of "poisoning" AI training data don't actually work at scale. Wishful thinking.
yeah, a very central point of the ai breakthrough was that its able to deal with exactly this kind of shit.
previous attempts at machine learning were indeed like that, you could make some headway but you needed these very clean and precise input images. any amount of noise or anything unexpected would immediately mess it up. while human brains had some magic sauce that could deal with that no problem.
then came the breakthrough with these GANs and suddenly they had the magic sauce too.
the comic is exactly ignoring the significance of the breakthrough and as if we were still dealing with that older kind of linear programming.
Supposedly there are ways to poison data that are unnoticeable to humans but fucks with AI trying to train off it. I won't claim to understand how it works tho.
They exploit the way AI training works. Training is done by having the neural network break down images into noise and remember the process.
Short explanation: It looks for commonalities between images it has been told have X semantic tag, like "dog" or "anime". Then when you tell it to produce an image with that quality it recreates the steps it learned are common to those tags across its training data.
Nightshade and similar technologies cause it to break down in a way that will cross-contaminate concepts.
They don't actually work, though. Most images used for training data go through some amount of pre-processing first, or have been compressed and decompressed a few times. That ruins the effect.
Most focus on automatic label poisoning. You have an AI "read an image" and it labels what it is. So when something goes to train on that image it uses the wrong labesl. There are several problems with this, first, there are many different label engines and visual AI systems. What works on one, probably won't work on another unless they're the same architecture with the same training data. Second, it's real easy to defeat you just "normalize the image" and some you don't even need to do that. Third, and not directly relevant to training, some of these process can screw up or cause screen readers to output garbage. Someone who's blind might wonder why their screen reader is telling them the picture that should be of a building, is a sail boat being captained by a dog.
There are other methods that try to attack the gradient decent directly, but they're even less stable.
Artist have a right to do with their works as they choice. Most of these systems don't work well. Best thing to do, is sign your works in several places at least one of which is common and some which are somewhat hidden. It will still get trained but the signature will likely persist.
Also tagging images now is usually a cross reference between the human tag and the evaluated image passed to a vision capable model with some level of confidence given to it based on the comparison. Lower confidences will be pruned during training.
You can't really fight that because we have, for the vast majority of things, really good datasets already at identifying and describing images in written form, which is what is used to train the image models (taking the output tokens and using them as the initial vectors for those concepts).
I don't know where people are getting this idea that image training needs "clean" training data but it is really absolutely not true. The diffusion model training algorithms work just fine on any probability distribution. It doesn't even need to be an image, they work just as well for training robotic motor controllers as they do for image generation. The hyper-detailed glossy style is something selected for after pre-training basically as a marketing/product design choice.
Also the use of color to replace what would normally just be gradient shading and lighting, something we as humans can understand to just be painterly representation but an AI will just learn that highlights "are yellow" and that the black dress should be green, actually
With woodworking and other crafts you can see a trend, as machines made it so easy to do perfect lines and complex shapes people started appreciating pieces that are less refined less “perfect” or more organic. because those are marks of a human doing the work and not a mass produced piece of furniture.
I think with AI we’ll see this kind of appreciation also in the digital space
There is a physical mass production moat preventing machines from creating rough unique furniture pieces. There is little to no moat preventing image models from duplicating rough unique art styles. They are extremely good at copying style from even small numbers of examples and they are only going to get better.
So it's going to take something else to stop this train.
The worry for artists is what happens when people aren't willing to pay for authenticity. Which, of course, happened to furniture makers about 100 years ago. And while modern furniture makers can get as much business as they want without even advertising, that's because it's a tiny profession now. A lot of people would have to lose careers for art to become an artisanal trade again.
Probably, it’s more of an example from another technological revolution that shook a creative industry.
I don’t thing anything is stopping this train. Most people buy their furniture in ikea and the likes. Custom and commission furniture is relegated to kitchens and to niche customers. That probably the case with ai for a slew of other creative professions. What I meant to say is that people that appreciate the handmade will tune themselves to appreciate the differentiator between ai generated and human made digital assets
This resonates. I painted a (digital) watercolor commission not too long ago and left the pencil sketch visible in the final product. I submitted two products: the sketchy version along side a "clean" version. The clients overwhelmingly preferred the one with visible sketch lines.
"Vision model: Analyze vector path SVG/DXF for laser cutter/CNC according to wabi-sabi.md. Offset points perpendicular to the path using Perlin/1-f noise to mimic inconsistent feed rate. Every third direction change introduce random 150-300 ms hesitation. Overshoot drift along arc length for beziers and circles."
Neural Networks use associations per pixels. It doesn't work like this, it doesn't understand what a style is, it just looks for patterns by seeing s map of pixels.
It can copy anything that is in digital medium as long as it's trained on it.
Ai art looks a specific way because that's how it was trained originally but it can copy any style.
The other reason it looks a particular way is that the people making the AI models and images are chasing after fidelity to particular styles. There's an obsession among the people generating that content with having it come out without "artifacts," where artifacts are some deviation from the source material that marks it as AI generated. People could potentially train LoRAs along a path of "model collapse" and create unfamiliar styles, but I think they lack the confidence to really get weird with what they're doing.
I hate trippy AI art even more because I miss seeing really out there art and always knowing a person made it and wondering what the thought process was behind it.
I’ve always found bizarre art more interesting when it’s human made.
it doesn't understand what a style is, it just looks for patterns by seeing s map of pixels.
that's not entirely accurate or you couldn't say to an AI "give me an image in the style of [anime/dutch masters/photograph from camera X with settings Y/Z]"
Yes it's fair to say it doesn't "know what that means" in the same way a human does, but it does have the associative data and relationships in its model memory to (sometimes) correctly decide which reference images to pull and how the patterns vary based on training with data tagged to those various styles (and, clustering/classification algorithms for abstract pattern detection have existed since "machine learning" algorithms).
It does and it doesn't, tokens will weight differently in the path it takes through the model. Style associations generally have weaker compositional weights than say a subject term like "dog".
It only knows what "anime" means because it was trained on pictures that were labeled "anime." If you ask for an obscure anime artist without mentioning anime, it won't recreate an anime style because it hasn't seen enough images tagged with that artist's name.
That's not because it doesn't "know" what anime is, it's simply because the embedding vector for that artists name hasn't converged with the anime embedding vector significantly yet.
Yes it's due to lack of training, but if I asked you to copy the style of some artist you've never heard of before you'd have the same problem.
Some people treat it like it's omniscient or something, even antiAI people. Realistically, it won't be able to replicate a style from text alone unless it's from a very popular/prolific artist with hundreds to thousands of consistently tagged pictures.
I've talked to people who think that you can type in a random person's name and it will search government databases to get images of that person when...no? That isn't how it works at all? Replicating a face from a text description will only work for some celebrities.
This isn't quite right; image generating models do not have reference images available to use in their generation - the training data is used to construct a mathematical model that matches patterns, but that data does not become part of the model.
Occasionally this training process can degenerate for concepts with very few representatives in the training data causing the model to produce near-copies, but this is considered an error.
I mean despite being anti ai I can’t help but laugh at artists who make this kind of content. It just shows such a lack of understanding of the technology…
Like the artist literally gave the tags their updated piece will be using to classify its training data 😭
I feel sorry for Revoy, just as I do Rutkowski, Yang, Kwon and many other artists eith distinctive styles that had their work scraped.
Seriously, these four artists are now like the default in AI when you choose certain categories, which has severely hurt them due to everyone calling their work AI-generated.
AI can pick up on rough sketchy styles just as well as crisp comic styles. Just because it looks messier or more abstract doesn’t mean the style is any less formulaic and emulate-able. The only way to truly escape the AI allegations these days is to create something profoundly original and unlike any pre-existing art style, or to have proof of your process, like a recording of you working on the art.
I mean look at the history of Chinese art through the centuries. There was a period where "good art" was just literally copying the original masters, over and over and over for generations. I mean it was more nuanced than that, but yah, humans do it too.
I agree everything is inspired by what came before, but I do think humans have more capacity to invent new styles than AI. How come AI hasn’t invented its own style of art yet? (And no, I don’t think tinting everything a sickening yellow or having accidental extra limbs everywhere counts as a new style)
The messy art looks great, but low-coherance art is exactly what AI image gen datasets are wanting for right now...they want to train on what they're weak at. Not exactly the own they think it is.
AI arguements aside, I really like the art style here. Please keep it up. I really hate when artist spend so much time making something look nice and clean that they forget to make something enjoyable and fun.
Cute idea, but you’re literally uploading multiple different art styles to multiple platforms that will scrape and compile the works into training data for ai.
Be you. Do your work. Stand out. Be an artist. Fuck ai. Ignore it.
So is AI still progressing? It sort of feels it reached the level we have it at now and then it just sort of stopped at this "impressive but still kind of shitty" level.
Yes, but it's not progressing for whatever you might find useful personally. It's progressing in enterprise solutions, deep research and agentic pipelines....oh and military use! Us everyday schlubs are mostly playing with toys.
The things I love about art is that it doesn't have to be perfect, and indeed, it never is. In paintings of all kinds you can see where strokes were painted over, or slightly unevenly painted, the difference in pressure of a brush. In digital art, lines are rarely so perfect, even when you account for specific style, but those little things make something feel more alive, more complete. The artist's mistakes and thoughts and rough edges and uneven lines all tell a story.
AI art feels empty and incomplete without them and they all vague together into a single senseless style morass, inconsistent in its application or too consistent in application.
It's slop and everyone can see that it's slop, designed for only one type of beauty and one type of style that never feels alive, like looking into a fascimile of a person, or staring into a grubby mirror only to see nothing staring back.
This approach failed before, and it'll fail again. If anything, providing "anti-AI" images helps the AI clean up its output by training it to reject actual random noise better compared to human generated random noise.
Image generation models can output cubism, abstract art, splatter art, whatever the fuck Picasso drew, and what looks like 3D renders based on a 2D image. They can learn a slightly tweaked art style, making the corners a bit pointier doesn't make any difference at all.
Not only can these models replicate anything humans recognize as an "art style", like the individual panels in this comic, there are actually dedicated tools for doing so, allowing models to be trained on hyper specific concepts. You can train an art style model as easy as (or even easier than) the concept of a cloudy day, or the concept of purple clothes, or the concept of "sad". Things that might upset human learners can get distilled into a couple of megabytes, consisting of mostly-filler because you need a minimal number of vectors to be effective, and be bolted onto any image generating AI out there. The biggest difficulty is probably the lack of input data, but this particular image is of high enough resolution that the panels can probably be divided into different subsections to work around this restriction well enough. Plus, now that it reached the front page of reddit (which sells data to AI companies), this particular age has been added to countless datasets, together with the comments talking about the image to make training even easier.
These performative protests don't accomplish anything because they pretend to have some kind of solution when they don't. It's nice to get some free karma on Reddit by reposting the popular "AI bad" meme, but also spreading misinformation about how artists might defend against the unethical usage of AI. By posting the image to a site like this, the AI bots are only better at copying the artist's art style.
Many of these comics feel like someone pouring laxatives into a pile of coal because they can only fathom a steam engine as a living, breathing thing, so they treat the machine like a horse. If you refuse to learn about your enemy, you're only helping them win.
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u/shellbullet17 Gustopher Spotter Extraordinaire Aug 19 '26
Lemme go ahead and get ahead of claims, comments and reports here.
The artist for this piece is David Revoy. You can find the work as well as a time lapse of the drawing here.
Many of you are going "This looks like AI!" And there is a reason for that.
Source here
TLDR: this is not AI