I suspect a guy from the art server is posting AI works. I’m not going to say anything because I’m no forum cop, and I hate the witch hunt culture that has sprung up on social media. (I think it’s way worse to incorrectly accuse a real artist than to let an AI reposter slide.) But it’s an interesting situation that I’ve been slowly rotating in my head.
Nothing about the pictures themselves tips me off. But his posting is weirdly regular. Every day, he posts a complete digital artwork in the daily-sketch channel. It’s always something different: one day, a crocodile anthro in a dress with a lollipop. The next day, a scantily clad knight with a sword. The day after that, a frog in the forest. Just a finished piece with zero commentary.
With a real person, you get some variation, you know? Maybe one day it’s a finished digital piece. The next day it’s a doodle in the margins of their math homework. A couple days later, a wip. And they chat about what they're doing. This guy has never commented on his own (or anyone else’s) art. He’s also never posted any traditional art and has never edited or added to any work of his, which makes me think he can’t.
Also, his pictures don’t give me any sense of an individual with interests. Normally, artists have interests. corvid is an avid birder and nature journaler, and their “default” sketch (whoops it’s bedtime and I haven’t drawn today) is a bird. felix is a newcomer to digital painting and enjoys painting insects and their pet lizard. Nalindy does a lot of sketching from life, including both urban sketching (e.g., the view from a cafe) and portraiture (e.g., coworkers during Zoom meetings). fizzy has a wide artistic range (portraits, landscapes, animation) but often returns to mech sketches, both digital and traditional. As for the guy I've been observing, he's all over the place. Which is not inherently bad—we love artistic range—but in his case it really feels like someone feeding a different prompt to a machine every day.
What do you even get out of reposting AI works? The satisfaction of putting one over a server of artists? Yeah, probably. I’ve just stopped emoji reacting to his posts. (Literally 0% chance this ever gets noticed. He gets lots of emoji reacts.) I’ve thought about trying to draw him into conversation, ask about process or what program he uses, but…eh.
edit (8/21): it’s so funny that shortly after I posted this entry on ayearago.today, all the front-page entries got like +15 views. I doubt it’s real people considering we’re smack in the middle of a challenge. webcrawlers heard me talking shit.
@rachelrae2003 That's wild. Like...the banana would go bad...then they paid $120,000 for a banana they didn't even eat...or maybe they did take it down from the wall and eat it but either way it's absurd because they don't even have the art piece they paid for.
My view on AI is more complex. I don't consider it "theft" if it's based on works posted publicly. Like, if I post art on this site, anyone can come and view it and be inspired by it and use it as reference in their own works (as long as they don't copy it so closely that it crosses the line into plagiarism). That goes for people, that goes for bots. So I don't mind my works being used to develop AI.
But I do think it's sad if the existence of AI discourages people from pursuing art and other creative outlets, because then everyone loses out. The overall body of human work is impoverished. And AI can't make up for that gap because it's based on human works in the first place, so if the pool is diminished, both AI and other human artists have less to draw upon.
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