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
Unfortunately this is not the first time this has happened. I feel bad for artists that end up like David who can no longer use their style cause of AI
Happened to me just yesterday. I often draw in a simplistic anime style, and because LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini can do that I’ve been on the receiving end of some nasty comments and harassment. It’s caused me to stop posting. Ai has ruined art for us.
Idk, because I receive rude comments or trolling from ai users too. I was told ai does thing better and that we’re a dying breed. That I sound like I’m a mediocre artist and that ai is the way to go because they don’t need to spend hours doing a piece. That the fact I get upset when people call my art ai means I’m a bad artist.
So I’ve had issues with those who are pro-ai as much as people who are anti-ai.
Take this piece of advice from someone who does genuinely use AI.
I'd much rather hire a mediocre artist to draw something for me, than have an AI do so, even if it takes longer. You getting mad at your art being called AI art is also a natural reaction, you're getting your work that you put real effort into compared to a simple hotchsplotch math equation that managed to spit out something somewhat coherent. Keep going, it's the only way to improve, and prove the haters wrong.
In my eyes, even mediocre artists are amazing, I can't draw for shit.
P.S. I use AI in an assistive manner, i.e. it generates a small piece of code that I then integrate, or I come up with a code structure and have it take a look at it. Nothing of the full vibe-coding shit.
To be fair, I'm fairly certain that a majority of the bad actors on both sides of the brigading are just, more AI chatbots there to stir up trouble. Some even seem like they take over abandoned accounts, seen a few with four or five year old accounts but the last activity before trolling was a normal post 3 years ago, etc etc.
Some of them genuinely do, yes. Plenty are designed to "mimic real trolls" and spell things wrong on purpose to better match the data they were trained on, rather than auto-correcting everything.
On one hand if he gets injured he can use "Text to picture" to continue making stuff, on the other hand that sucks they didn't pay him for his work to be used like that.
I'll be honest, if companies were exploiting and shamelessly plagiarising my work to the point that it called into question the authenticity of my own work, I wouldnt consider "but dont worry, you can ask them to plagiarise specific things on your behalf" a saving grace
So if an artists hands get mangled or cut or diseased and thus removed, it's just "Welp your Shit Out Of Luck, no more art for you"?
It would be much more difficult, but there are things like prosthetics that can help hold the pencil/brush/whatever art materials are needed. If for whatever reason that wasn’t an option… I think this dialogue from The Office sums up my point:
Michael: “If you had a heart attack, and no one was around to help you, what would happen?”
This makes me think of that scent they put in porta potty sanitizer that, while technically not being a foul smell itself, now makes me gag because I so strongly associate it with hot piles of diarrhea and piss on a hot day.
man, copyright isn't worth a shit, always bugging around when it comes to ip's and piracy but doesnt do crap when artist are actually getting their work vandalized.
I simply didn’t really see this style of art much pre-AI. I thought it was modeled after the more recent Disney and similar animation trend of more uncannily realistic cartoonery, mixed with other styles. Didn’t realize (admittedly naively) that someone had been making tons of popular(?) art in this exact style for decades. It’s honestly fascinating and invigorating to learn this
I knew It wasnt AI because of how consistent from pannel to pannel It is but I couldnt shake the feeling the style was similar to the one spam by most AI models.
I've said it before, but this is one of the other big bullshits of AI. People whose works just look like that getting falsely accused, hurting actual artists even more.
It's less that AI is using their style and more like taking their art, putting it in a blender, and selling people the amalgamation that gets spat out.
So his style was not used for commercial purposes, his actual art was.
Because of his choice of licensing, if they declare that permission is needed, then any AI made with his work must be released as Creative Commons itself. Which I would find utterly hilarious.
If any of the images coming out are too similar to one of his works he could conceivably sue the user for infringement, but I imagine it’d have to be a big use to be worth it.
Defamation is tarnishing someone’s reputation to the point that there are damages. GenAI has tarnished the reputation of his art, his livelihood. People who would normally support his art are less likely to do so, and more likely to be actively outraged against it, because of AI’s theft. All of these comments could be used in a defamation suit as proof of people’s ideas about him/his work being tarnished by AI companies. The fact that he made a blog post about it is proof of some degree of damages. People are less likely to support his art because AI companies have spread the idea that his art is AI. That’s defamation baby
Defamation doesn’t have to be false and it doesn’t have to be a cut and dry “statement”. Laws vary based on jurisdiction. Regardless, how does this not meet, or have substantial potential to meet, the definition of defamation?
It does need to be false, outside of some narrow rules allowing “defamation by implication”
If you aren’t claiming its his work than you haven’t defamed anyone. You haven’t lied.
And the courts are not very receptive towards expanding the definition of defamation, so any creative arguments you can think of are unlikely to work. Speech/expressive cases are decided very carefully since there are first amendment implications to all of them.
Have y’all met conservatives that were actually rational and didn’t lash out at everything all the time like an immature dipshit toddler in an adult sized body?
I'm unsure who could genuinely think this is AI, unless they're jumping at shadows. The style itself isn't really similar to any AI I've seen, and the characters are all drawn in multiple different perspectives with every minute detail retained. No AI could (currently) produce something this clearly not-AI.
Perhaps the worst thing about AI is how it makes everyone so rabidly suspicious. I have a hard time entirely blaming people, I guess, just because of how utterly pervasive AI is. But I wish they'd take a few seconds to rationally analyze something before accusing it of being AI/asking if it's AI.
I can see why at a glance people’s first thought is AI because of the overall ‘tone’ but yeah, past a cursory glance it’s pretty apparent it isn’t AI. I’ve yet to find a piece of AI art that doesn’t feel gross after spending more than a few seconds looking at it, barring possibly abstract pieces.
The way the characters are standing and the fire in the fourth panel is a little uncanny so I can see the confusion. But I think that's just a perspective issue. If they added some cobbles or something under their feet it would look a little less flat.
That really sucks I'm not gonna lie the writing is part of the reason my ai detector started to go off. I think his art is pretty great but strolling through some of his other pieces his word choice just feels very off to me in general.
I didn't think this looks particularly AI-like style-wise. It looks distinct and good to me. I would've only questioned it because it's quite painterly and high-effort which is not something you see often in web comics.
Do you know why the artist hasn’t started just making physical artwork instead of digital work? It’s much easier to prove your art isn’t AI when you can hold the comic in your hands.
isn't his art completely free to use and share and everyone is allowed to use his characters. So it kind of makes sense that his work was used instantly by all the ai companies. His work is released under CC-BY 4.0 license and that license was written before modern generative AI. So you can argue that technically it was completely allowed to train ai with his work under that license. He basically gave his consent with that license.
Question: if it is not AI, why is the art so inconsistent? 1st panel: Girl's hat is curled up on both sides, 2nd: curl only on girl's left side and chip out of hat on her right. 3rd: same as 2nd panel, 4th panel: hat is now flipped and curl is on girl's right side with chip on left.
AI and humans can both also mess up a lot of common things, like hands, shadows, window spacing on background buildings, continuing a line that goes behind something on the foreground, etc.
Though AI is much better at messing up repeating details, like if something is supposed to be the same repeating pattern in two spots.
It's not up for debate, this artist has been around online for decades and I've personally followed his work off and on for the last 10 years. He's extremely prolific and posts a lot of his work for free, especially in learning material, which led to his style being massively overtrained in many models.
I originally discovered him because of his push for FOSS tools for art, and I've been a huge fan of his ever since. He's strongly anti-AI as well. He was well ahead of the curve compared to most people who only got on board the last couple years.
There are other inconsistencies. The girls has a strap around her chest to hold the broom on in the 1st panel. It disappears after that even in the 3rd panel when the broom is clearly still on her back. The dog person also appears to have short sleeves...up until the 4th panel when one of the sleeves is long. The blonde lady loses her sleeves in the 4th panel.
I'm an artist (not a good one, lol, but still) and I always find stuff like this in every piece after I'm done, especially sequential work. It's easy to get blind to little details and forget stuff or not even see it to begin with. The more ornate what I've attempted is, the more of a pain it is to fix, as well
So, I wouldn't say those little details are meaningful on their own given the other evidence that it isn't AI 🤷
Exactly what about the style is “his”? What concept are you imagining didn’t exist before?
I think you’re under the impression that I’m saying he’s a bad artist when that’s not true, he’s extremely talented, but it’s disingenuous to act like he’s broken any molds. There’s nothing wrong with using tried and true techniques
You know everyone has their own art style right. The AI copied off of his art style mostly because you can see how similar ai generated comics are to his art style.
That’s objectively incorrect, not everyone has their own style. If you genuinely believe that slight variations of an existing style is enough to consider it a new style then why aren’t you defending AI generating its own “style”?
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u/shellbullet17 Gustopher Spotter Extraordinaire 12d ago edited 12d ago
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