Art was already open to anyone just pick up a fucking pencil
Edit: drawing all the talentless hacks out of the woodwork lol
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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chapotraphouse
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im not going to take a pencil and personally draw a courtroom sketch of Macdonald's The Grimace giving live birth in front of a judge
That sounds like a you problem
it sounds like a problem for whatever entity has to draw something like that
Stop kinkshaming
i really hate this reasoning. when people say "i can't draw" they mean "i can't draw what I set out to draw" not that they can't make marks on a paper. People want to make what they have in their head, likely to a level of competence that would be appreciated by an audience beyond their mom, not some other thing that they physically can that will look bad to them and anyone else.
I also dispute OP's assumption that we can all learn to draw competently, i've tried on and off for years with various tutorials and programmes and my brain and hands just do not work that way.
Ask any artist if they are satisfied with their art. They won't be. That is the nature of the beast. Doesn't matter how good they are at it.
I have done art on and off for years as well. I would estimate I did maybe a few thousand hours of art in my life. Other people have done literally 10 to 100 times that and they are better because of it. You hone your skills over time. Anyone like me dabbling in art has to accept that there are countless people who put in more time, who are better and who will stay being better because they will keep putting more time in then us.
Using AI, you steal those hours from those people, for a product that doesn't show what's in your head. It's stilly to pretend AI can do that and you know it. If that were true, all the art prompters wouldn't include the names of existing artists in their prompts.
So yea, put in the fucking time, or get off the field. Don't be fucking selfish and then try to defend it in flimsy ways.
What's being stolen when someone uses genAI to make a picture for personal use? In what way is it selfish?
It's weird if someone acts like they're 'making art', but it's also harmless.
All of the art that was used to train generative AI was used without its creator's permission, meaning they weren't compensated for all of the years of work and study that went into creating it. Then all of that labour was repackaged into a product that corporations are selling at a premium, with none of the money going back to the people who made the creation of it possible. These companies have well admitted that they wouldn't be able to make a profit if they had to actually pay all these artists for their work. Now obviously, that isn't technically stealing, but neither is it harmless. I personally know several artists who've told me that work has dried up in the years since generative AI became popular, and who are upset that their own work was used to train the machines that are replacing them.
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"Hey man I need to see all your text and all your images you ever made."
""Why?"
"So I can make bad collage-copies of them and write shitty listicles."
"I don't want you to do that."
"Too bad, you put your stuff somewhere I could see it so I already did it and you have no recourse now because the powerful people that made me are above copyright law."
There is no personal use with this, because the AI was trained on everyone's stolen information. That is the problem, not the fact that it can make a bad picture because that was done. If the AIs could actually make anything from whole cloth, then we'd be having a different debate, but that's not what's going on.
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I mean, yeah this true not everyone can make art up to their desired standards. But everyone can still make art, there's tons of different genres and styles of art, all humans are gonna have the ability to engage with some of them. Maybe not to the level they'll become famous for it but they can do it.
Edit: to provide a personal example, I suck at drawing and painting but I used to do actual paper collage art, which doesn't require you make any images yourself but is instead about the composition of other premade images. With pretty good results.
Aw that's so kool <3 thanks for uploading
top one is giving 1990s magic the gathering. sick.
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So you want an audience to adore you but for work you didn't put in?
Also what's competent? Have you ever seen avant garde paintings? Impressionist? Surrealism? Heck you could make your own style based on how your hands do work? There are people that paint with their mouth or feet because they want to put the effort in.
Wanting the reward first is backwards.
what? no, i'm not really looking for an audience for the thing i'm not doing at all. if any of my attempts at developing a skill had resulted in developing that skill maybe i'd be art posting instead of simply not making 2D visual art because i can't make what i want to.
Also what's competent?
output matching intent. I can imagine a much higher fidelity image than i have the ability (or neurological patience, probably. drugs pls) to produce which, quoting myself:
when people say "i can't draw" they mean "i can't draw what I set out to draw"
and that goes for whatever else. I'm not actually good enough at blender to make what i aspire to make either, but i've found something i can make to a level i'm satisfied with and is worth my time, unlike the literal garbage i'd get trying to do it on paper or canvas.
Have you ever seen avant garde paintings? Impressionist? Surrealism? Heck you could make your own style based on how your hands do work?
but spider-man i do not want to cure cancer, i want to turn people into dinosaurs. I made marble paintings as a kid, i've seen art that doesn't look anything like what it's meant to depict. these things are profoundly uninteresting to me and not what i'd be interested in making. so it's incredibly fucking rude to tell me to go make garbage i don't want to make and be happy about it.
Wanting the reward first is backwards.
what "reward" lmao. i just want to look at a thing, and since I can't make something i want to look at I want people to not claim art is accessible to everyone because that claim is a fundamental misunderstanding of people who can't make the kind of art they would like to make, and it is literally not accessible to me and a few other people in here who have mentioned repeated attempts at trying to develop the skill and being neurologically unable to.
You said for more than your mother would appreciate which means you are sharing it and/or care what other people think about it. If it's for yourself than you are only as critical as you need be.
And I can imagine a remote space base on an asteroid but I'm not gonna be upset with myself that I can't build it. It's normal to have stuff you can't do. And then you work towards it little by little aware that you might not get it in your lifetime and you leave it for the next people to do.
So instead of it being about being for recognition from others this is some sort of instant gratification need? Cause I am still not getting what the issue is other than a stubborn need to get exactly what you want and in as little effort as possible. And you calling it rude to try at something else instead of get what you want is entitled and not something I support.
If it's for yourself than you are only as critical as you need be.
if i cant make a thing look like i want it to look then I can't make the thing i want to make. no shit.
an asteroid base is something that would take multiple people many years to accomplish. a cool drawing is something one person could reasonably expect to do on their own.... the fact that some of us can't is exactly my point that art isn't fucking accessible just because anyone can make garbage because some dorks have a uselessly broad definition of art that is useless to normal people who just want to transfer the image in their head to paper.
it's not about instant gratification or no effort either, the inaccessibility is in that we have tried to learn and were unable to. I take this condition and dispute the notion that art is accessible.. i'd be happy to put in time and get a result, but i put in time and effort years ago and never got anywhere because brain differences.
You are mistaking art with being a skilled craftsman. And your expectations are too high on yourself.
Art is accessible in that you can express yourself and find a medium to do that but it doesnt mean you are just gonna be great at painting or line drawing. Thise are skillsand most people are lucky enough to have a couple things they are truly skilled at in life. It doesnt mean we can do everything. We work together as humans. A person born without lega can provide skills to the world but cant just build their own wheelchair and all the medications for themselves.
You can not draw exactly what is in your head, boohoo. Im sorry but im not gonna have sympathy for you being human and not getting to do everything you ever want to do but you can work together with others to help make that possible. I have an incredible tattoo that looks exactly how i imagined it in my head but couldnt possibly draw it myself or tattoo it on my own body. But i went to an artist and showed them my shitty drawings and they turned it unto something amazing and someone else put that ink to skin.
Its my art. I am expressing myself through it but i dodnt expect to do it all myself.
Stop expecting yourself to be able to do everything and stop making it so that you dont feel you can work with others and accept limitations. Thats how life is. Full of limitations and disappointment but there is less when you work together instead of thiniing you are gonna be superman doing it all on your own.
Art is accessible in that you can express yourself
no, I can't. i've tried. If i say "me sad" that's technically words but it's not adequately communicating my interiority.
And your expectations are too high on yourself.
jesus christ for the tenth time i'm not expecting to be michelangelo. I'm worse than every highschool baseball player in the world but i can throw baseball-sized objects well enough for when that cop car across the street needs a broken window.
apparently you can read about as well as i can draw because you have constantly ignored my expressed desire for competence in this matter.
You are the one stuck on it being that you draw the things you want to see. It is not my reading comprehension but just that you are completely insistent that this is the method to express yourself.
People can express they are sad poorly with words but well with flower arrangements or sculpture or hair styling. Art is absolutely accessible but you insist it isnt since you cant do what you desire to do.
There is a guy in the comics community that literally just has the wordt looking doodles but they get their point across. I have seen lego comics and cyanide and Happiness used clip art of a circle, a square, and some drawn lines. Who the fuck needs to be Michelangelo? Thats a craftsman you seem to be comparing yourself to again.
Im saying that you wont find competency in something just because you want it and you won't find artistic expression of yourself in a knockoff image generator. I would ignore your issues with saying you want to fly but still suggest that you get a pilots license. You are insistent you preent in a way that might not be possible and it will not make you more competent just make you reliant on being sold a tool to pretend you are. Its ok to not be good at something you just dont like that as an answer.
People can express they are sad poorly with words but well with flower arrangements or sculpture or hair styling.
i don't want to cure cancer, i want to turn people into dinosaurs
And yet you think comparing yourself to a dumb comic book villain is a good thing?
Does the lizard seem happy? Dont be shocked when someone tries to stop you then.
I also dispute OP's assumption that we can all learn to draw competently, i've tried on and off for years with various tutorials and programmes and my brain and hands just do not work that way.
I’m curious if you’ve tried https://drawabox.com/
It’s set up to be very rote and effort in = results out. If you like studying and practicing that way, it works a lot differently than the typical advice.
drawabox is one of the worst programs for learning something from scratch i have ever tried. That shit is horrible. I am capable of imagining its good for people who already draw a bit and want to get better, but from scratch its horrible.
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I'm not categorically against generative AI tools and believe they can be fun and useful. I just don't think you can call their output art. I would compare them to character creators and similar creative tools in video games
You wouldn't call yourself a character designer after making a cool custom fighter in SoulCalibur or an interior designer after making a house in the Sims, but that doesn't take away the fact that both are valid creative outlets
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yeah i think there's some ADHD thing that short circuits the connection between my mind image and my fingies
and i doodled and drew for years up until my late teens. also took tons of classes, including drawing classes in college.
luckily I read a lot and apparently could write well (back then at least) and did that instead. but I was always envious of people that can just do the whole "my hand is a printer connected to my brain".
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People defending gen AI in these comments proves this place isn’t much different than the rest of lemmy at all lol
at least for me, the joy of art is in the process. if you want to replace personal development with a slot machine, feel free i guess. every artistic or musical piece that I make leaves an imprint in my mind and manifests a physical object or vibration in the real world. you could say that AI can take your desire and manifest it, but without the internal struggle between your imagination and the medium the art won't change anything about how you see or understand the world. you might even miss getting a deeper look into what your actual desires / dreams are / mean.
Isn't it wonderful that this pseudo-AI has freed humans from having to write and draw and think and dream? We have so much more time to mow lawns and wash dishes and do the laundry.
And work at Amazon fulfillment centers!
People are like "art is hard, you hone your skills over time" but that's why i do abstract paintings, there's no difficulty, no skill, just color gettin all fling flanged around. i refuse to get better at it.
My 3070/5900 rig runs stable diffusion well enough. The barrier to entry is much more gaming pc than it is server farm but I still agree with the sentiment and don’t agree with the idea that AI makes are accessible. It makes image generation more accessible but there’s a billion tools for tracing that already made shit pretty accessible.
Yes, but there’s a reason why we gatekeep art. Your average person has no taste and is just horny.
I felt MUCH more creative just tracing other's art (for personal practice, they don't survive long enough to be saved). I felt more creative finding a cruddy lego comic I made when I was 8. I felt more creative seeing a pallet my neighbor threw away and taking it to use for scrap wood for maybe making a cat tree. All more creative then trying to wrestle an "ai" to make a blurry ugly mess. The BEST piece I got still had odd eyes and muddy lighting.
I can barely draw a straight line. I can barely TRACE a hand. Yet I've gotten better. If I had the time/energy/drive, I could become decent, even without spending 10 million hours. I've just accepted certain personal limits. Like a slight natural shakey hand. It was frustrating wanting to paint minitures, but I got over it and had a hell of a time painting a simple landscape ala Bob Ross.
I've had a better time THINKING about evangelion and how I might make a game based on all the admin and engineering aspects the anime glances over. Not even the "art" stuff about it... but also thinking about the times it talks about the environment, its relation to late 90s tech, purity, the supposed "accidental" use of abrahamic icons, its seemingly forward projected critic of certain anime tropes, the disatisfaction with there being no clean end of anything human... And I still have to watch more then just the first series.
Besides everything else, I love leftist theory/thought because of the actual freedom it provides. ("Leftist", "Theory" here being a bit loose.) Accepting what is and improving what can and needs to be is such a detoxifying mindset. Perfect would be nice, but sometimes you just can't be, and you have to learn to forget your notions of perfection. I'll probably never get over ~specific, fairly minor, chronic disorder that I shouldn't add to my dox~, but I can tune out the distress 99% of the time, and the 1% I can cope with.
If you believe you are doing art with AI, can a mirror see you when you look into it?
Running one of these genai art models really isn't that hard and doesn't require incredible top-end hardware.
That isn't really a defense of it, but it does allow some people who otherwise do not have artistic skills to make pictures.
Like, I have aphantasia and can't visually conceptualize anything. Art is very hard for me. I don't think it hurts anyone for me to make a character portrait for my dnd character using automatic1111. Even using an unethical model, I would never pay an artist for a dnd character portrait - it is too expensive for me and while I like having a nice character portrait and it helps me have a better conceptualization of my character, it is not worth the time or money to get a real artist to make one. If not for genai, I'd just go on deviantart and use one somebody already made or like draw a really shitty one.
Plus, if we're going to say software piracy is OK but art piracy isn't, thats a little hypocritical. Software piracy can definitely hurt software devs (especially ones working for smaller companies and even moreso for indie devs) in roughly the same way that art piracy hurts artists.
As a rule I think software piracy is fine if it doesn't hurt anyone (i.e. if you wouldn't have paid for it and it's for noncommercial use). I don't see how art is all that much different. Its completely different if you're using any of this stuff for commercial use to take work away from people who need it and replace it with shitty AI stuff - but I'm not talking about that.
Plus, if we're going to say software piracy is OK but art piracy isn't, thats a little hypocritical. Software piracy can definitely hurt software devs (especially ones working for smaller companies and even moreso for indie devs) in roughly the same way that art piracy hurts artists.
This is BS how can you even believe its the same? Piracy is about reproduction as is. You download a software, you use it as its made.
AI art is fundamentally different, you're not using it as is, you're taking it, distilling the authors intent and work and claiming as your own, often for a profit.
Again compared that to software piracy, please I hope you're not suggesting the average person who downloaded Photoshop in 2015 was actualy hacking it so they could resell it for $50 called it "TotallyMyOwnPhotoEditingSoftware Pro HD Max 12".
Embarrassing to even write this shit. Barely above "you wouldn't download a car".
Piracy doesn't hurt small devs. This is a stupid myth propagated by the AAA shills. Small devs are far more likely to benefit from piracy since it gives better word of mouth. If someone isn't going to spend $5 or $10 to buy a game to begin with then at least they're very likely to spread the game around, through communities or social media, if your game is actualy good.
Like this is discourse from like 15 years ago I kid you not. Its been debunked for at least since the early days of Steam.
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As someone who also has aphantasia, but still likes to draw sometimes, this feels so strange for me to read.
I would never pay an artist for a dnd character portrait - it is too expensive for me and while I like having a nice character portrait and it helps me have a better conceptualization of my character, it is not worth the time or money to get a real artist to make one. If not for genai, I'd just go on deviantart and use one somebody already made or like draw a really shitty one.
If you don't consider a drawing of your character to be worth any amount of money that you'd be willing to pay an artist, why do you feel the need to have one at all? And to say you'd go to an artist's page and use one of their character drawings as your own, something that artists famously hate, means that you don't even want to have a better conceptualization of your character since the drawing would just be of someone else's character. Also, I do think that any drawing you make on your own would be infinitely more charming than any generic overly polished piece of art generative AI could spit out.
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i mean, it runs on laptops, its interesting to wrangle it with control nets to try to approach what you want, not art tho, more like visual shorthand builder
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