AI/LLMs AI art bans are going to ruin small 3rd party creators

[Morrus]

This is such a strange definition. Isn't the act of creating the work literally being creative?

When I write a story, I come up with an idea. And then I work through various drafts to refine the idea. I'm being actively creative by... creating my story. I'm being creative by trying out different ways of phrasing. By writing and rewriting. By listening to myself read it out loud and refining the rhythm. By editing. Those things are work, yes, but they also require a tremendous amount of creativity.

No, no, ordering a meal is cooking, remember! Chefs are just automatons who mindlessly process your genius cooking. At least, I think that's what I've been told repeatedly in this thread... I don't even know why they get paid. The restaurants should be paying us for cooking our own meals!

 

[BookTenTiger]

No, no, ordering a meal is cooking, remember! Chefs are just automatons who mindlessly process your genius cooking. At least, I think that's what I've been told repeatedly in this thread... I don't even know why they get paid. The restaurants should be paying us for cooking our own meals!

Oh yes, I forgot! I'll be right back, I need to go bake a cake by purchasing it from a store. Don't worry, I called and told the baker what kind of cake I wanted so I obviously created it myself.

 

[bsss]

I can't run 60 m.p.h along the highway, so I ask the car to do all the work for me instead. I just fill it with gas and tell it where to go.
I can't tabulate and analyze 15,000 complex data records, so I ask the computer to do all the work for me instead. I just input the initial data (or maybe someone else does).
I can't accurately remember every detail of what I'm looking at in a given moment, so I ask the camera to do all the work for me instead. I just point and shoot.
I can't lift a 30-foot metal I-beam 75 feet into the air, so I ask the crane to do all the work for me instead. I just tell the crane what to do.
I can't draw.......

Thanks, I will remember this for the next time I want to know about things that aren't analogies for what I'm talking about.

 

[bsss]

Oh yes, I forgot! I'll be right back, I need to go bake a cake by purchasing it from a store. Don't worry, I called and told the baker what kind of cake I wanted so I obviously created it myself.

Whoa, you made your own telecommunications network?

 

[BookTenTiger]

Whoa, you made your own telecommunications network?

I can't speak loud enough for the baker to hear me from my house so I stole someone's phone and made the call. But that's okay because it's cheaper than buying a phone. Now it's my phone.

 

[Morrus]

Whoa, you made your own telecommunications network?

He invented the telephone!

 

[BookTenTiger]

He invented the telephone!

This is a nice site you have here, Morrus. I might have to have created it myself...

 

[Lanefan]

This is such a strange definition. Isn't the act of creating the work literally being creative?

When I write a story, I come up with an idea. And then I work through various drafts to refine the idea. I'm being actively creative by... creating my story. I'm being creative by trying out different ways of phrasing. By writing and rewriting. By listening to myself read it out loud and refining the rhythm. By editing. Those things are work, yes, but they also require a tremendous amount of creativity.

This may come in part - maybe large part - from different methods of working.

Me, I want whatever I'm creating to be as nailed down in my head as I can get it before even starting the serious production work, because that production work is something I only want to have to do, at most, once. If what I produce is bad enough that it needs a rewrite (beyond simple typos and obvious errors), that means I haven't got it right in the first place and am most likely not going to, so scrap it.

I've been booting an idea around in my head for a few years now for a novel. I won't start writing any of it down, though, until I can see the finished plot and nearly all the key moments in my head; and if I can't get it to that point, it ain't getting written.

 

[Maxperson]

There have been multiple times in my life when I've wanted to see a physical reference image for something I can picture in my head, and I've found a perfect match by conducting iterative Google image searches using carefully-worded search terms. Not just, "That image I found is good enough," but, "That image I found is exactly what I was picturing in my head!" (If your wondering how that's possible, it usually happens when I'm imagining how something I read in a book would look, and I discover a visual artist who read the same book and pictured it exactly the same way I did.)

Maybe I'm just more detailed than you are with what I envision, or I'm much harder to please, because I've never seen a picture that perfectly matched my vision of anything.

I'd never say my ability to extract the exact image I'm looking for from a repository of existing image data constitutes me creating that image. I was being creative in my use of search terms and in the curation I performed, but my search terms didn't create the image I curated. (Compare to a photographer, who creates a 2D-image that didn't previously exist in that form anywhere in the world.) All the data points needed to display the exact image on my screen were already present in the data set I was querying before I started entering any search terms into my browser.

Cool. I'd never say that, either. Nothing I'm discussing here is about taking an image given to me by the AI and saying I created anything. Not one word.

Likewise, I wouldn't claim to be the sole creator of an image I spliced together from several existing images I retrieved from the internet. At most, I did some creative editing of other artists' work in doing so. I wouldn't want to distribute the composite image I cobbled together from their work without getting all necessary permissions from those other contributing artists. I can't rightfully claim to have created all the visuals appearing in that image.

Ditto. I'm not saying that, either.

 

[Mecheon]

Sure, I could make something. Something not worth looking at ever again.

All the best artists have a whole heap of attempts and tries in the past we never saw. The first attempt won't be the best

That's just it, though: I want the image on the page to be just as "crash hot" (love that term!) as the image in my head. I don't want stick figures, I want somethng far more elaborate and 'finished'.

Find something that works for you. I can't draw for anything, but I can make Minecraft skins (I still need to go back and finish a loxodon, because for inexplicable reasons the one D&D origins based Minecraft mod has loxodon), and even among published things, you can find traces of other stuff. The video game Terraria infamously is based on Final Fantasy 5's artstyle and sprites. Heck, those pixel artwork things you find in stores sometimes are blatantly based on Megaman sprite artwork

Push comes to shove you can look at how the Super Mario Maker team did the sprites for that game, best seen with the costume Mario packs. 16x16 is a small enough pixel size and good for experimenting with. Case in point: