Technology

I'm afraid to say I did too and it wasn't until I saw his time-lapse that I was fully convinced. I think it's the soft, studio ghibli like style. One of the chat GPT models was spruiking it a year or so ago or and everybody was posting 'Ghiblified' profile pics so now it's kind of synonymous with low effort AI art (which is such a shame).

He's been doing this same art style for many years, certainly before LLMs were launched.

His Pepper & Carrot series started in 2014, all freely released under a Creative Commons license, by the way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%26Carrot

The same happens to people who write a lot and pay attention to their style, such as this gentleman. The way LLMs generate text is strongly influenced by what used to be considered a high-effort eloquent style. Varied sentence lengths, triplets, typographically correct punctuation, yada yada yada. Until recently, that stuff used to be the hallmark of professional writers (and Kenyans, apparently).

What were LLMs trained on? Professional writing, first and foremost. Books, scientific papers, op-eds, blog posts. So by default they take a polite, professional tone with all the flourishes and best practices that previously used to be de rigueur for authors and the like. So now what happens when someone used to "proper" writing writes something?

Everyone thinks it's AI slop because that's how LLMs talk. High effort now looks like low effort. And because tech bros immediately went on to develop "humanizing" tech, any other style will soon also look like low effort. And the same is true for art: Being able to produce highly detailed pictures with spectacular colors and shadows went from something impressive to evidence that you're just a random jackass with a ChatGPT subscription.

You can't really win anymore. Anything short of a live performance or a feature-length movie could feasibly have been generated by a fully automated content mill. That really sucks if you want to engage in creative expression of any kind and doubly so if you once thought you could make a living off of that.

I had someone ask me recently if a picture of Thomas Aquinas was AI-generated. It was a 15th-century painting.

Which is the goal. Low trust societies are easier (initially) to control

Pro tip: when copying a link to a Lemmy/Piefed/Kbin/etc post, please make sure you use your instance's option to copy the link to the post on its original instance (the instance the post was made on), rather than simply copying the link to the post on your instance out of your URL bar. On your instance's web interface, that option is in the More drop down next to the Boost button, just below the post title. (On a Lemmy instance, the link to the original post is the Fediverse icon right next to the upvote and downvote buttons, and you can right click and Copy Link from there).

Obviously, when you open a post in the browser on an instance that isn't yours by clicking a link (for example, this link to this same post on my instance), you can't interact with it, because you aren't logged in, because you don't have an account on that instance. To interact with it, you need to open the same post through your own instance.

If you have a link to a post on the instance it was created on, you can simply paste that URL (the whole thing) into your instance's search bar to open it on there, so you can vote/comment/etc. Some mobile apps can even do this automatically. However, this doesn't work if you paste a link to a post through an instance other than the instance it was created on. In order to interact with the post you just linked to, people have to click the link to open the post on your instance, then click the button on there to copy the original link, before pasting it into their own instance. It's polite not to make them go through that extra work.

Judging by your account age, it seems you're new to Lemmy, so you probably didn't know that. Just something to keep in mind for future. :)

I get it though, the state of everything right now really really sucks. When I enjoy content that I later find to be AI generated, I feel like I've been deceived or manipulated and it has me doubting the authenticity of pretty much everything to avoid feeling that way.

I don't know what the solution would be to it at this point either

It will always be an arms race. If someone develops a new style that doesn't look like AI, then it's only a matter of time before an AI model can generate that style.

And the future I see for this arms race is eventually it will be better than humans at producing art that doesn't look like AI.

I'm at the point where I think AI generated shit should be judged on its own merit rather than for whether or not it's AI because eventually we won't be able to tell from other factors and any attempts will end up hurting humans more than the AIs (because they have no feelings to be hurt and will just continue while some portion of the humans will get discouraged and stop bothering to try).

Plus, at least with programming, saying code sucks because it's AI generated is weak. If a code submission is shit, there will be technical reasons that it is shit that have nothing to do with who (or what) wrote it.

artists will start to create things that deliberately do not look “like they’re AI”.

Arguably though this is how new art styles are often created. What is the current safe, trendy art gets challenged. Andy Worhol painted a grid of Campbell's tomato soup cans which is considered an important piece of American Modern Art. I'm certainly not saying "an upside to AI is that it will force artists to be more creative" anything, moreso that as you said, a pattern of artists rebelling against the norm is a historical cycle rather than something new AI will bring on.

Not only are his comics CC, his entire artistic workflow is built on FOSS. His art tablet runs Linux, he uses Krita for digital painting, his fonts and brushes are FOSS too, and he provides them free of charge for anybody to download.

He also provides free tutorials and guides on his setup and workflow, and advice one how to start using FOSS as a professional artist.

His comic is open source. Might seem like a moot point seeing as how most comics can be seen on the web for free but it lets people use it for other stuff. From what I understand, a few of his comics have been turned into short animations and things like that. Kind of cool tbh.

I think it's in reference to