After publishing the first version of my game (Dirty Cases) yesterday, I received some criticism related to the use of A.I. to 'improve' the overall artwork. Some liked the art and defended it. Others said that the old art was better and that the AI makes it uglier or a bit generic (and is this a problem in a market dominated by the same Honey Select/Koikatsu/DAZ 3D models? It is another point of discussion.)
Particularly, we on the team found the AI 'enhanced' versions to be prettier. And that some of these comments might be pure and simple luddism. Or not.
Here, I share the "before/after" of the arts for general appreciation and therefore ask for an honest opinion on the use of AI.
And I take the opportunity to open a general discussion about it here on the forum, since it is a subject in vogue in recent months.
I mean, I'm not trying to sound like an asshole (which I probably will), but anything that can be said about AI art/AI-assisted art has already been said and regurgitated a few times over at this point. I could go into the bevy of upcoming legal issues concerning AI art toppling the entire project, or the lack of copyright on your images leaving them vulnerable to being stolen, but I'd hope you were aware of that before making the decision. You've fundamentally changed every part of your characters, and are now AI-assisted, thus leaving them open to be taken for other use. Even worse, is that you can't call them stolen as you've stolen them yourself.
This smells like a mix of imposter syndrome and just being an outright copout. You don't like your art? Do as the millions of artists in every medium have done and put the work in to get better. Don't steal art from other people just because you don't like your own. The reality is that these aren't your drawings anymore. They're in a completely different style, one that you aren't able to achieve on your own. That, again, isn't art. It's outright theft, and again, a copout. The reason people are blasting your game/VN for being AI is because it's soulless, lacking in a character that can only be done (currently) by a human. If you can't respect your art enough to use it as is, then how can you expect players/users to respect AI art that isn't fundamentally yours in the same way?
But hey, that's just two pennies from some guy on the internet. And I'm pretty openly anti-AI art until the artists being stolen from get their due.
Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one and they stink.
Here's my load:
The art samples from the before column appear more genuine and intentional, and are unique for the artist.
The samples in the after column appear cookie-cutter, assimilated, bland, and generic.
The question that you, as a creator, must ask yourself is are you wanting your product to be more personal or more mass-produced in appeal? (i.e. steakhouse burger vs. McDonald's burger - sure, the latter is cheaper, easier to get, found anywhere, satisfies an urge, and very popular whereas the former is a delight, delicacy, a meal to savor, and is prepared with more care and better presentation)
If I were to choose which I prefer, it is the first column.
EDIT: PS -- Google Lens thinks the image in the lower right corner is that of
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-- in particular, matching it to this fan-art of the character:
Gotta say, it ain't that far off from believin'.
Setting aside all the real and imagined issues with AI art, IMO it's not really valid to call the examples on the right "retouched" "improved" or "enhanced". It's brand-new art, not unlike what you might get if you commissioned a human artist to create something "generic anime styled" based on your work.
I don't touch games with cringe anime art if I can help it, so I don't really see this as an improvement. Your original art might not be perfect, but at least it has some character. That shit on the right is just bland mush.
Different eyes/brows make them look like different characters:
Inconsistent artwork makes it look like they don't belong to the same game:
Honestly, I don't understand why you would trade the left art for the right one if you can draw it consistenly, even if it looks a bit more amauterish on the left at least it looks more unique and you will not run into inconsistency issues so often.
Particularly, we on the team found the AI 'enhanced' versions to be prettier. And that some of these comments might be pure and simple luddism. Or not.
Globally, there's a lack of constancy in the art style, but the originals aren't better on this side. There's three different drawing style in your panel ; only the first and fourth sharing the same.
First picture:
The original have a neutral facial expression, the AI retouched have a stern one and her left hand is totally messed.
Second picture:
The AI retouched version looks good, but the eyes should look at the target, not the viewer.
Third picture:
The AI retouched also looks good, but her left wrist is clearly broken, and have a double pinky.
Fourth picture:
Again, the AI retouched looks good, but the right hand (showing mid length of her right tight) is clearly messed.
In the end, the result isn't bad, but should have been retouched a last time.
It's not just a question of look, there's also an issue with the expression itself. Take the last row by example, left he's surprised, right he's happy.
We are at the cusp of a huge technological revolution. Like what the computer has done to society. And the internet after that. I'm a cynic by nature, but I'm convinced that we will see the singularity within our lifetime.
Machine learning is already a part of our daily lives, whether good or bad. Google, youtube, and virtually all
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across all sectors use some form of machine learning to process data.
Deep Learning is used to create sensors that can detect and identify objects. It's used to create translation programs. It's effective for basically any system that relies on classification.
Then there is Reinforced Learning which is used to create an AI that learns to achieve certain goal through trial and error. In 2017, AlphaZero only needed the rules of the game as the input, with the goal of winning. After 4 hours of playing against itself, it surpassed Stockfish 8 (which basically brute forces by analyzing a huge database of positions), the dominant chess engine at that time.
ChatGPT is making waves in the mainstream. The capabilities are absurd. It passed the
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It passed a
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And of course, it can hold absolutely convincing and meaningful conversations that passes the turning test easily.
What if the AI can create another AI and recursively improve itself? Isn't that basically what leads to the singularity? Actually, it already has been done, in a somewhat
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I'm fully convinced that a huge amount of sectors will become obsolete sooner rather than later. Anything to do with crunching numbers like finance. Anything to do with analyzing data. Even things like medicine and education will become largely automated. We are literally at the cusp of some sci-fi shit. Let's just hope it doesn't turn dystopian.
This kind of change is exciting yet scary. All those years you spend training and studying to do your job and have a place in society is being threatened by technology. But that's just how society progressed all this time. Farming phased out hunter gatherers. Cars phased out the horse and buggy. Factories became increasingly automated. Streaming services and online distributors are killing off block and mortar stores.
So finally, we arrive at the question of AI generated art. All this negativity is like contrarians fighting against the wave of progress. It's just another facet of human endeavor that's being emulated by AIs, and it won't be the last.
Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion open source and we're off to the races.
People like MissFortune fundamentally don't understand the concept of AI art. It's not "stealing" anything. It doesn't store the pictures in a database and use them in some type of collage. What it does is learn the particulars of the images during training by adding increasing levels of
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. It then learns to de-noise from scratch to arrive at a new image following further conditions set by the prompt and training. The data is a mathematical representation. It has information about the training in an abstract form and doesn't actually memorize the pictures. I don't see how that would violate copyright. In practice, this leads to the emulation of the art style that you want to train it on. Art style is not something you can copyright. And scraping the net for pictures to train is not philosophically different than an aspiring artist studying works by famous artists that they found uploaded on the net.
There are copyright issues that come with it, but that's because the law always lag behind tech. Notably, AI cannot hold copyright, so AI art is legally in the public domain. There is nothing preventing you from commercializing AI art as per the Stable Diffusion license, but I suppose you have no protection from others taking that art and using it for their own means. Of course, it's still subject to other facets of law like using someone's likeness and such. We will see how the law interprets the training process. There is a lawsuit already by some artists, and also a lawsuit about GitHub Copilot which is a coding AI trained on various copyrighted code on the net. Anyways, there are talks about an opt out process, but I'm not sure how that would work in practice if the AI is open source.
About the overwhelming comments about shitty anime-style and the art being "generic," That is basically entirely up to the training you want to give it. In practice, Stable Diffusion is pretty much like DAZ. You have a program that functions as a UI to interact with the AI (Automatic1111). Then you have databases of pre-trained models like
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and
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. Sounds familiar? The style is basically the model you use. And you can even specifically train it to use an actual "model" like a particular face. Buying a DAZ asset and playing around with posing is not very different from downloading a trained model and playing around with prompts or image to image. Why would you think one is more "creative" than another? You should be advocating for models built from scratch using blender or something as opposed to using DAZ if you take offense at AI art because it's "generic" or "lazy."
Let's see a couple reactions from well known artists.
It's a powerful tool. The anime style people bitch about is just one model that is trained with that style. You can do any number of things by making use of the various functionalities and training it with the things you want. The quality of the art, cohesiveness, and the integration into the story and gameplay is up to the person using the tool.
Other than the obvious problem with the hands being fucked up all the time (you could fix it with inpainting or manually), the biggest issue when it comes to porn games is creating a set of images that stay consistent throughout a series of pics (clothing, hair, etc.). Some examples above seem to achieve this in some fashion, but it's probably still quite hard to do. That said, we're talking 2D games which functions mostly with character sprites with occasional full CGs for the scenes. AI is perfect for creating sprites and you just have to worry about the 2-3 CGs used per scene to be consistent for that scene.
I can at least understand people like MissFotrune who have some ethical hate boner against the training process. It's not worse than outright piracy of assets by devs that's obviously going on everywhere on this site, but ok. What I can't understand at all is how someone can complain that AI art is generic, but at the same time consume all the generic DAZ and HS shit that makes up 90% of the games here.
The only valid complaint is the one about consistency, and that hurtle is probably gonna be overcome in the near future and arguably already possible to work around.
Tbh I won't argue against its ethical side since majority of scientific developments are far from anything ethical. I have similar opinions with desmosome but I am not as analytical as and if the world population were fully analytical, they wouldn't ban many genetically engineering projects in international contracts except countries like china etc. So I would also be mentally fine if there were AI bans etc. like MissFortune mentioned lol.
@CoyotteStudio my biggest advice for you is to not care every comment. Some people just enters new games topic to joke or randomly comment about something than they don't play your game at all. I also had some people commenting first days and now(months after) not even a single of them plays my game. Some people really don't like AI art , I guess its because of ethical reasons- which I am totally fine with it- or their pc have big resolution that they can see all the details that AI suck at and can't concentrate on game. Either way they are not your audience, you can't please everyone so continue what you are doing, care about for constructive criticism but don't care about the people who complains about the things you don't want to change.
I think I get what you mean by "enhance" to describe AI since I have been playing with various AI art thingy since they came out and it is really hard to get something poses other than sitting, and standing or weird sexual like poses, especially intentionally not randomly.
I don't know how people get some results purely from text2img but I also mainly use img2img and giving&drawing a base img is really time taking. I am sure many people think your original art took like 10min to draw since it is cartoonish but you guys original drawing has really nice lineart, so minimum it has stages like " draft art -) lineart -) base colors -) cellshading" which is pretty time consuming itself.
AI produces some amazing art and it really develops fast so even our current problems won't be there in a near future. I think your art is cute af but it is totally normal to like AI art more than your personal art, especially for game since you have to produce faster than normal art due to update dates.I also immigrated my game art to AI art, with next chapter it will be fully AI.
For example I draw a drawing for valentine day art thingy like this, and was planning to directly post it to patreon etc. (girl and heart pillow is drawn by be fully, the sheet is AI, I hate drawing sheets)
but for experimental reasons I uploaded it to SD and result is this.
with editing for correction and closeness of the game character and promos etc.
I was like WOW, diz is so beautiful. It turned my cartoon art to very very very beautiful renaissance like painting that I felt ashamed to post my drawn version lol. I post it just to motivate you. I think if you love your game and publish regularly instead of abandoning it, you will attract your crowd. Look people also say bad thing about honey select etc. but caribdis with his story, character style, humor is one of the most succesful adult vn maker. Don't be discouraged from the first day.
People like MissFortune fundamentally don't understand the concept of AI art. It's not "stealing" anything. It doesn't store the pictures in a database and use them in some type of collage.
You fundamentally don't understand the notion of property and copyright.
AI are trained through the illegal use of copyrighted content, without the consent of the rights owners, that aren't even warned that it happen. Then what the AI got as knowledge is monetized. This is a theft, and it is what MissFortune was talking about. There's people who struggle to do some art, don't achieve to live doing only this, and then comes some engineers good at Math, who decide that since it's on Internet they can do whatever they want with it, and use the result to earn a lot of money. Because, yes, they earn a lot of money, the free facade is just the promotion that you willingly do for them ; enough to get the attention of more investors, and a bit to attract the first paying customers.
Of course, it can seem hypocritical to have such speech on a piracy site. But there's a limit to everything, and personally it starts the instant you earn money with the hard, or not, work of others.
MissFortune was also addressing the other side of the problem: So far it's totally uncertain that the creation from an AI is your property, therefore you possibly own no rights over the arts of your game.
Tbh I won't argue against its ethical side since majority of scientific developments are far from anything ethical. I have similar opinions with desmosome but I am not as analytical as and if the world population were fully analytical, they wouldn't ban many genetically engineering projects in international contracts except countries like china etc. So I would also be mentally fine if there were AI bans etc. like MissFortune mentioned lol.
@CoyotteStudio my biggest advice for you is to not care every comment. Some people just enters new games topic to joke or randomly comment about something than they don't play your game at all. I also had some people commenting first days and now(months after) not even a single of them plays my game. Some people really don't like AI art , I guess its because of ethical reasons- which I am totally fine with it- or their pc have big resolution that they can see all the details that AI suck at and can't concentrate on game. Either way they are not your audience, you can't please everyone so continue what you are doing, care about for constructive criticism but don't care about the people who complains about the things you don't want to change.
I think I get what you mean by "enhance" to describe AI since I have been playing with various AI art thingy since they came out and it is really hard to get something poses other than sitting, and standing or weird sexual like poses, especially intentionally not randomly.
I don't know how people get some results purely from text2img but I also mainly use img2img and giving&drawing a base img is really time taking. I am sure many people think your original art took like 10min to draw since it is cartoonish but you guys original drawing has really nice lineart, so minimum it has stages like " draft art -) lineart -) base colors -) cellshading" which is pretty time consuming itself.
AI produces some amazing art and it really develops fast so even our current problems won't be there in a near future. I think your art is cute af but it is totally normal to like AI art more than your personal art, especially for game since you have to produce faster than normal art due to update dates.I also immigrated my game art to AI art, with next chapter it will be fully AI.
For example I draw a drawing for valentine day art thingy like this, and was planning to directly post it to patreon etc. (girl and heart pillow is drawn by be fully, the sheet is AI, I hate drawing sheets)
View attachment 2392748
but for experimental reasons I uploaded it to SD and result is this. View attachment 2392755
with editing for correction and closeness of the game character and promos etc. View attachment 2392754
I was like WOW, diz is so beautiful. It turned my cartoon art to very very very beautiful renaissance like painting that I felt ashamed to post my drawn version lol. I post it just to motivate you. I think if you love your game and publish regularly instead of abandoning it, you will attract your crowd. Look people also say bad thing about honey select etc. but caribdis with his story, character style, humor is one of the most succesful adult vn maker. Don't be discouraged from the first day.
Many thanks for the kind words. What I have to say - and I'm being completely honest here - is that I prefer your original artwork too. I find it more unique and more fapable, even though the AI output is impressive.
I think we tend to like AI art more than our own art because it's able to technically do things that we can't do. But technical complexity doesn't always mean better art, does it?
Of course, it may not be a universal truth, but perhaps the originality of the art tends to be more and more important from now on.
You're right, I can't let the negative comments get to me. But I'm seriously considering going back to the original art style - it won't be too much work since it's already done.
Good luck on your project! I make your words mine.
Furthermore, the heated discussions about copyright in an artist-hated piracy forum, where 90% of games use stolen assets, is a delicious irony (and this is not a criticism, I think it's a very pertinent discussion and I think the points raised are great)
I think we tend to like AI art more than our own art because it's able to technically do things that we can't do. But technical complexity doesn't always mean better art, does it?
