Nemelex t1_iwfqani wrote on November 15, 2022 at 8:09 AM

Reply to comment by TheForgottenHost in AI Drew This Gorgeous Comic Series, But You'd Never Know It by rpaul9578

I imagine similar things happened when tailors, hand-crafting shirts, saw great industrial machines fabricating enormous rolls of cotton all at once, to be cut and trimmed into simple shirts. Would you try to stay up 20 hours a day, frantically pricking at your fingers to desperately and futilely try to keep up with the massive capacity of industrial creation? No, of course not. You can't adapt to that degree of complexity and industry. But you can handknit custom shirts, you can make skirts and hats, you can do whatever you want with your shirts.

I can insist on the value of "the soul of cooking," but I would be a buffoon if I tried to outproduce advanced, complex food factories churning out thousands of gallons a soup a day. That doesn't take away from the value of the soup I make at home - it just means I'm not gonna bring down Campbell's with my handmade food.

The same is EXACTLY true for digital art. Are you shaking your fist at people who use Photoshop, draw perfectly straight lines and use complicated vectors and shaders and filters to encapsulate particular styles and ideas in mere seconds that would manually take hours to create? Of course not. It's just a different means of artistic creation. I'm sure medicine men were angry at legitimate doctors when they brought medicine and technology and used them to save lives instead of rely on the traditional medicine men, but that doesn't mean the advancement of technology is a bad thing. It's just something to adapt to.

Your enjoyment of the creation of art shouldn't go away because other people can make art faster. It sucks to feel scared about technology taking your job away, but if you want it to be your job then adapt to the technology and use it yourself, nothing is stopping you. Just don't try to outfabricate a factory line with nothing but your hands, your wits and your plucky spirit.

TheForgottenHost t1_iwitnyt wrote on November 15, 2022 at 11:10 PM

But that's the underlying problem with mechanization. It takes the personable aspects of the craft and feeds them through the machine. It's not your labor. It's just pointing in a direction and having the computer do all the work for you.

Who cares about their work more? The artisan who chipped away at every part of the toy horse for their store? Or the assembly line worker who spends all day every day making the same hindleg. One put more humanity into their work than the other by a long margin. You might say that the labor is taken out. But when you're competing with peers, in your own mechanized industry, how much of your art will you disassociate from to meet the deadline.

The time you put into the craft makes it.

As to your second point, of course, I'd spend hours even days laboring for my work. I and others love putting our souls, our wits, and our hurt, into our art. The act of doing as an artist is the end in itself. The fact that you would just brush it off as an example of people not 'getting with the times' just screams callousness on your part.

Also, how can you compare like art to medicine?? One is a subjective endeavor. The other is a scientific process that improves with time. Art hasn't improved with time. Its quality has always been defined by the work people put into it. Having photoshop tools is all and good, but without that crucible of dedication that so many have put themselves through, it just doesn't register the same.