When online commenters detect my art as AI | Hacker News Reader

When online commenters detect my art as AI

davidrevoy.com

117 pointsJare69 comments

I see the resemblance to what AI generates, and wow some of those works are painfully detailed. I don’t think it’s just training.

His work I is what I would describe as somewhat middle of the road Fantasy / SciFi Pop art. The deviant art of old, or even before, the art that would cover the scifi magazine. It’s an amalgam of styles and interests from the nerdy spectrum, obviously done with great care by the artist. Problem is with middle of the road is that that’s where the LLM averages out. Not flaming the artist at all, these are lovely works, but an average of lots of pop art / interests. I don’t think he will lose his livelihood - art by commission will stay a thing. For poster and promo work, that’s gone probably.

> Not flaming the artist at all, these are lovely works

With respect, you totally are. Call it what it is - your honest criticism/opinion. Calling their work “middle of the road” and then saying they can’t get certain jobs then trying to pretend you’re being nice is just dishonest.

No, no, you misunderstand my intentions. Say there is art in “pop music” (I think there is, as is in classical music or rock; even in 00s or 10s pop). So there is a pinnacle of art.

But if that pinnacle lies on the average of a lot of types of (pop and non pop) music the LLM might give a sound that at first glance sounds like a specific artist.

The Backstreet Boys (and One Direction as well) were pretty good (lol) but any average of boybands will sound like them. That is not a digg on their artistry but on them being the middle of the road in pop.

AI classical will sound romantic? AI rock will sound Three Doors Down? AI art will be deviant like (but there still can be true artistry in that category). That /I/ usually like arts at least a standard deviation away of the middle, is just my snobbery, which I was trying to explain away because in my opinion artistry is in the craftsmanship (not taste of the public).

Show me an AI-generated work comparable to one of his.

It probably won't look as good if you truly inspect it, but AI can certainly mimic the style.

Sure, but it’s analogous to AI generating a lot of code and a fancy presentation for a product that doesn’t actually work. You can do a lot with that, impress VCs and win stupid hackathons, but the market and need for quality is still there.

This was true 2 years ago but LLMs can now absolutely create production ready programs from end to end, including hosting if you give it the access.

Again, give me an example

I used replit (no affiliation) and it can definitely do this for more basis use cases (simple crud app, login, etc.)

Bitchat, MenuGen, fly.Pieter.com and lots of stuff posted here every day

Assembling all of those comments seems like a lot of work to me.

This must be so disheartening. To take the time to create something complex and wonderful only to have a bunch of drive-by yahoos shout "LOL! AI!" out the car window.

Creative work is now so devalued the instinct when most people see something is to believe that nobody put the work in and it was generated, because that's suddenly the overwhelming majority of "art" we are seeing. It's horrifying.

They’re not “drive-by yahoos”, they’re people who appreciate art, and they are necessarily and justifiably skeptical. They’re doing nothing wrong. In another world, many of them would be dedicated fans of the artist.

In this world, however, AI companies have been permitted to cause this massive tragedy of the commons, and they are the ones we should reserve our epithets for.

I think if you have that many false positives, you're doing something wrong, no matter whose fault you claim it is.

I have plenty of epithets for people who accuse others of lying based on vibes alone. It is not necessary or justifiable.

I tend to judge false accusations (when done negligently or maliciously) as harshly as whatever the accusations are of. Falsely claiming somebody is a liar is as bad as lying. Claiming they're racist, as bad as racism. Cheater, fascist, abuser, and so on.

It’s the internet. Whenever there’s a new category of accusation/put-down, there’s soon a thousandfold more “drive-by yahoos” throwing it around without actually understanding it, and definitely not caring about false positives or accuracy/precision in general; the appeal appears to be in the very act of flinging shit, and any pretense will do. Monkey behavior.

That's not being skeptical. It's being cynical. Skepticism is a positive trait. Cynicism isn't and this hurtful mislabeling w/o any gain over skepticism is exactly why it isn't

Incorrect. This is no better than people who claim writing is AI just because the author uses emdashes

In both cases people are using the heuristics they have to deal with the onslaught of slop, nothing wrong with that.

The error rate is what’s wrong. A heuristic which has a high false positive rate is worse than nothing because it trains people to ignore all reports.

It doesn't have a high false positive rate.

I’ve yet to see it claimed here not in error. AI writing has other tells which are far more reliable, use them.

Emdashes as the sole signal is just wrongheaded. Read a piece (a least a little bit of it) to determine if it is slop before calling it AI-slop. Slop is slop but you have to digest at least some of it before the determination can be made.

I sometimes use the Pangram extension for Firefox.

Human slop, as I like to call it, since so many anti-AI protestors unintelligently use the phrase "AI slop".

But that's the entire purpose of AI: bring the value of the work of others down so that those at the top lessen the dependence of the economy on the masses. Of course, this will in turn eventually slow down the economy but if AI can take care of the majority of the needs of the rich, why do they need us?

David Revoy isn't a random artist on social media. He's a featured artist on Krita and creator of various Krita brush packs and tutorials.

None of these accusers seem to have done the bare minimum of Googling the artist's name before starting making accusations. I don't know if it's laziness or just lack of tech literacy that pervades the modern world, but it's very sad to see it.

Don't let it get to you. They are all saying things without thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

It's called reputation.

Do you think people just spawn out of nowhere the instant you interact with them or did they have a life before you met them?

I take it you dont listen to your doctors.

And he art directed on Sintel, which you couldn't get away from anywhere there was any discussion of Blender, being one of the largest scale productions in Blender during that era.

I remember seeing his Yin and Yang piece especially trending on deviantart maybe 2010 to 2012, he was really well known and no doubt his was among the material scraped for training models.

This sort of thing is older than generative AI. For the last couple of decades it has been impossible to share an interesting photograph without someone claiming that it was Photoshopped.

I can tell from some of the pixels, and from seeing quite a few 'shops in my time.

That's what people say - that they can tell if something has been 'shopped. And maybe they can with particularly clumsy manipulation. But the fact is just with as with people claiming something is AI, they often claim that something is Photoshopped which is later shown to be true.

https://xkcd.com/331/

That's been going on a lot longer than photoshop and digital photography.

It probably looks like AI art because they were trained on his work

I have never seen an open source comic before, publishing the full res Krita files and all.

Mad respect for that. I've donated a couple of bucks.

It could eventually be the case that providing the full speedpaint for a given digital artwork significantly bolsters credibility in the minds of audiences who universally reject AI-generated content as cheap, spiritually enfeebling, and provided largely for commercial motivation. Such a thing can serve as an informal certificate for an art's "human-ness". This approach wouldn't necessarily serve as strict validation that something was not produced by AI, but it would serve as additional evidence that the creative work in question had demanded frequent or exclusive human involvement.

Ironically that would be useful data for AI labs to take. It could be used productively to make digital art training material or nefariously to make models to displace those artists.

It is clearly not AI art when you look closely, the problem is on some of them you have to look closely.

The worst to my eye is the Alice in Wonderland one. What's going on with Alice's hair? What's the tea on the left being poured into? What kind of playing card has a 'C' (it can't be a messy Q as the figure on it is male) and why is there only half a heart there? What's with club on the jack next to it? What exactly is that black bird doing? (It's been a long time since I've read the books, what bird is that anyway?) How does the flamingo's body work? Is Alice sitting on it? Why are there buttons on both sides of the White Rabbit's coat, and why is it shaped differently on the left and right?

Well spotted, thanks.

> … why is there only half a heart there? …

https://www.peppercarrot.com/gd/viewer/misc__2010-07-21_Alic...

C is coeur (French).

The adjacent Jack of Clubs has only part of the trèfle icon.

Comparable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French-suited_playing_cards#/m...

i've been thinking about this a lot. working on a longer form piece on this idea:

i find it's actually easier to "discover" than it is to "create" using llms. discovery, especially in math, is mostly a question of throwing compute at a problem and trying different results. there's a verifiable answer at the end. but there's no way (afaik) to aim something you're training via RL at a creative problem and say "make the next lord of the rings". taste literally changes by the day, and so much of what makes art matter depends on cultural significance you can't specify in advance. if you were training a music model in 1915, it would never come up with rock and roll. it's so hard to know what's going to resonate. van gogh was making his work for essentially nobody and now it's worth millions. you can't pre-load a success criteria for that

i think this is important to call out in a world that seems to devalue creative work now. people think llm generated "artifacts" are creative but in reality it's garbage and based on pattern recognition

To be honest it does feel AI generated for me. Most likely because AI was trained on such art styles. Props to the artist though.

99.99% of people have zero artistic skill.

Those same people feel that they can detect AI-generated works?

Those same people have the audacity to spread their uninformed opinions online?

Those same people are spreading their harmful opinionated content online, actually causing real harm to real artists.

This proves the old adage that opinions are like assholes, everybody has one and they stink.

I've been following David Revoy for years and purchased his Pepper & Carrot books, long before machine learning and large language models got into the hands of unskilled people. He is right to complain.

It's like people who order a diet coke with sushi and feel entitled to drop a 2/5 review on Yelp because they had a stomach ache.

Some people really shouldn't have a voice.

Enjoy their art b clicking the link in the first paragraph.

Watch a time lapse illustration video here: https://www.peppercarrot.com/0_sources/miniFantasyTheater/ma...

This is the problem with the genAI image hysteria. As the models improve, it becomes a fake outrage, since the ability to distinguish human creations from AI becomes impossible.

Besides the actual topic. The portfolio is fantastic! I particularly liked the yin and yang of world hunger. https://www.davidrevoy.com/article43/yin-and-yang-of-world-h.... I mean not something I want to look at on a wall for too long but it draws on my enjoyment of dark comic book illustrations while also pointing to something topical

I found the person made of dynamite sticks who was trying to light a match in the rain to generate a mental tickle.

Pre-AI I worked on a lot of (niche) open source; I've had several jaw-dropping moments when a friend or employee would tell me we should stop working on X because we're just making a copy of Y which is trending on some part of Twitter.

I was very surprised, so I'd look up Y and find it was just someone charging for a product based on my code. And people in the community would accuse me of stealing.

I've seen this scenario play out with several of my friends too.

This isn't a new phenomenon, AI just makes for a more efficient laundry. Nobody cares, and nobody does their research. The tech industry is full of psychopaths glad to piggy back on your work and find loopholes to get away with it.

It's one of the reasons I'm not so keen on open source anymore. I'm glad to do free work, but being accused of theft while people make money off it is not a great reward. Probably a lot of creatives are feeling the same right now.

I encountered some of his art a while back, and I too thought it might be AI, or in some way AI-assisted. The main thing that convinced me otherwise was his extensive "pre-AI" portfolio. I feel bad for anyone who doesn't have that!

Even if some work has been partially or entirely created by AI the complaints have become tedious.

> … the complaints have become tedious.

True, almost without exception. In some situations I instablock complainers.

Internet commentators are dumbasses. Nothing new here.

Point and laugh at them, and move on. They don’t matter, they’re idiots.

Source: I’m a dumbass.

I do AI assisted images for fun and browsing their art I can't see any tell of AI or even tracing on AI; people became paranoid and jump to conclusion without any substance and I find it sad that people who put a lot of time and effort into their craft are getting knee jerks comments like this.

> people became paranoid and jump to conclusion without any substance

Before AI, the only question was who made a particular artwork. Human-created practically a certainty.

When AI-generated art was new, it was all exiting & the process described to boast about AI capabilities or the skills of people deploying AI. But human-created still the default assumption.

Now, AI-generated <anything> is everywhere, and that default assumption of "human-created" is often questioned.

The natural next step is "AI-generated" as default assumption, unless claimed / shown (or even proven) otherwise.

Imho: assumption is the root of all evil. Investigate! Or take an author's word for it unless they're shown to be a liar. But as another commenter noted, it's a kind of tragedy of the commons. Methods to prove you as a human created <artwork> will be a thing.

His art does not look like AI at all to me. Maybe I have good AI-dar.

Cool art, I could totally imagine a Dixit deck with your stuff

Note that most of the complaints are his art looks like AI art. That's very different from it being AI-generated.

Yes and looking at his portfolio I can see where those commenters are coming from. It's a kind of style for which tons of actually AI slop gets spammed in various places.

is not "very" different. to me, many of these read as hedged insinuations

Creative content authors need to move up the ladder. Use AI fully and apply your talent to make it even better. No need to get recognition for your non-AI organic content.

When a machine weaves fabric, no point in sticking to handloom and sell it as handicraft. Use powerloom and add your artistry on top of it.

if your sole goal in life is the relentless pursuit of as much cash as you can possibly grab a hold of on your short time on this planet, then you are right.

If you have a soul and aren't an awful creature that sees the world as a series of zero sum interactions, other concerns play into this. Things like you actually enjoy the work or you feel proud of making the piece or you care that every last detail is as perfect as you are able to make it.

Now I won't say that it's never right to use AI (goodness knows I do). But its totally wrong to suggest there is "no point" in ever doing things a different way from the cheapest possible technology

This is myopic “Silicon Valley” rhetoric and lacks understanding of art or why it’s appreciated.

We have video cameras and movies, yet stage actors on Broadway are celebrated like movie stars. People still read books. We have cameras and photoshop, yet a huge market still exists for oil on canvas. We have synthesizers, drum kits, and all the tools we need to make music on a computer, yet live concerts with guitars and drums sell millions of tickets annually. We have the technology to deliver payloads on another continent with millimeter precision, yet every few years, the whole world gathers to watch people who have trained a lifetime to run, jump, and throw stones.

“The old way is dead” doesn’t hold up in the arts like it does in the sciences. Technology moves on, but humans are the same. You can inspire and awe us today using the same tools and methods that were used hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Every art form you've mentioned still had to be created by a human. The only difference was how. Was it oil on canvas or stylus on Wacom? Was it film or digital? Is the synthesizer analog, digital or a VST plugin, and does it really matter as long as someone is still playing the keyboard with his own two hands?

AI has removed the human element entirely. This is a paradigm shift, and there's more merit in bemoaning using AI to wholesale generate a "photo" than there ever was in a film photographer bemoaning digital.

Please understand that when you think of artists as "creative content authors" you are already off-base so any argument you make based on that is going to be incredibly wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com