This week's poll was suggested by Afiaki. How do you feel about AI generated art? Obviously there's a lot of potential nuance, but gotta boil it down to a short, easy poll.

You can submit poll ideas here https://www.mangaupdates.com/topic/kilkdnn/site-manga-poll-suggestions

Previous Poll Results:

Question: Which UI theme do you generally prefer?

Choices:

• Light mode - votes: 516 (18.4%)
• Dark mode - votes: 2287 (81.6%)

There were 2803 total votes. The poll ended: November 16th, 2024 8:38am PST

Well, good thing we're thinking about creating a dark mode

A just ruler amongst tyrants

Just a little is OK. Backgrounds are from filtered photos for a very long time already. But if "artist" will use AI for everything, then I don't need him. I will just feed any lightnovel to AI and get manga.

My issue with ai art isn't the final product, but more of the fact that the training basically steals art and says that the rehashed images are something new to be used as a final product.

If the ai art was trained on just stock photos or paid licenced pieces, it wouldn't matter so much as long as it fits the use case, be it as is or with human touch ups.

This may sound rude, but i don't care at this point.

Is AI stealing? yes. Are people profiting using AI? yes. Is it lazy? yes.

But I don't want to have to look at small details just to figure out is it AI or not. It is annoying to see people trow fits because someone used AI or they think someone used AI. If you don't like AI art, block/report "artist" and move on!

I'm just so so so tired of it!

Honestly I don't know, this is a tough question. I can say that I don't care for AI generated art unless I generate it myself for some reason (like using it as a portrait for a roleplaying game).

Acceptable if used as inspiration or reference and that´s about it. You can´t copyright AI work so Skynet isn´t taking over this sector any time soon. It got a bunch of established comic artists fired instead. Will AI be used to write "formulaic content" such as telenovelas, family sitcoms, kids TV or side questions in video games? It most likely already is.

I have used ChatGpt at work to "write" press releases but I heavily edit what comes out the other end. We had a discussion at a library manager conference last month about AI and whether we use it for work. A bit less than 10 out of the about 40 people raised a hand. Formatting letters and getting rid of nonsense busywork is of course not the same as trying to be the next Toriyama. Learn how to draw first. The moment you give away your actual work output to a machine is the moment you are 100% replaceable from the point of an employer. Algorithms have been used since the 90s for CG water simulations, to generate landmasses in videogames and so on but giving any Joe Shmoe a barely functional AI toy has proven to be a disaster so far.

Final tough: I have a Bachelor's in essentially research and Large Language Models are utterly terrible at it. Make sure to use AI sparingly in such cases and double-check the results in all cases.

Edit: I just saw that Araki called AI art a "social evil" this month: https://x.com/jojo_wiki/status/1857903571573919813

I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

AI is just another tool, like many other tools in photoshop... Using 100% AI generated stuff is no good... But if it is human doing guiding and touching up, I don't see much difference from using photoshop filter...

My way bigger concern with AI is not usage of it, but the fact that they use art for training without paying royalties to the artists who drew the art that was used for training, now that is scummy...

I am envoy from nowhere in nowhere. Nobody and nothing have sent me. And though it is impossible I exist. © Trimutius

I'm pretty neutral on AI art when it's just used for fun and personal entertainment, like when people who don't have very good art skills themselves trace art or copy poses and the like, but if it's used in a professional context, either being passed off as original art or used in any way to make a profit, I view it like plagiarism. I also think it's important that if AI art was used, you should have to say so.

The same goes for AI music (which I guess you could call a kind of AI art, just a different art form). It's been popping up in my spotify discover weekly and release radar a lot recently, and it's infuriating, I want it gone. I don't care if people make these songs for fun on youtube and whatever, but I don't think they should be making any profit from them, and even worse a lot of them aren't transparent about them being AI artists (even though it's obvious listening to the song or reading their terrible made up bios). I personally don't want to see them, I wish there was a toggle to completely scrub all AI music from my feed so I wouldn't have to manually block them when I come across them.

TL;DR, I think it's fine as a toy, but not in any professional or money making capacity.

Omg i had thought about this previously but as i was writing my pov i realised this topic is so much more nuanced (and had to delete everything i wrote).

Like am i okay if my friends share their photos on social about traveling the world but its all fake AI made?(no).

Am i okay with seeing advertisements made with AI(maybe?)(and if yes will this spiral into dystopia like blade runner 2049 and what are my thoughts in this situation). Am i okay if world becomes like what I saw in pluto(anime)?(idk)

Am i okay with seeing a AI generated backgroung in a scene anime or movie?(yes but what if there is lot of complexity in bg and at that point would it even matter if other than bg some non main characters are also AI made or the whole stuff is AI made if it is really good. Hard to draw a line here.).

I can't just answer yes or no or some percentage of AI influence in a work. These answers can only be given on case by case basis or categories. For now Im confused and I will continue to think about it as AI progresses even further.

I wouldn't even call it art to begin with if it's made by AI...

Painters have been using photos as reference since almost the invention of the camera. Its a real pain to go out and do a landscape if its raining, or maybe you have limited time and you can't make several trips to a location to finish the work. Then there is portrait painting. Not everybody can sit for several sessions to get their portrait done. After an initial visit having photos to refer back to can speed up the process. In short I think AI is acceptable if used as inspiration or reference. It can be the starting point to generate ideas, not the final destination.

At first I thought this meant, "Do you accept ai art as art?", but then after voting I thought maybe it means in manga.., so probably picked top option by mistake.

LLM generated stuff does not usually look good. It'd probably suck if we had mangaka replaced with generated stuff. It depends on how it is trained, if the quality has degraded to the point it looks meshed in puzzle pieces.

It's pretty hard to take a general stance on this. Ugly art is art, art that is not appreciated by many is art, but does art require a human intent? LLM are not intelligent, but the way we learn has some parallels.

Saying "let the market decide" would be the easy way, but if companies start pumping it out cheaply then it could undercut already poorly paid mangaka. I think most people will opt for non-ai stuff, at least in its current form.

Quote from residentgrigo

Acceptable if used as inspiration or reference and that´s about it. You can´t copyright AI work so Skynet isn´t taking over this sector any time soon.

There is a slight work around on that, you can not copyright something that was generated solely by ai, but if you incorporate it into something then you can. I am not sure on the proportions, but some relevant case law might emerge later on.

I like your take though, true stuff. I'd not be able to trust code it generated to actually work, it's nice for a general framework, or something like checking your grammar though.

As inspiration or reference, that's fine. Even as a game or just screwing around.

In every other instance, it's not acceptable. That's my opinion, at least.

I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

I produce a newsletter and articles for my work, and it’s useful as a replacement for stock images, especially for generating more diverse images. I don’t really view it as art though, it’s just the product of a tool. Someone who generates AI images is not an ‘artist’.