This is ai generated. Is that the joke?
I’ve been an illustrator and writer for over 25 years. This is a cartoon community, not a pro-AI vs anti-AI battleground.
Then illustrate.
I do. Made my living as a professional artist and writer for over 25 years. I also do the Ashtray Gospel comix in this comm.
You illustrated this?
Yep. I let the ai interwebbal jesus christ superstar machine redraw it and smear my kid scribbles over the top, throw in the wobble and grime for me, because I’m old now and I don’t have the patience to sweat every crooked line like I used to.
I came up w the joke, idea, the concept and characters (Tasha and Larry, from stories I’ve been writing since I was in my 30’s).
I don’t use tablet to draw tho; I still grind away with a charcoal pencil, an overstuffed pen-and-ink anime set I grabbed from Michaels for $7.99, scratching it all onto watercolor sketch paper while Red Dwarf rattles on the TV in the background. Then take pic w my phone, ai-dazzle it up, then I take into GIMP (cuz fuck photoshop subscription model!). Text is Comic Relief Bold, 18 point. Linux Mint version. That’s the setup. That’s the whole operation.
I also won my local high school art contest about forty years ago. Big moment, brah. My name in the hometown paper. That clipping’s framed now and hanging on my home office wall alongside other awards and assorted bullshit from a career of doing this stuff. Most of it came from working at the same local marketing and PR firm for 27 years. I designed art for ads and way too many damn local business TV commercials. You know the ones. Carpet cleaners. Roof tile repair. Some cutesy annoying cartoon plumber unclogging a toilet while dancing, because of course he is.
They’re all hanging on a wall decorated with fake brick panels I bought off Temu for six bucks. They don’t line up. The print’s bad. Totally not worth six dollars. But they’re still up there, because I paid for them, and that’s how most things in my life end up staying.
Want more of my life minutiae in full glorious detail? Cuz, I got a can of Mountain Lightning sweating next to my beans and toast, so buddy, the night’s wide open. Plenty of time left to loiter on Lemmy, poke at the keys, and defend my work like it matters to people who already decided it doesn’t.
Gee, I wonder what my next comic panel will be about? I wonder if it will be about a Lemmy guy who questions if everything single thing he sees is AI. Hmmm… I wonder…
I would love to see your kid scribbles or your charcoal drawings! I didn’t like CustardFist’s rough style at first, but their art has really grown on me and their jokes have become a lot tighter. It’s always nice to find an artist I’ve never seen doing something unorthodox.
The AI takes the personal touch out of the art. It’s not your work I’m criticizing, it’s what the AI did to it. Dazzling it down. That’s just my criticism on AI use.
Though, I will say as criticism untied to my opinions: if the message of the comic is critical on AI reliance, then using AI illustration muddles that a bit. I think the original comment in this thread is just asking about the joke, not trying to hate.
I’m old, so I can speak like a wizard, even tho I look more like a troll. But AI is just a tool. A hammer. A match. I liked what it helped me make, and that’s enough for me. You don’t have to like it. That’s your right. But you don’t have to understand it either. It isn’t yours. It’s mine. Like a child is mine. Not harsh. Just true.
It’s like painting a room. You choose the color. You imagine the light on the walls. You want the place to feel a certain way when you walk in at night. Maybe you use a brush. Maybe you use a sprayer and you’re done in forty five minutes instead of three long days. Someone can argue about the method all they want. But the room still glows the way you wanted it to. You’re the one who made the choice. The method doesn’t erase the vision. The room wouldn’t look like that without you.
Better yet. Take a piece of paper. Draw something. Anything. Stick figures. A bad joke. A strange idea. Play with it. Let it breathe. When you find something you like, hand it to a machine and say, make it sharper. Make it stranger. Make it look like anime or Lego blocks or something you’ve never seen before. Then you adjust it. You guide it. You stop when it finally feels right.
Ask yourself this. Did that thing exist before you imagined it? Before you nudged it into the world? Of course it didn’t.
The spark was yours. The shape was yours. The decision to stop was yours.
That makes you the creator. Yes, YOU. The talent isn’t in the tools, it’s in the idea.
Sit with that. Enjoy it. Let it warm ya. And let the rest of the noise burn itself out. I’m an artist and I can draw on my own and ai does very little to my stuff, but even if I couldn’t draw, I’d still be posting shit that I want to. Cuz that’s what I do. I’m a creator. Even if no one likes any of the things I create. :)
We’re all gonna make it, brah.
Did you even stop to consider the hundreds of artists you put out of a job by generating this? It also used one million gallons of water and killed your cat.
deleted by creator
I do not actually believe that generating this image killed your cat. It was a joke that apparently didn’t land. People on Lemmy act like using AI does these things however.
Holy crap!! hahahaha, I missed your sarcasm. Sorry, my bad. I’ll delete my snarky reply to you! lol
All good lol. Have a good one.
