I'm a graphic designer. I've been working in the field for nearly seven years now, two of which in an actual agency. One afternoon I started on a project that was born of more or less pure spite -...
I'm a graphic designer. I've been working in the field for nearly seven years now, two of which in an actual agency. One afternoon I started on a project that was born of more or less pure spite - I love the annual art trading game Art Fight, but absolutely loathe how the game is run, how it comes completely crashing down every year due to people trying to access the site all at once and them not having any contingencies in place, and how the leadership there is apparently only concerned with donations and little community outreach. If you're unfamiliar, artists get sorted into one of two teams, upload their original characters with reference sheets and then draw characters belonging to the opposing team's members. It's great fun, and I tried volunteering for them, but the fact that I'd've to sign an NDA just to be a moderator is just a step too far. For those unaware, the Art Fight team was also caught embezzling donations in one of the last fights, 2022 if memory serves.
So I did what I do best. I started drafting user stories, did UX research, sketched, drew and designed what I'd think would solve all the problems with Art Fight. The result I called PICTOCLASH, and while the process to make and prepare the design took me about four weeks from start to finish, I knew I couldn't actually make the thing work. Disregarding the fact that the Art Fight platform is anaemic and runs on outdated PHP, has no optimisations for image storage or user content and does not buffer or queue database interactions, it's still a massive lift. We don't have numbers on how large AF is, but suffice it to say that it's far larger than any hobbyist project can be without VC involvement.
I was convinced, though, that if one just... approached the problem differently, maybe with modern technologies, the Next.JS I kept hearing about from my web design peers, maybe a shiny new database like Postgres, state management, all the things I know next to nothing about, this could work. My project could work. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be impossible. With a team of developers, all believing and contributing to the project in an open-source way, that's doable. Eminently realisable, even.
So I started. I began reading documentation for TS, Next, React, Prisma, Postgres and all the other things I'd need to read up on. This was maybe half a year ago. But damn, programming got hands. Even the Me-ChatGPT-Dream-Team wasn't enough to have me wrap my head around so many concepts here. I'm a front-end guy, that's for sure. I got my ass handed to me, and in a month, I barely have a login system, and looking at GitHub I could have just went with any of the many pre-rolled solutions.
Which just led me back to my original point. I have three hundred-odd lines of barely functional typescript that holds up an incredibly slow login system. I'm not cut out for this project, and I need to accept that. I'm a designer, I know PHP, I can write valid JavaScript, but... application development? That'll forever be a realm locked off to me.
And of course, the easy way out would just be to look for developers. But I can't do that, at least not without significant risk of falling into the "I had an idea for an app, you wanna make it?" brand of parasite. I'd feel dirty doing that, even if I know that I could more or less to front-end and every visual component by myself. In fact, I have done that. It's just the app part that's missing, and that's unfortunately the major lift.
How do you people cope with this? Because it's not been the first time this happened to me. I keep putting off learning 3D modelling out of exactly that reason, that I could just hit a wall no matter how hard I try. It's frustrating, and looking back how easily I picked up other disciplines in university it really makes me wonder if there are some things my brain just can't learn. I don't think I'm ready to accept that.
Edit: For anyone interested, I uploaded the abridged design document to my website.
I just took this test myself and was surprised to only get 34/50. Yes, these examples were cherry picked, and many of them deliberately fool you, but still - as someone who's been playing with diffusion and image generation since the mid 2010s I was surprised to see how... not good, but high-fidelity the technology has become.
That being said however, the pictures here aren't really representative. They were generated, usually, by people that knew what they were doing. Were cognisant of "AI Tells" and tried to remove them. Knowing my way around the tools of the "trade" as well, I can absolutely guarantee some of these images got at least three passes in the inpainting mode to fix hands or details, and while that's valid as an artistic choice, it's not very representative of the AI generated "slop" that will clog up your google images and pinterests.
Side note: I personally believe if you go so far as to put in the actual effort to touch the piece up, either with Inpainting or Photoshop or literally printing and painting, you're sort of collaborating with the machine, making the piece AI-assisted rather than AI-generated. I think AI assistance is a perfectly valid technique and superficially no different than the clone stamp tool in Photoshop, so arguably to me those wouldn't qualify as "AI made" anyways.
What was even more interesting to me was that there were pictures in there that I could tell were generated, but still appealed to me on an artistic level. Notably, the Paris Scene one was genuinely quite enjoyable, and even knowing it was made with a machine learning model, I would have little trouble hanging it in my home and enjoying it. Maybe interpreting it like a human-made piece of art would defeat the purpose, sure, but just for decoration I think it's great.
What does this leave me with? Conflict, mainly. I know that this technology is neutral, as I've stated many times before, but the accessibility makes it easy for corporate ghouls to just bury us all in a goulash of extraneous fingers and nonsense greeble. I don't think AI art, whatever that means, is a threat to human creativity. That's ridiculous, and the same argument that game up when photography and later photomanipulation hit the scene. But I'd be lying if I said that we as a society have nothing to worry about.