AI art as we know it started so techbros who couldn't be arsed to go through the creative process or commission someone could have pictures they could beat off to. I'm sure the official stance on the so-called "democratisation of art" is different, but remember those deepfake porn videos? Someone using a computer to simulate the face and voice of Paris Hilton and Ben Affleck or something and passing it off as genuine? Yeah. Don't let anyone tell you differently; AI art only exists because of horny trustfunders.
Anyway, deepfake celeb sex tapes have fallen out of favour, because now it's all about digital airbrush-style fakery. The thing is, the algorithm has done what any computer would do and averaged all the porn it's been trained on. Now it's only able to output one girl in one posture. The weighted average of gigabytes of high-definition artworks arrives at, basically, Anna from Frozen, bent over in a submissive position facing the viewer. It's a matter of adding fetish features to the same girl and feigning pleasure, choking chicken to it; then wondering why you're so unsatisfied. The answer is that their smut generator has been trained as far as it can go and the commercial AI generators, like ChatGPT and Bard, have been taught that advertising money is more important than sex.
I'll put it out there again: these horny-ass techbros, who couldn't get any tail at their Bored Ape NFT matchmaking convention back in '21 ('cos no girls showed up), are only doing this because they can't be bovvered to learn how to draw girls themselves. It's probably too late for them, especially after last year's UV lamp fiasco. However, we can learn from their mistakes.
This style is pretty forgiving. It's hard to make a mistake here. I'm prepared to say this is the Bob Ross Technique of drawing girls, it's how easy it is. All I did was draw a mitten, give the mitten a full head of hair, draw a few lines, and erase one (the head outline—you don't need to see the whole mitten). Admittedly, the hair required some reference material, but as I was on the Models Resource at the same time anyway, I just gave the mitten Kafei's hairstyle with embellishments. All told, this sketch took me about 7 minutes to complete. I made myself completely unconcerned with how the final product would look in comparison to anything and just fuckin' drew.
Even the mitten shape is... ahem...fungible. I could have used a circle, a rounded rectangle, an egg, the PBS logo, it just doesn't matter. I decided on mitten because that was the headshape someone's avatar on TMR used. The eyes came directly from the 3DS Mii Maker, but squashed a bit on the y-axis. AI art has made certain people forget that reference material can be found all around us, without copying it directly or feeding it into a weighted-averages algorithm. Without even carrying on from this point, you can already tell that the subject is a young woman with slightly-larger-than-average boobs wearing a halter top, and it only took the same amount of time as going outside for a vape.
A thing I hear on Tumblr a lot is "tracing is a sin". Yes, tracing without any desire to improve oneself is a sin. If all you're interested in is copying existing material without doing anything but changing a colour or something and then pretending you created the whole thing or fail to mention that you traced over something, you may as well just use a document scanner and GIMP. However, tracing with the intent of study—using the back of the maths textbook to reverse engineer an answer so you can figure out where the procedure breaks down in your own work—is not only not a sin, but it is also how you learn. In my case, I didn't trace anything; I used references. I had images open on various browser tabs and kept cycling through them as I drew on paper. What I ended up with, therefore, was an entirely original creation, drawn by my own hand.
I should point out that I had never drawn in this style before yesterday evening. I tend to avoid drawing full-body sketches in general because I'm usually afraid of it turning out misshapen somehow. But, the desire to draw a pretty girl was too strong.
And, all I needed a computer for was darkening the pencil marks and removing the notebook lines. Exactly 0% of this drawing was generated by an AI process.
--9 January 2024--