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