See that’s the thing. I don’t see it as “stealing.” When I tried to teach myself to draw, I picked some styles I liked and tried to copy those artists’ styles. I looked at their stuff, practiced, and in the end, produced similar (but inferior) content mimicking those styles. Generative AI is the same concept, but on a much larger scale. AI isn’t going to create an outright copy of someone’s art. It creates something based on the prompt its given with a similar style.
And you’re right, it is a tool rather than a replacement. I can use it to whip up a concept for a character quite easily, but human artists still have several edges that they had better take advantage of while they can:
- AI is bad at doing human interaction/multiple people in a scene, etc.
- AI can’t fine tune things. “Oh you want that character’s belt to be different? Okay let me completely redraw it with a bunch of other things different as well.”
- AI goes full stupid on some things. I tried to createa water mage concept but it kept giving her elf ears, no matter what.
- NSFW content. I mean AI can do this, but its far less accessible since nearly all of the freely available ones block it.
I think at the very core of all this, artists are simply just afraid of being replaced by AI. The truly good ones will continue to find ways to stand out instead of relying on a style that’s “generic anime.”
Ultimately, AI is inevitable, so why don’t people work with it rather than against it?