Following the recent “events” that’s happening on Artstation…I was wondering what’s keyshot’s policies etc…
And for anyone who doesn’t know what’s going on, I found this video that explains it well “The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs”
I’m not Keyshot but I like the discussion about AI so I reply. I know you hate AI since I was on your Artstation page so your point of view is clear 
Personally I see AI as nothing more than a tool/instrument. While AI can mimic some skills it will never replace a creative process. For example drawing, if you can draw awesome pictures but using other pictures as inspiration you have skills but that doesn’t mean you are creative. I know people who can paint ultra realistic paintings but that’s also skill and not being creative.
So there is a big difference between skill and creativity in my opinion. The creative process involves a briefing of a client, limitations which can be budget, brand guides etc etc with those briefing and taking all wishes/limitations into account to think about getting a result that will make the client happy. That’s a complicated process which is not easily replaced by AI at all. Especially not the AI where people currently talk about.
It’s not that when the camera was invented painters didn’t had a job anymore. It’s not that when everyone had a smartphone photographers lost their jobs. Or better maybe, when stock images were sold photographers lost their job.
Creative people will always have jobs. Weather you are a creative programmer or you are creative with images. The photographers who lost their job because of stock images where just not really good photographers. Or, also common, had the wrong type of clients they work for. If a client is satisfied with stock images he will never team up with a high quality photographer.
Current early state of AI might create funny or nice images but nice images is not going to please my clients. Especially not if it’s a hamsters in a space suit. If I look at the things I created the past 10 years none can be created by current AI because the amount of variables for every project was way too large and the skills needed to diverse.
For those people who create drawings/paintings of their own ideas/concepts it can be a bit more of a struggle against AI because AI is pretty ok if you don’t have boundaries to think about. They mostly don’t like commercial environments and love their own freedom without the boundaries commercial jobs give them. That group of artists is often very creative and can easily figure out a way to do more commercial work. Or they can even use AI as source of inspiration for new paintings. If they will sell you’ll never know but that’s the thing with free work without boundaries.
So basically the only people that should worry about AI are those who are maybe skilled but lack creativity. And still, think with enough skills AI won’t be beating you soon.
I run stable diffusion here locally and you can try it as well: GitHub - AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui: Stable Diffusion web UI
Than try to get the output you actually want if you limit it with a lot of boundaries. It will fail and it’s output is terribly inconsistent. Still fun to play with and get crazy images you can print on canvas and sell as ‘artist’ but that’s not too different from the free work a lot of artists generate. If you come up with weird idea’s (which is creativity) and you fed it into AI you will get weird results. And if someone wants to pay big bucks for weird stuff on canvas it doesn’t really matter who put it on canvas I think, it’s the creative idea that appeals to someone.
A lot of comments on that video are from people who never actually touched AI. The only thing they see is some pretty AI images which is not different from pretty stock images. They don’t see that most AI images which look pretty were not meant to look like that at all but AI is pretty hard to steer into the right direction so sometimes you get nice images but that’s like the free art, a commercial client doesn’t need nice images.
It’s an interesting subject though and sure interesting where AI will end up. It’s nice to see AI getting used for music, programming and images but so far it’s not really useful. I can be quite a nice tool if you need some inspiration for example especially if you are terrible at drawing like myself.
I’m close to 50 and I’ve seen quite some things arrive at this world where people started to worry about their jobs. Computers, internet, digital photography, smartphones etc etc if they took your job you weren’t fast enough (or too stubborn) to adapt. A creative person shouldn’t worry about AI and if you do you should be more critical to your level of creativity in my opinion. Current state of AI is the level of stock photo’s nice images but you never exactly get what you want.
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Are you an artist? aren’t you worried about theft? AI steal images and own them. even private images are stolen and used, not just art. They steal images without concent. It’s so not about who’s better or who’s more creative. There are deeper problems.
The ‘are you an artist’ worries me a bit and immediately started me thinking about this image…
AI does basically the same as every artist does, getting inspired by everything you see. Images and other content getting stolen is as old as the internet. Where I live every creator has copyright on the things he/she creates. Automatically. So while stuff gets stolen you still own it and can send a bill if you like. But basically the AI can never ‘own’ my images simply because that’s not is how copyright works where I live. That’s also why I think NFT’s are a pure scam since it doesn’t protect anyone let alone NFT art itself is never unique but just the link to the art is the unique part.
Besides that I think that artists who get frustrated by the existence of AI are too little aware that being frustrated is not exactly helping the creation process of whatever you like to create.
The thing is that artists like to see themselves as unique but if you look at f.e. artstation you see plenty of artists creating the same kind of work all the time. Has nothing to do with AI but it does involve the human mind which gets influenced a lot by everything around you. If you spend a lot of time browsing sites like ArtStation there is a big change you’re gonna adapt your style to the work of others. That’s simply how the mind works.
And I don’t mind some artists who really like to be unique stick a banana on a canvas with tape but for me it’s just trash and luckily that’s a personal taste thing. But same with images the AI generates, if I look at the discord channel of Midjourney I sometimes see nice pictures but most of them are totally useless besides a nice background on your desktop.
I mean it’s cool AI is capable of fixing a cat in a tank but I don’t actually think lots of artists get ruined by these kind of pictures. While I do think that AI can be a nice source of inspiration if you think about a certain concept but are a bit stuck. Normally you would maybe go to the library (before the internet) or google some images… now you can give some text input and see what AI comes up with. That’s AI used as a tool.
Current AI is pretty hard to steer in a certain direction though so I’ve the feeling you never tried to recreate your art with some AI. That’s also my response to the video you posted, he would have a solid point if he could generate the drawing he makes during the video by using AI. You can’t.
There is more involved to his drawing than just skill namely creativity. AI can’t be creative. You can be creative with the text inputs and the AI will try to fix something which is close to what many people like since that’s how it’s trained. But it won’t present a picture like you would have thought out inside your mind.
So I think artists that are worry about AI should level up their creativity. Artists that like to create cats in tanks have a problem yes. Creative artists will never have any problem, that’s why they are creative.
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