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In a Time of AI, Wildwood Celebrates Humanmade Art | The Backdrop (Patreon)

Published:
2026-10-27 15:07:53
Imported:
2026-10

Content

This week's episode of The Backdrop is available now!

Files

In a Time of AI, Wildwood Celebrates Humanmade Art | The Backdrop

Wildwood is an incredible work of art, and a great reminder of the importance of handcrafted art in a time of AI. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Second Wind Merch: https://shop.secondwindgroup.com/

Comments

Willhart

There is much more to AI art than just the prompt. One can use a lot of different features to control and combat randomness, and give more direction to each project. One can use it to make new art if they put in the effort and experiment. It is a machine designed to follow your decisions, and there are AI artist out there who have perfected their process, and are able to consistently make art that has personality and stands out from others. The floor is low, but the ceiling is high. Some even go to effort to inpaint entire canvasses, or draw parts of the image by hand.

Lucas Roote

Everything Darren is saying I agree with but I think it ends up with me preferring the film as a rhetorical device rather than as a movie experience. The movie itself is pretty overstuffed with characters and ideas so that it never really comes together for me. It doesn't help that lots of its ideas are unfortunately, in the broad strokes at least, pretty generic. Evil monolithic imperial armies versus scappy and irregular nature lovers and cute animals is mostly played out but I appreciated them going for less obvious aesthetics like the British red coated armies rather than modern military. There is also some dissonance in those aesthetics like how the Dowager empress dresses like the Bandits in the movie and leads the Napoleonic army but came from city folk but the city folk aren't really narratively connected to the Napoleonic army. It reminded me somewhat of Ralph Balkshi's attempt to make an animated lotr movie where you can feel the compromises made in the story department because creating anything in their process takes an ungodly amount of effort. I suspect for Travis Knight and Laika this is less a bugetary thing like it was for Bakshi but more about not killing their darlings. Less "I did what I could with the resources I had" and more "this sequence took forever to create so by God you all are going to watch it!" Having said that I'm still glad it exists and think everyone should watch it, it just makes me sad I'm not over the moon excited to recommend it to people like I have been with other movies this year.

Dying Breed

""Enjoy Handmade Art While You Still Can." Can I get that on a shirt?

Crescent Minor

Some even go to the effort of rewording a couple of the phrases in their plagiarism, instead of ONLY getting good at asking for stolen art to be laundered for you. I know what being proud of 100%ing a video game while doing nothing else with yourself is when I see it. It was nice to do when I was little. I’m too old to ignore stunted development. Actual skills make for actual creation … only to be stolen from by a billionaire enabled thief these days. Train an AI on only your own work, and be honest what percentage of your project is basically a bunch of complicated computer assisted tracing. And figure how we don’t pay hideous environmental cost for that frivolous shortcut. Then, maybe, I’ll engage with this thing deserving to exist. Until then, generative data centre AI is thievery and poisoned land.

Lil' Cass (CJ)

Well said, Darren🧡, well said🧡

Badger

The problem with the defense of LLM's is that the knowledge they have was acquired through theft. They have been trained intentionally by their creators copy others artistic style while giving no credit, due, compensation or respect to artists that came before. There can be no respect for a "creator" who does not care about intellectual property rights outside of themselves. Plagarism is a death sentence in the arts for artists.

Jackarrow

Clocked that as soon as I saw it yesterday

Dying Breed

"Train an AI on only your own work, and be honest what percentage of your project is basically a bunch of complicated computer assisted tracing. And figure how we don’t pay hideous environmental cost for that frivolous shortcut. Then, maybe, I’ll engage with this thing deserving to exist. Until then, generative data centre AI is thievery and poisoned land." I'd also like to add to all this with "practice the transparency AI supporters claim to support". One of the biggest things making me distrust anybody who uses AI is how they stealthy try to sneak it into everything, even when folks like me have made it very clear I do not want to support it. People such as Tim Sweeny act like me wanting a disclaimer disclosing AI usage similar to what Steam does is somehow unreasonable or even damaging. All I want is to make an informed decision on my purchase, but apparently that is a bad thing now.

Stellarator

I would suggest that it is possible to acknowledge the ethical issues, as well as the issues of most ai gen stuff being generally not very good... and also acknowledge the fact that if a person *is* using the tech in some capacity, right or wrong, there is still a definite skill to getting better or worse results. That is an issue that seems to cause many AI enthusiasts and AI opposers to talk past each other.

Ando

Sublime film. I could watch hours of that behind the scenes making-of content - it's just all so beautiful.

Badger

The problem is that with the knowledge that most LLM's people use are preloaded with skills from stolen IP to train them the question of "user skill" is buried under the mound of people harmed by the tool being used. Anyone in an artistic community will have no respect for people seen as actively stealing another artist's work to succeed. And that is what LLM "art" will be stolen glory or vainglory.

Willhart

I feel like a lot of people see AI art based on the common slop made by chatgpt and older models that could not even make hands. There are 3 steps to follow to use AI to create new art: 1. Artist first: Make AI art creation a process. Apply your own experience to make it your own. Build on previous work and try different ideas to make it better and learn what resonates. 2. Concept first: Make it with your own goal in mind. Plan ahead. Use AI as a tool to create your ideas. AI is not good at everything, so consider using other tools too. 3. Uniqueness first: Have a goal to make something new you've not seen before. Be creative and push the tech to the limits. This should also arise from earlier 2 steps, as longer process and even using multiple different models for different parts is much harder to replicate. Someone I know used one model for backgrounds and different one for the characters. As of now, the image models are furthest ahead in terms of features that are actually helpful for editing tasks. Music and video are slowly getting there as we are finally getting local unrestricted models that can be used to generate without too many artifacts. Open source is the way.

Willhart

There is no stealing or theft when AI is used to make new art. Training the models is fair use, and the goal is not to replicate, but to learn "vectors" in art. AI learns style and content separately, meaning you can mix them freely and set them to any strength, even on negative values, and extrapolate far outside of the training data. What happens if you write the word "holy" 27 times in a row, and how does it keep changing when you repeat it more? There are plenty of artist and creative people who have picked up AI as a helpful tool, and some have build communities around them thanks to being able to make new art with AI daily. Less friction can also mean that people can use it to make more complicated things without getting overwhelmed. There are plenty too who don't care where the training data comes from, as long as the model still works. These models require tons of varied data to function, but when they do, it needs only one example image to be able to transfer the style. No-one is "save" from it to begin with, and style itself cannot be copyrighted. We can thank the internet for the freedoms to make fan art and fangames from assets of others, and the same freedom that allows for AI to flourish too. To me more art and ai art in the world is only a good thing. More ideas, more people making, and finding new ways to make. I do think it is still important to mention when AI is used, so that people can view the art in the right context, like people should give credit to both the models and the art inspirations.

Peter James

I agree on almost every point except on the film/digital divide, where I think at a practical level there’s an increasingly limited opportunity for filmmakers to be able to shoot on film in the first place, where often for smaller independent productions digital is the only viable option. Improving digital’s ability to emulate different mediums and styles of photography to me offers opportunities to achieve an aesthetic vision that may not otherwise be available. Of course that doesn’t really apply to larger budget productions, and the appeal of digital often runs alongside the more cynical trends of modern blockbusters.

Badger

But all LLM art and artist will carry the taint of the fact the programs they buy are based on theft. If you go onto deviant art etc they have rules that display images are for advertising purposes and any use needs to credit the artists. That is not the case with LLM's the base model was trained by the company on theft of property. If you want to use it fine but understand people will not buy your stuff (even some long time consumers) because that taint will stay for a long time. LLM's are also becoming a crutch people using them for writing etc are shown to have their skills diminished as they rely on the program more that self improvement through continued trail and practice. Knowing how to prompt a machine to do X does not make one an artist, it makes one a prompter.

Willhart

I think that more people creating is only a good thing, even when it is done with AI. It gets more people to try out things, and to start new projects. People will naturally gravitate towards more complex and fulfilling creation, and when AI is not enough, then they can branch out to doing parts by hand and to try gain deeper understanding. Also not all art is done by hand (glitch art is a good example), and sometimes some randomness and loss of direct control can be freeing. People try to "free their line" by doing tasks like drawing with wrong hand or with eyes closed. Or by making random blobs of colour and turning them into creatures by adding detail. AI art is still art, and making it is a creative task.

toktok_woktok

Great video, well worth the watch! Its all in there: Pointing me to a movie I had never heard of and which sounds right up my alley, historical discourse on animation in filmmaking, creating context to current developments, and lets not forget about the puns :) Thanks Darren!