My stance about AI (Patreon)

Recently some people have asked me what was my stance on AI. I made a couple of journals about it on DA back then but of course they got nuked ^^;

Basically, I look at it with a mix of apprehension and fatalism, like many artists to be honest. It's a technology that is clearly here to stay and have made its way into a lot of pipelines already across the illustration and animation industry, so it's not going away regardless. I can't say I'm a big fan, though, for many reasons.

-It's very destructive and force professional artists to compete with algorithms capable of instantly producing dozens of pictures on a prompt, which is making many already though professions even tougher or downright unsustainable if you don't use it... It's very demoralizing for illustrators and sent a few of my friends and colleagues into depression and anxiety..

- AI in general is a technology I look at with suspicion. I don't want to become too political here , I certainly think it has a lot of potential in certain fields but I feel it's something that is being pushed very hard and artificially onto the population, with very little upsides compared to its massive downsides. It also consumes an insane amount of energy to work.

-It impoverishes creativity in general. There are many talented aspiring artists that could have been very successful but who simply won't try and pursue a career in art because of AI. In the long run I fear it's going to lead to less human-made pictures being created in general, while in parallel we're increasingly going to see AI cannibalize itself and start to harvest AI-generated pictures to generate new ones. I don't think the result will be very positive for anybody..

- And of course there is the big one : the whole process relies on basically stealing the work of artists. It's like a two prong thing : it harvest hundreds of thousands works from artists and then use them to mass-produce pictures to replace those same artists. It's.. not a good feeling.

So yeah... I can understand people who like it and use it and feel empowered by it. but as an artist myself, I look at it with mostly concern and a lot of worries.

And I want to be clear that you will never see any AI being used in my work. I count myself very lucky to have a job where I draw for my community and you guys instead of some companies. It's giving me the choice. So everything I do is, has always be, and will remain 100% hand-drawn. that's something I can guarantee to you guys :3