Orcus, Day 5 - Scary Cave Lion (Patreon)

Sir Rexard the Magnanimous. Assassin and usurper to the throne of Sir Urbald, he's overall considered the better monarch,  non relying (entirely) on annexation wars for replenishing the national treasure.This can give you a good enough estimate of how long it can take for a soul to rebuild a body. The bear has died decades earlier than this cave lion and he has managed to recreate only half of his head and his abdomen. Advantage partly offset by his incomplete hands. It takes centuries for an average soul to recreate their body in the afterlife. And that's what rubs the monarch the wrong way: being just average.This is my personal October challenge: Orcus, journey into a frustratingly horny Underworld.You may notice the much more colorful color scheme of this character, and I have a confession to make: I used an AI.Not for the drawing it self, oh my god no, I severely doubt an AI can come off with something this creative but also contextualized, but for the color scheme.I've just typed "Skeletal werelion beside a campfire", and DALL-E gave me something completely different from what was in my mind, but had a nice color scheme that I reused.I'm not ashamed of an AI having better sensibilities than me towards color compositions, because that's my least favorite passage in the entire artistic process, and I always try to get away with the least amount of work.And that can be a pretty interesting point of discussion about art and AI. I get that people that are now learning to draw are completely disheartened by a machine already doing apparently better than them, and that event of the Colorado Art Fair was just ludicrous and tells a lot about "art critics", but we can consider this a step similar to the adoption of drawing tablets: a technology that makes artists able to make complete and commercially viable art in less time and with less money.What about an AI that takes care of crowd shots, maybe using characters in your style that you've already fed to it? Or does the in-between frames in animation? Or does the coloring, or the backgrounds? What's worse for your Visual Novel? Using real-life photos with a paint-like filter slapped on or an AI-generated background that at least meshes with your characters?That's to say, it's normal to feel threatened by a machine that already seems a more skilled artist than you, but first of all, it's not: they benefit from everybody having zero expectations of the outcome. "Ha, but the technology evolves", yes, but creativity is for me such a combination of wandering and procedural thinking that requires sentience to happen. And I have strong doubts about the likelihood of artificial sentience in our lifetime.But most importantly, we can whine about, neglect the accomplishments of artificial intelligence, or move forward, start to know the tool, and see if it can help us in getting things done quicker and cheaper.This is my personal October challenge: Orcus, journey into a frustratingly horny Underworld.