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Aug 21, 2018

I'm making an ongoing fantasy webcomic, The Firelight Isle. This world and story is my current obsession! ✨Read on my site: paulduffield.co.uk/firelightisle/1 💫And on Tapas: tapas.io/series/firelig 🌟Join my patrons: patreon.com/paulduffield

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The Art Of Comics

@TheArtofPodcast

Mar 2

Later today, we are recording the next episode! It will be released next Friday, 10th of March. We’re discussing "Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me" - have you read it? What are your thoughts?

Feb 24

I've started a podcast with the wonderful

@jawsum_art

where we have relaxed chats about a new comic each week. We both love going on deep dives about the ins and outs of comic making, so hopefully there'll be lots of insights to appreciate! paulduffield.co.uk/the-art-of-com

Listen to The Art of Comics on Spotify.

Molcher

@molcher

Feb 23

It's *official* Publication Day for 'I Am The Law'!! Thanks to everyone who's bought a copy so far, it means the world to me. And thank you to all those who helped and supported me over the past almost-three years, it would not exist without you. I love you all.

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It's actually every other week, not every week, way to make a mistake in my first announcement XD

You can listen on the website, Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you get podcasts (personally I use Podcast Addict, a fantastic app with some powerful organisation tools). Consider leaving us a review if you enjoy it! ^_^

open.spotify.com

The Art of Comics

I've started a podcast with the wonderful

@jawsum_art

The Art Of Comics

@TheArtofPodcast

Feb 24

Episode 01 is up! We discuss "This One Summer" by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki! paulduffield.co.uk/the-art-of-com

!! Exciting news -

and I have started a podcast. A cozy comics club discussing a new title every other week - open.spotify.com/show/0OCpiSMRB

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The Art Of Comics

@TheArtofPodcast

Feb 24

Episode 01 is up! We discuss "This One Summer" by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki! paulduffield.co.uk/the-art-of-com

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Dec 7, 2022

I bang on about algorithmic art not being "intelligent", but what do I mean? Let's get specific... Squint at this prompt art, and you might think it's by an accomplished artist: lovely atmosphere, beautiful palette, calming aesthetic, nicely rendered. But it's a mess...

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Fascinating thread that's both practical and further demonstrates a point I've been trying to make

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Magnifico Art Heritage

@art_magnifico

Feb 15

A.i. watermark removers are popping up like mushrooms. These are trained a.i. models that recognize and remove watermarks, even those never seen before. After some testing Francesco realized how almost everything seems to depend simply on the contrast between pixels.

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Jaws

@jawsum_art

Jan 27

💕FEBRUARY 10th💕 Charity stream, mark the calendar, spread the word!

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Ursula K. Le Guin bot

@UrsulaBot

Dec 31, 2022

No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.

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Dec 11, 2022

Writing that last thread and responding to everyone who commented has made me realise that ultimately, where we are with algorithmic art is just another manifestation of this, and I'm still just talking about the same thing in a new way.

I'm chilled by the idea that we might slowly enter a dark age of art, where instant passable results are a prompt away, but the process is just as mysterious as the insides of our phones are. It doesn't have to be that way. It may well not be. But it's not implausible either.

And no matter how good it gets, you won't be able to teach yourself how to examine the results properly just by writing prompts. In fact, if less people learn to draw because they can just prompt, we may risk that vital knowledge becoming even rarer than it currently is.

Wether I like it or not, i don't doubt that more progress will happen sooner or later, but it's very unlikely to do so without proper respect for, or understanding of the process that it's attempting to replicate.

Ultimately, it's *people* who are judging the output and figuring out how to improve the algorithms, which means that the kind of knowledge in this thread (the kind that is very hard to accumulate without years of drawing practice) is vital to even identifying how to proceed.

... This side-steps my point. I'm not just talking about the superficial quality of the finished result, I'm taking about what you learn about the world when YOU know how to get there yourself with nothing but marks on a blank canvas of some kind.

Further thoughts: a lot of people have responded with something along the lines of "this is a useless exercise because it won't be long until you can't make these critiques of algorithmically generated art anymore"...

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You could learn this stuff if you were taught it, or set about watching tutorials, but most people don't do that unless they also want to actually draw! The vast majority of people can't intuit it from the world by looking... or by writing prompts for an algorithm.

You don't need to convince me that writing prompts is participating in making "art", but it categorially *isn't* drawing. Learning to draw gives access to insights about line, light, volume, shape, perspective, movement, framing (etc) that allowed me to make this critique.

Addendum: some replies are getting lost in defining "art", or assuming that I'm saying this ISN'T "art". I'm fine with calling this art, but I draw every day. In this thread, when I say "art", I'm talking about the skills and understandings that come with that lived experience.

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Absolutely this, and potentially with disastrous consequences if they're touted as real knowledge-generation machines as with Meta's Galactica aiweirdness.com/galactica/

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TallNQuirky @PATREON

@TallNQuirky

Dec 6, 2022

💕#HumanArtist

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Dec 7, 2022

But the more I talk about it, the more I notice that people who often jump to defend ai art (or characterise artists as gatekeepers/whiners) seem to be totally ignorant of the field of ai research itself AS WELL, and now that's bugging me as much as the disregard for artists!

I'm far from an expert in ai research, but I've listened to hours of interviews, am on mailing lists about it, I read books on it. The thing that bugs me is how it's *implemented* and the disregard for the knowledge and rights of artists that all-too-often accompanies it.

Of note: I am actually really fascinated by and impressed with algorithmic image and text generation/processing, and love to listen to researchers talk about their field, the innovations that drive it and the challenges they face.

And here's a nice chaser - the original context, and the art that clearly fed this particular algorithm/prompt:

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Dec 6, 2022

Replying to @LexPlans and @ai_curio

It's a dim reflection of the achingly beautiful background art from makoto shinkai's movies, these palettes are a big influence on me! Here's the real thing from "5cm per second" and "Garden of Words", the aesthetic is so intense in these movies it moves me to tears.

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It doesn't HAVE to be this way, we could all receive this education in the same way we do with reading and writing... but it is. And art algorithms are only going to erode access by providing people with shortcuts to images that they don't have the skill to look at meaningfully.

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You can call all this "elitist" and "gatekeeping", but here's the issue... drawing IS a rare and difficult to achieve skill in our current culture. There are literal gates of knowledge and learning that you have to make an effort to try and pass through in order to achieve it.

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And this is what frustrates me about people celebrating AI art as if it gives them "access" to making art. It doesn't, it gives you a dull reflection of the finished results without any understanding, learning, or any of the beauty of truly SEEING the world in new ways.

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Artists learn to see, understand and interrogate the world teleologically. When you've wrestled enough with movement, purpose, perspective, detail, etc, you can look at a scene or object and find characteristics that people who can't draw usually won't even notice.

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The thing is, artists don't blindly process the world, probe it for visual correlations and spit them back out again like an algorithm. It would take me over 30 years looking at an image per second to look at a billion images and I'd learn nothing about drawing in the process.

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I could go on, but the point is that after the first glance, the image falls apart so severely that there's barely anything coherent in it, just an alluring jumble that doesn't relate truly to the form, purpose or meaning of anything in it.

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The tree, though? By the width of the rail, that's a slim trunk, but it morphs into a tree that looks large enough to be behind the "train", but it's under the "cables". And why was it planted there?? The algorithm has no idea, because it doesn't know what a tree is.

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But those tracks right? They're nice! Nope... there are no sleepers, the rails are set too far apart, arranged bizarrely, and appear and disappear like the cables above, the gravel is lit as if it has occasional sharp ridges in it. The algorithm doesn't know what a track is.

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But... is it a train? There's no hint of wheels, carriage breaks or doors, it has no pantographs for the overhead lines, and it just morphs into a solid shape that recedes into the distance. The algorithm just doesn't know what a train is and can't distinguish it from a barrier.

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For a further demonstration, compare the height of the "train" (we'll get to this) with the height of the cables on the overhead line, they're at nearly three times the height of the train. Again, the algorithm doesn't know what they do, or why they're there.

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Let's shift over to the overhead line. Any level of attention shows cables placed randomly that just begin and end out of nowhere. This isn't a picture of a functional piece of equipment - the algorithm literally doesn't understand what it's for.

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