c/ai-art-debate

30

johnson.lee•13h ago

Wasted $150 on an AI art generator that couldn't handle hands right

I bought a mid-tier AI art subscription last month thinking it would save me time making concept art. Cost me $150 for a three month plan on ArtForge. It kept messing up fingers and eyes in every single picture, even after I tried all the prompt tricks. I ended up having to fix most images in Photoshop anyway, which totally defeated the purpose. Anyone else find a generator that actually does hands decently without spending a fortune?

4

jakewhite•1d ago

My AI art looked like a melted clown at the county fair

I was showing my cousin's kids how AI art works at the county fair last Saturday. Typed in 'happy family picnic' and the thing generated a family where the dad had 3 arms and the dog looked like a melted hot dog. The kids thought it was hilarious but I felt like a total fraud trying to explain it's 'art.' Has anyone else had AI spit out something so bad it made you question the whole thing?

28

evan151•1d ago

Spent 2 months running AI art through a sharpening filter and the difference is wild

I started applying a 0.5 radius unsharp mask to every piece of AI art I made, and after 50 images the textures look way more like real oil paint. The details in leaves and hair went from blurry smudges to having actual edges you can see. Has anyone else tried post-processing tricks to make their AI work feel more like traditional art?

18

claire_ramirez22•3d ago

Vent: That guy who told me AI art "isn't real art" and I should focus on real painting

So back in March, I shared one of my AI generated landscapes on a local art group in Chicago. This one guy, Tom from the paint shop, commented that I was "cheating" and if I actually learned to paint with a brush, I'd get more respect. I was pretty mad at first, but I figured I'd prove him wrong by trying his way. I spent like 40 bucks on cheap acrylics and a canvas, and honestly my attempt came out looking like a blob monster. It took me three evenings and I still hated it. But here's the thing - I went back to my AI tool and started studying color theory and composition from tutorials I found. Now I actually understand why the AI picks certain palettes, and my recent pieces are way better than before. Has anyone else had a hater accidentally help you get better at the creative side of AI art?

9

spencer_johnson22•3d ago

I finally saw the difference between SD upscaling and img2img at 2x

Been messing with stable diffusion for about 3 months now. Always just used the basic txt2img then slapped it through a standard upscaler. Got okay results. Then last week I tried taking that same low res output, running it through img2img at 0.3 denoise and 2x size. Night and day difference. The img2img version kept the structure but added actual detail instead of just smoothing out pixel mush. Took like 3 tries to get the denoise right though. Anyone else find specific workflows that actually improve the output vs just making it bigger?

20

the_rowan•4d ago

Used to spend hours tweaking prompts for AI art, now I just type one line

Back in 2022 when I first got into AI art, I was writing these huge prompt paragraphs with all kinds of specific style keywords and negative prompts. My last one had like 80 words, stuff like 'octane render, trending on ArtStation, intricate details, cinematic lighting' and I still got garbage results half the time. Then last week I typed 'a cat wearing a cowboy hat, ugly' into an image generator at a friend's house in Chicago, and it came out perfect first try. My buddy just laughed and said I was overthinking the whole thing. Now I keep my prompts under 10 words and get way better pictures than when I was writing novels. Anyone else notice their best results come from the simplest inputs?

16

mila_mitchell•5d ago

AI art failure made me rethink my whole process

Last Tuesday I spent 6 hours generating pictures of a cat in a rainstorm. Every single one had the raindrops going sideways while the cat's fur was bone dry. I tweaked prompts, messed with weights, nothing fixed it. My buddy who draws by hand said "you're letting the machine guess instead of telling it what you want" and that clicked for me. Has anyone else hit a wall where the AI just refuses to understand basic physics?

7

the_seth•5d ago

Just realized my AI art looked wrong because I was using negative prompts backwards

Was making a picture of a dragon last Tuesday and it kept coming out all blurry with weird colors. Spent like 3 hours tweaking settings before I noticed I had "blurry, low quality" in my positive prompt instead of negative. Swapped them around and the next generation was perfect. Felt like an idiot but hey, lesson learned. Anyone else had a facepalm moment like that with their prompt structure?

12

riverp37•5d ago

That artist on Twitter told me to stop using Lora stacking and I should have listened sooner

Had a guy with like 50k followers say my AI portraits looked muddy because I was piling on 3-4 Loras at once. I thought he was gatekeeping. After 2 weeks of ignoring him I tried his way with just one Lora and a good prompt. The difference was night and day. Now I feel dumb for wasting all that time. Has anyone else gotten advice from a random pro that actually turned out to be solid?

14

the_anthony•5d ago

My friend Deb told me AI art is cheating and now I am not so sure

Deb has been painting for 30 years, and she told me last month that using Midjourney for concept art is just typing, not creating. I agreed with her at first, but then I spent 17 hours last week tweaking prompts and composing a piece about a flooded library in Boston. The final image feels more like mine than anything I have made with a brush in years. Do you think the effort we put into selecting and refining counts as art, or is Deb right that the machine is doing all the real work?

5

xena_anderson•6d ago

Took me 3 months to realize my AI art prompts were too specific

I kept getting these stiff, lifeless images from Midjourney no matter what I tried. Every prompt was like 'a woman standing in a forest at golden hour with perfect lighting and a flowing dress and a gentle smile'. They looked polished but totally dead. Then I saw this guy in the Discord post something super vague like 'lonely street corner, rainy night' and his results had way more soul than mine. It hit me that I was over-directing every tiny detail and leaving no room for the AI to actually interpret anything. So I tried a prompt that was just 'old bookstore cat' with no adjectives and the weird imperfections made it feel like actual art. Has anyone else had this moment where less detail made way better results?

23

jesseb20•7d ago

Just realized I was prompting AI art wrong for 3 months

I use Midjourney to make pictures for my D&D campaign. I spent weeks typing detailed paragraphs like "a dark forest with twisted trees and a full moon casting silver light through fog." The results were okay. But last week I tried something different. I wrote "gloomy woods, moonlight, fog" and got a better image in one try. Now I keep prompts under 8 words and I get better results every time. Has anyone else noticed shorter prompts work better?

1

the_luna•9d ago

Midjourney made a photo of my cat that looked more like him than my actual camera

I was always one of those "AI art is just copying" people. But my buddy uses it for his side hustle making pet portraits. He showed me a side by side of my orange tabby Leo. One was from my iPhone 13 and one was from Midjourney. The AI one actually got his exact lazy eye and the way he sits with one paw curled. My photo looked like just another cat. His looked like my cat. That kind of got to me. Is it art if it captures a personality better than a photograph? Or is it still just a copy machine making something that never existed?

27

margaret_bennett3•10d ago

Tried an AI colorizer on an old family photo from 1940s Detroit and it added a mustache to my grandma

Honestly I thought it'd just be a fun experiment but the AI made my grandma look like she had a thick handlebar mustache. The sweater and background looked great but faces were a total mess. Does that mean the AI doesn't understand human features well enough to count as real art, or is the imperfection part of the creative process? I'm curious if anyone else has had face fails like this.

10

paige870•10d ago

The other day I had to decide between letting an AI generate a landscape for a gift or painting it myself with watercolors

I went with the AI version because I only had 2 hours before the party and the result looked like a half melted dream, so I’m still not sure if that was a win or a loss. Has anyone else picked speed over soul and regretted it or been pleasantly surprised?

3

rowank69•13d ago

I was told AI art would never replace traditional drawing. 5 years later I'm not so sure.

My old art teacher back in 2019 told me AI stuff was just a gimmick and real artists had nothing to worry about. I agreed with her back then because the early stuff looked like melted Play-Doh. Fast forward to last month and I saw a Midjourney piece at a local gallery in Portland that fooled everyone until the artist admitted it. It won a prize and everything. Now I'm wondering if that advice was more about keeping students from getting discouraged than actual truth. Has anyone else had a teacher or mentor give advice on AI that turned out wrong?

3

jessicamiller•13d ago

Debate: Does an AI art piece count if you barely changed the prompt?

I spent a week making this landscape with Stable Diffusion. I wrote like 30 different prompts, tweaked settings, and still felt like I was just picking from what the AI handed me. A buddy of mine on Discord keeps saying "real AI art" means you need heavy img2img or inpainting work, not just prompt luck. Then I saw someone else post a near identical image just by typing "mountain lake sunset" once. So is it still my art if I didn't really do much beyond choosing? Where do you guys draw the line on effort versus outcome?

6

holly_gonzalez61•17d ago

Found out AI art datasets include copyrighted medical scans without consent

I was digging into a study from MIT Technology Review last month and learned that over 12,000 medical scans from patients were scraped into training sets without asking anyone. Turns out some of those images are now being used to generate AI art that people are selling on Etsy. Is it even legal to profit off someone's MRI without their permission like that?

7

rowan_wells67•17d ago

Walked through a gallery in Denver yesterday and spotted something weird in 3 different AI prints

I was at this small local gallery in the RiNo district and they had a whole wall of AI stuff. At first glance it looked fine but I noticed the same exact weird shadow pattern in 3 pieces by different "artists". Like a repeating artifact or something. Made me wonder if these people are just using the same base model and calling it their own style. Has anyone else caught stuff like this in real life galleries?

13

sam530•18d ago

Compared an oil painting I made to an AI generated one side by side

I spent 3 hours on a small landscape in acrylics last Sunday. Then I fed the same description into Midjourney and got a result in 2 minutes. The AI version looked cleaner but my painting had this weird brushstroke where I messed up the sky. That mistake made it feel more real somehow. Is it just me or does perfection actually take away from the art?

3

aarons36•18d ago

Watched a guy at the art fair sell AI prints for $200 each

I was at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in Denver last Saturday and some dude had a booth full of Midjourney prints, no joke he sold 12 of them in an hour. How is that different from the painters down the row who spent weeks on one piece?

9

wade558•19d ago

Spent all weekend fighting an AI art generator over hands before giving up and drawing them myself

I must have generated 200 images while trying to get a character holding a coffee cup before I finally sat down with a pencil and sketched it in 20 minutes, has anyone else just rage quit the AI and gone back to basics?

20

susanh46•20d ago

Why does every AI art piece have those weird twisted fingers?

I keep seeing people defend the mangled hands in their AI images as 'stylistic choice' but you can tell the model just doesn't know how fingers work, am I the only one who thinks that kills the whole art argument?

19

tarab54•22d ago

That AI art piece with the extra fingers finally got me

I used to argue AI art was just as valid as anything drawn by hand. Then last week I saw a piece that had seven fingers on one hand and missing toes on both feet. The person who made it said that's just part of the style and you shouldn't nitpick details like that. But that's the whole problem right there. If you can't control basic anatomy, you're not making art, you're just rolling dice and picking winners. Has anyone else hit this wall where the AI's limits make the whole thing feel hollow?

10

felix_jones•22d ago

Three years ago I hated AI art. Last week I sold a piece on Etsy.

Back in 2021 I was one of those people arguing AI art was just stealing from real artists. I drew by hand since high school, felt like the tech was cheating. Then my sister got me a tablet for Christmas 2023 and I started messing with Stable Diffusion just to prove it sucked. Couldnt get a single good prompt for months. Then last month I spent a whole weekend feeding it my old sketches and tweaking the settings until it made something that actually looked like my style. Put it up on Etsy as a joke. Someone bought it for 45 bucks last Tuesday. I still draw by hand but now I see the AI as just another brush. Does using a power saw make you not a carpenter?