#it's been on my brain i guess

[canmom]

ai analogies

with photography, the 'inputs' or 'creative choices' include the subject, the framing, and technical qualities like exposure, focus, aperture and iso. the output, the thing that's judged, is then the qualities of the image - composition and colour and narrative. since photography is very quick, a photographer will typically take many shots of a subject, and then pick out the ones they like best to share with the wider world, so there is also a curative element.

with collage (and also photobashing, and even the limited space of a dollmaker game), the 'inputs' are the choices of existing images, and the composition created by arranging them. so there's a curative element in selecting what to collage, and then new meaning is created by juxtaposing two previously unrelated images, the spatial relationships between them, and so on. (see also graphic design!) the visual qualities of the original image are relevant insofar as they affect the composition, but you don't judge a collage containing a painting or photo on how well-painted the painting or well-shot the photo is, rather on how well it uses that painting or photo.

with 'readymades' and similar genres of conceptual art, it's kind of similar, right? you put the existing objects in a new context and create meaning through how they're arranged. people respond to whether the idea it communicates is interesting. (often these days they come with some text which gives a key to inform you how to interpret the artwork.)

anyway. with drawing and painting, which are comparatively laborious to create, you are constantly making thousands of creative choices, from the broad scale - composition, value structure, how you construct a figure - to the tiny, like line weight, rendering, shape design. to navigate this vast space of possibility, you will be informed by your memory of other pictures you've seen (your personal 'visual library') and techniques you've practiced, reference images you've gathered, and so on. the physical qualities of your body and the medium will also affect your picture - how you move your arm, how watercolor moves across the paper, etc etc.

broadly the same is true for other very involved media like sculpture or computer graphics or music (of all kinds!). more fine-grained control implies both more work and more scope for creative choices.

when someone sees an image created by whatever means, they take all of this in at once, for a gestalt impression - and if they feel like it, they can look closer and appreciate the particular details. many artists will think about trying to create a composition that 'leads the eye' to take in particular points of interest and convey the narrative of the picture.

so then, 'AI'. your inputs are the design of the neural net, the selection of training data, the text/image used as a prompt and then finally the selection of an image produced by the program. (you can modify that image of course but let's not get into that for now). chances are you don't have a lot of control over the first two since the computation involved is too unwieldy, though some image generators can be 'finetuned' with additional training data.

'AI art' is like photography in that you typically generate a lot of images and select the ones that 'come out well'. like a photographer looking for a subject, you might search around for an interesting prompt. it's unlike photography in that you have very limited control over all those other parameters (at best you can try to verbally describe what you want and hope the AI understands, or ask it to generate similar pictures and hope one has the qualities you want).

'AI art' is like collage in that you are taking existing images and creating new meaning of of them, by generating a latent space and transformation algorithm that approximates them. it's unlike collage in that you have no real knowledge of what specific images may be 'most' informing the corner of latent space you're probing. you can look at an AI generated image and say 'this looks kinda like a Nihei manga' but it's not using a specific image of Nihei. still, there is something similar to the relationship between images in collage when you do things like 'style transfer'.

'AI art' can be like conceptual art or for that matter political cartoons in that often it's just providing illustration to a concept or joke that can be expressed in words. 'Shrek in the style of The Dark Crystal' or 'cats that spell "gay sex"' is what you're getting across. but 'AI art' as a subculture places very high concern on the specific aesthetic qualities, so it's not that simple.

briefly, sampling in music often tends to foreground that it's a sample, either one the audience may recognise - the Amen break for example - or just by being noticeably different from the texture of the rest of the piece. even when the sample isn't easily recognised, though, the art of sampling is to place it in a new context which brings out different sonic qualities, e.g. by playing it rapidly in succession, or heavily filtering and distorting it, overlaying it with other sounds, or playing it right before the drop. it's similar to collage and photobashing.

paintings then. AI art rather obsessively tries to imitate paintings, drawings, 3D graphics etc. some of its proponents even try to position it as obsoleting these art forms, rather than a new derivative art form. a lot of the fear from artists who work in those media is that, even if the AI generated images are a poor substitute for what we make, it will be 'good enough' to satisfy the people with the money, or discourage people from learning how to paint with all its nuances.

so, 'AI' may make results that look like a painting, but the process of making it is hugely different. rather than gradually constructing a picture and making decisions at each turn, you try out successive prompts to get a page full of finished pictures, and generate variations on those pictures, until you find one you like. it's most similar to the client who describes an image they want and then makes requests to tweak it. there is still creativity in this, because it's kind of replicating the back-and-forth between an artist and client/art director/critique-giver/etc. however, in this analogy, it's hampered by the limited communication between you and the 'artist'. and it's a different sort of input, so we respond to it differently.

generating and posting AI art could also be compared to the kind of thing we do on this website, where we curate images we like and share them. you're all looking at the outputs of the same image generator and pointing and saying 'ooh, that one's cool'. what's kinda troublesome in this analogy is that AI obfuscates all that stuff about credit and inspiration, collapsing it all into one mass. unless their name was used in the prompt, you can't tell if the 'AI' image is 'drawing heavily' on any particular artist. this isn't a new problem - firstly websites full of uncredited images abound, secondly any creative process is inspired by loads of things that we can't enumerate or hope to divulge, so the idea of tracing the paths of inspiration is perhaps a mirage anyway. still, for me (sakuga fan type of person!), knowing what i can about the specific people involved in creating artwork and how they went about it is important, and that's heavily blackboxed by 'AI'.

none of this would be helped by harsher copyright laws. it's great that people can create derivative works and respond to existing art. that is the scaffold that launches us somewhere new and hopefully interesting. simply putting someone's work into an image generator to create similar pictures is not a very interesting statement in its own right, and a lot of AI illustration produced at the moment has a weirdly glossy, overproduced feeling that is offputting and leaves nowhere for the eye to settle (when it isn't just mush), but that's not to say AI is never going to be able to be used to say anything interesting or become a meaningful art form in its own right.

'AI' is kinda like a bunch of things but not exactly like any of them. (this isn't to get into the economic questions at all, that would be a much longer post!). but since there are people very sincerely devoted to this being an art form... I want to know how to 'read' these works - what I'm looking for in there, what a meaningful comment would be. bc right now when I see an illustration and realise it's AI generated image it's like... a sense of disappointment because whatever I was picking up on isn't actually part of the 'statement' in the way i thought. so it's like oh... that's nice. the machine picked a cool perspective huh? all the things i would normally appreciate in an illustration are outside the artist's control, so responding to them feels irrelevant! so what is the right mode here? there's more to it than just the choice of subject. but I feel like I have more to say about even a picrew.

#ai #yet another one of these lol #it's been on my brain i guess

[fish-tetris]

thinking about how law was (apparently??) being raised in the one piece catholic church™. thinking about how he specifically refers to the victories of the strawhats as miracles. thinking about how luffy has a god's devil fruit. thinking about law inclining his head and closing his eyes like he's praying towards the end of gear 5 luffy fighting kaido. is this anything.

#one piece #one piece spoilers #trafalgar law #and I guess I'll throw in a #lawlu #this isn't even me lawlu truthing tbh #i don't know what it is. but this post has been pinging around in my brain for 24 hours #law being raised catholic funny as shit to me btw #90% of his damage i'll chalk up to The Various Traumas and the rest is the catholicism #chinhands. is there a pope in one piece. #also sorry about the horrific quality images these are phone screenshots of a random streaming site

[stevebabey]

Eddie is beginning to wonder if he’ll ever reach a point where Steve couldn’t reduce him to this state.

This state being… transfixed. Eddie is sure he must look like a lovesick cartoon. In fact, if he could manage to drag his gaze away, he’d probably find red hearts circling around his head in a halo, popping like little bubbles.

But Eddie can’t move his eyes. Can’t even close his mouth either.

Steve’s talking to him too, which is most definitely worse — he’s totally missing every word. He can see Steve’s lips moving, pink plush lips wrapping around words but fuck, that was a total trap because now Eddie is just looking at his lips. He tries to refocus, to listen. His eyes just wander back to what he was staring back at the first place.

Was Steve like this all the time? Just a walking around looking so damn delectable?

Or is it Eddie, just a starved man who’s been living off stolen glances, for as long as he can remember? For once, he’s learning, he’s allowed to look.

And by God, is he looking.

Steve’s not even doing it on purpose either, which probably makes the whole thing funnier. Eddie knows what his boyfriend (boyfriend! he thinks giddily in his mind) looks like when he’s cleaned up to impress. He can spot the way Steve preens beneath Eddie’s lingering gaze.

This is not that. Today, Steve is just cleaning, a usual Sunday morning ritual.

He’s got some old sport shorts on and he’s clearly grown a bit since he first got them— unless Hawkins has always been giving out slutty little shorts to the basketball team (They haven’t. Eddie would know if they did.)

He’s wearing one of his wife-beater singlets too. It’s a little on the scrappy side though, considering it’s nearly see-through with how worn it is.

Honestly, in Eddie’s humble and gay opinion, it’s stupidly hot. The dark hair dusted across of Steve’s chest is visible beneath it, the shirt showing off the shape of his broad chest. Even better, his happy trail is visible and goddamn, if that doesn’t make Eddie happy, he doesn’t know what will.

But it’s not even that.

Quite frankly, Eddie’s rather embarrassed that he’s basically blue-screening because Steve is pulling out the cord out from the vacuum cleaner.

But… but he’s yanking it up towards his chest, slow and strong repetitive motions— that take enough effort to make his biceps bulge with every tug.

Eddie can’t stop watching. The cord must be several metres long and he’s not sure if he should be cursing it or thanking it for the view he gets; Steve’s tan arms flexing and rippling. Try as he might, Eddie can’t help imagining how they must look when Steve’s got his hand aroun—

“—hello? Are you even listening to me?”

Steve’s voice cuts into Eddie’s dangerously side-tracked thoughts and he pauses his tugging at the same time. It’s the thing that finally allows him to break his lustful stare at Steve’s arms. Oh God, he just got all hot and bothered over his boyfriend doing the vacuuming.

“Hello.” Eddie says back, because that was the first word to register in his brain. “I mean- yes. I’m—”

Eddie decides mid-sentence that he’s not getting away with the lie. He pivots. “Okay, no, I didn’t hear that. Would you please tell me what you just said, oh lovely sweet man of mine?”

Ever the butterer-upper, he was. Thank God it works on Steve. He rolls his eyes a little but there’s an adoring grin on his lips.

“Man of mine,” Steve mutters amusedly under his breath. He drops the vacuum cord on the carpeted floor and leans down the grab the handle of the vacuum. “You just kinda froze when you came in. I was asking if everything was okay? I’m just doing this room then I’ll be done, if you don’t like the noise.”

Eddie adores that Steve’s taken his silence as though he might be afraid of the vacuum cleaner or something. He nearly snorts aloud at how far from the truth it is.

“Uh huh.” Eddie nods, not bothering to correct him. He jerks a thumb behind him, pointing at nothing. “I’m just gonna…”

He spins on his heel and exits left stage, fast as he can while still looking normal (he’s unsuccessful, as he leaves a baffled Steve behind him.) As he enters into the kitchen and decides to fix them both a pot of coffee, Eddie lets himself giggle over the pure absurdity of what just happens.

It’s mortifying. It’s hilarious. He can never tell Steve.

Except, when Steve comes to find him in the kitchen and trades a kiss for some coffee, Eddie can’t help it. All he ever wants to do is make Steve laugh.

He decides it’s worth the embarrassment when Steve laughs so hard coffee comes out his nose.

Steve teasingly promises that he’ll to try be less distracting, then rescinds his words at Eddie’s abject reaction (“Don’t you dare.”) looking far too smug— in a delighted sort of way. Preening, in that way Eddie loves.

Their first kiss, as Eddie slides onto Steve’s lap and loops his arms over his shoulders, fingers dancing on those tasty arms, tastes a little bit like coffee. Their mugs grow cold, untouched.

Eddie doesn’t mind — he’s too busy finding out that the rest of their kisses taste like something between sunlight and Steve.

#have; the thought i’ve been having every time i vacuum #i’m one of those bitches who just like pulls out the cord the whole way when i start #and now i say so is steve #just a lil ficlet to get my writing brain up again #ruby writes steddie #steddie #steve x eddie #steddie fic #steddie ficlet #steve harrington #eddie munson #fluff #it’s always just fluff with me innit #<3 #i dunno how active we all still are…… 🧐 #guess i’ll find out

[gravedigg]

in my dreaming you'll be drowning Hells below God above all drunk on my love

#look i know this kinda looks like shit #but it was in my brain #ive been trying to use more interesting color palettes #bg3 #Virgil Acheron #enver gortash #baldur's gate 3 #the dark urge spoilers #durgetash #durge #bg3 spoilers #the dark urge #goretash #lord gortash #bg3 fanart #bg3 durge #my art #suggestive #i guess #lyrics are long snake moan by pj harvey which is a very durgetash song #envirgil

[a-s-levynn]

"A sacred guardian" A Series of Small Offerings - IV/1 - day33

#a series of small offerings #sleep token fanart #levynn tries to draw #i had this thing in my head since i put together the small offerings challenge #that was in last november #so this was cooking in my brain for some time now #this was the only one i had a very clear idea for what i wanted #the only thing wasn't set in stone was what runes i want to put on him #this is my sistine chapel #this is the peak #we only gonna go down from here #hope you like it because i worked on this pretty much all day and i've never been this happy or satisfied with anything i ever did probably #and yes this is one of my standard ca. 13 cm tall drawings as per usual before anyone asks #also yes Darya you guessed it that was the tmbte moon rising on the missing limbs one #sleep token #vessel fanart #vessel i #i sleep token #sleep token i #vessel sleep token #sleep token vessel #sleep token band #sleeptoken #levynn tries to think

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

fantasy au scribbles!!

#ft. bardaby and wall beefing <3 #ok yeah im just gonna call possessed wally wall. #cause yk. homes. home. walls. wall. #the alternative options were like. walome. holly. etc. bad options #In My Mind that scribble is the result of barnaby's first time seeing home possess wally #he did not know home could do that! they'd already had a very stressful and bad few months! #both of them were at their limits and were ready to Start Biting! #scribble salad #wh fantasy au #wh au #welcome home au #anyway yeah i gave howdy a lil ponytail. what about it #and his lil magic bullet bandolier <3 #ALSO DRAWING THE PUPPETS WITH TEETH IS FUN BUT ALSO VERY STRANGE #I AM NOT USED TO SHOVING CHOMPERS IN THEIR FACES #but in this au they're Real Fleshy Beings so. they need teeth i guess #ok i just wanted to give them teeth in a way that my brain allowed #still very unwell about this lil au btw #my little imaginings have been keeping me going lately #my favorite plotlines at present are bardaby-home bonding / wally & home are separated / ocean adventures / disembowelment <3 #fun things all around!

[rapidhighway]

i was thinking up some prime scenarios and i had like a scene where Sonic and Shadow have to hide out somewhere in like New Yoke or whatever and became possessed

(dont tag as ship)

#sonic prime #sth #shadow the hedgehog #sonic the hedgehog #doodle #sonic fanart #i like to think she'd figured it out like a yer ago she just came out to rouge and omega and no one else dijffjfihvifdjd #one fic i red has been invading my brain so i guess thats where this came from #i have trans girl shadow on the mindddd #impprobably not gonna do shit with this i just liked this fjcijijcrijrci

[oodlesodoodles]

Harry squeezes a local Club manager to let them have a swim in the fancy ass pool in return for keeping a drugging/poisoning case quiet

#Ive been really productive the last few days but i go back to work so thats gonna change #Maybe this isnt universal but the most easygoing and eager to skinnydippers ive met are trans guys haha #And i like the thought of kim being so tightened til theres relative privacy and also a body of water OUT OF THE WAY #Hes really disapproving of harry doing this until it works! Then hes excited. so they come back in the wee hours to 'interview a late night #They have to be hush about it bc they dont want anyone else tagging along #God when im bored for multiple days instead of doing chores my brains starts writting fic i guess.

[zu-is-here]

☆ Happy 2nd anniversary to Trapped ☆

(In case someone would want to play this :D)

#zu art #zu music #trapped #error!sans #blueberror #underswap!sans #swap!sans #us!sans #undertale #undertale au #utmv #sheet music #MUSIC?? Music! :D #it's been sO LoNg heheh #and then coming up with this in just two days?? #my brain wanted to compose something depressing for these two heh #but my heart said otherwise <3 #there's something calm in this tragedy #there's something tragic in this calm #guess when I realized I need a cover... XD #enjoy! <3

[rockmoth]

T-Tsukasa pony… 🤲

Please don’t ask me how long this took, it’s embarrassing. (11 Hours.)

Oh and a bonus Rui pony included, completely free of charge (i’m so kind), idk he kinda walked in here and i couldn’t throw him out.

Would have included the full speedpaint but that wound up being 10 minutes long because, yknow, 11 hour drawing… so here’s the short version (pls let me post tumblr plsssss let me post).

#colorful stage #project sekai #prsk #pjsk #tsukasa tenma #wxs tsukasa #wonderlands x showtime #wxs fanart #rui kamishiro #wxs rui #ruikasa #i guess? #this has been rotting in my brain for 2 days #mlp #??? maybe #have fun with this one #my art #ponysekai

[egophiliac]

We ARE going to bring up Captain Amelia. You have good taste! GOOD TASTE I SAY! *aka I just rewatched Treasure Planet and got hit with, "Oh yeahhhhh... that explains a lot!"*

honestly, the Meg/Jasmine/Amelia trifecta tells you 90% about me as a person. (the rest is covered by Sailor Jupiter and Sailor Uranus and, uhhh, I'll stop baring my soul to the world now)

and speaking of Amelia, this is tangential, but like -- there's one Twst comic I have been kicking at for a while where I needed an RSA sports/flight teacher and, uh, well

someday I will wrangle this stupid comic into coherency and she'll get to make an appearance (in the background of a single panel, half-obscured by a tall hat) (but I will know she's there and that's the important thing)

#art #twisted wonderland #twst oc #my plan worked i've tricked you all into looking at my anime catgirl oc #she exists to yell at some rsa boys so she doesn't really have like. a character or story or anything. sorry! #(her name is alexandria north and that is what she considers a sporty outfit. that's as far as i got) #this is the one that is mainly about silver and neige having a mutual bluebird friend and i am having terrible trouble making it not suck #which given some of the stuff i post should tell you something about how it's going so far #(it's just kind of an incoherent mess of ideas at this point. nothing specific just ~the creative process~) #maybe the rest of episode 7 will give my brain the kickstart it needs. depends on how that goes i guess #god. the next episode 7 bit drops in (probably) just a few days. #I'M NOT READY #i have simultaneously never been ready and always been ready #i exist in a perpetual state of impatience

[generalmoony]

Help me 🤡

#good omens #good omens 2 #illustration #artists on tumblr #crowley x aziraphale #aziracrow #aziraphale #crowley #fan art #my art #inneffable husbands #inneffable idiots #fluff fics have been holding my mental health together by a thread 💀 #sorry to my followers #this is how my brain works I guess #Roman Crowley snatched my wig

[guillotine-drop]

Gage is definitely contender for the funniest Fallout 4 companion because he’s such a sad little kind of ugly loser of a man, who basically everyone in Nuka-World either hates or just dismisses every time he opens his mouth, and who will spill his guts to you at the first opportunity just to tell you about how shitty and sad his life is

“Yeah I think I’ll just be the guy behind the Overboss pulling the strings” shut the fuck up you’re my pet now boy. Put the collar and maid dress on

#yeah dude #fallout #fallout 4 #Nuka world #porter gage #can you guess what DLC has been taking up the bulk of my brain space. this HDD is FULL and it’s 75% this ugly little man #24% Mags Black and 1% everything else. as it should be #he’s just so miserable and pathetic. I want to lock him in a cage and jab him with a stick

[nuclearanomaly]

He didn't get the memo...

#ffxiv #Ninira Ninra #Estinien #Estinien Wyrmblood #Estinien Varlineau #wolstinien #Y'shtola Rhul #G'raha Tia #woo! managed to finish my haha the gang enjoying chill dawntrail time comic before dawntrail comes out #the comic that I guess maybe could be considered a lore drop lmao #I mentioned this in passing recently and so many people came to scream WHAT at me #teehee :^) #it's okay graha you're not the only one (clearly) #and if I had done this right there would have been a comic before this one actually lmao #but maybe I can make that one happen too (doubt) (hopeful) #technically my brain says there should be a part 3 follow up to this too but we will see #art: mine

[munamania]

common shane dyke moment

#a.og #heheh this has been in my brain since i first heard this song #the l word #shane mccutcheon #and is it heavily biased to s1-carmen. yeah #lil peek of my icon in there #kate moennig #this is one of those uh. personal projects u know. made for me but i guess if anyone here watches or just thinks shes hot here u go <3

[sonic-adventure-3]

unmmmmm outfit concept or something

#the main thing qbout this is that i’ve been really wanting to design wrist guards for shadow #stil have no idea how to go about it #i wanted to make them look somewhere btwn real wrist guards and his boom gauntlets #I HAVE FINALLY DRAWN HIM ON SKATES THOUGH thats a win #these would be city skates or even rec skates ig. this outfit isn’t practical for aggressive skating #this is a fashion outfit not an activity outfit whatever whatever #i so wanted to give him a longer skirt but long skirts are not practical for skating whatsoever #so i settled for a shorter skirt but i think shadow would rock long skirts remind me to draw him in a long skirt sometime later #art is hard today this is mediocre and i didn’t draw it how i wanted to but it’s at least out kf my brain #ignore how i sketched the same exact thing thrice. well i guess it’s hardto ignore #uuuuuuuuuuuuuu whatever i’m sleeby i’ll hopefully revisit this someday later #doodles #shadow #action sport posting #my art #i GUESS. ppl seem to like it so it can go in my proper art tag. i guess.