In early 2022, I did a series of fantasy pinups. My Patreon and Twitter followers voted on which characters from any given week would show up in future weeks. Little narratives started to unfold each time a character was featured; we eventually ended up with overarching narratives and characters whose stories overlapped. When I sat down to figure out what kinds of comics I wanted to make this year, fleshing those stories was as good of a place to start as any.

Images released under CC0. Workflow includes a combination of manually rendered content and assets generated by Stable Diffusion.

Shit looks like AI art, nah man.

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The workflow includes AI. For this chapter, I hand drew the characters and had the AI do several passes over them for the final renders, and then did manual touch-ups. When I was making chapter 1, the adult content AI models genuinely sucked- the AI didn't know what a dick was, much less what penetrative sex was- so there was a lot of manual illustration and manual touch-ups.

I've been a full-time freelance illustrator since about 2015. AI represents the death- or drastic change- of my old way of life. Not saying I was terribly good, but I was good enough and reliable enough to squeeze by. In 2022, most of my freelance work was character illustrations and portraits, though... the stuff that AI knocks out of the park without even trying.

AI might be the grave of my career, but, well... look for what joy in life that you can. Find the things that bring you satisfaction and relish them. If you are presented with your own grave, might as well take the opportunity to dance on top of it ❤️

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@sketchquest AI generation is a tool just like Photoshop is a tool. You use that tool instead of beaing its slave. Good job.

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Put the fact that this is AI generated in your title, so it gets the tag and people's filters work...

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Gotcha. I'll add the AI generated tag in the title. When I was first double-checking the wiki, I saw that we weren't supposed to tag the software used to create the images. But! That's a fair request.

There are other projects I've worked on where it probably falls under the "AI was only used as a tool in the process of creating something that does not have the obvious visual appearance of being AI-generated", but it's arguable enough that this has the obvious visual appearance- so I'm happy to roll with it 👍

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thanks to this crap i've now learned that AI not only fucks up hands and muscles but it fucks up testicles too

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Let me say dude: I’ve seen you post in support of AI art in a few of the artist groups I’m in, and as strongly as I am against the abuse of AI art as many of us artist have experienced thanks to “dudebrotechjocks” , you’re one of the few I’ve seen do it properly. You use it as a tool. As I understand from how you’ve described your process in the past, you fed your own work into the AI to help more quickly format pages, the go back and edit the problem areas as you see fit. This process would save HOURS for comic or quick turn-around artists and is still ethically viable since the program is being fed the artists own work, therefore giving consent to it generating based on their own body. I have to applaud you. I’m going to continue to not look at AI generated work, but yours falls in a new category: AI assisted. That’s not even close to being the same thing.

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Utter garbage.
Traitors like you should burn.

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"AI might be the grave of my career, but, well... look for what joy in life that you can. Find the things that bring you satisfaction and relish them. If you are presented with your own grave, might as well take the opportunity to dance on top of it "

tl;dr "lol fuck it get that bag and step on the corpses of anybody who actually made an effort in their life"

It's seems like an impossible hurtle but you're actually worse than the AI trogs shitting out endless galleries of glossy titted trash: you're an "artist" who's too lazy to get better and took the easy way out. Hey, at least you're right, you'll still be making a living typing prompts eight hours a day because you gave up any sense of dignity unlike all the other real artists who didn't and had to end their career, congrats.

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@Kawlson I appreciate that! I've lost access to posting in a lot of my favorite groups since I introduced AI into my workflow, and it can kinda feel like I'm talking into the void. Adobe's image generation is out, though, and it's a matter of time before its integrated into Photoshop. When that happens, a lot of people will see how it can be more than 'prompt-and-post'- that it can be a tool. As people use it more and more for things like small touch-ups or textures, it'll become impossible for mods to police 0 tolerance policies. I expect that the distinction you offered- AI generated vs. AI assisted- is going to be the common way communities thread the needle. I just wish we could skip to that part, lol.

@Evulchibi I've been told that I should burn by a pretty wide range of people throughout my life. I guess I'll just have to add "Artists whose careers are more secure than mine" to the list.

You are a skilled artist, with a good following. If you ever soften your stance on AI, I hope that you're able to find empowering uses for it. Either way, I hope that you'll be able to maintain your share of the market going forward- attitude towards random artists online aside, you produce good work.

@fletchlives Prompts play a pretty minimal role in my workflow- a lot more of it comes down to manually drawing the compositions, creating linework to guide the AI, masking out different sections, compositing elements together, and making custom fine-tuned models for the desired aesthetics and character designs.

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An AI artist that actually uses their own drawings with the AI... You're the first guy I find who does it. Not really my thing, but I can respect that.

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You know, from the wievpoint not of an artist but of one watching art, I think that "AI-generated" is probably NOT the right tag for this gallery. The AI tag is to warn us that we are to expect bland, generic faces and random number of digits made with zero effort.

This is not the case here. Because (back to the artist's wievpoint) this is not mindlessly generated by a bot. This is generated by an artist using the bots algorithms in a very deliberate way over his own art. As others have agreed, this particular gallery would be an example not of "AI-generated" but of "AI-asisted". (Maybe even THE VERY FIRST EXAMPLE OF SUCH. Maybe not. But it would be HILARIOUS if the first example of using AIs as tools and not as zero-effort hacks were in porn).

Anyway. back to some users complaining that this should be tagged so people's filters work, I think this should NOT be tagged because this is NOT what people who filters against AI are usually filtering against.

Thoughts?

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The [AI Generated] tag is used incorrectly here. From the definition (as of the time of this comment):

Notes: ... It is not applicable if AI was only used as a tool in the process of creating something that does not have the obvious visual appearance of being AI-generated, e.g. if it has painted over.

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I'm pretty fond of the this site's AI policy- I think it's a bit ahead of the game compared to most places.

The question with this particular work is the degree to which it does or does not hit the 'obvious visual appearance of being AI-generated' caveat in the policy. It's most debatable in the goblin chapter- a lot of new techniques for controlling the output and doing custom training have been released since then. It becomes less arguable with every chapter.

Still, we're early enough in the AI transition that some folks won't want to see *anything* touched by AI processes. I'm okay with taking a conservative interpretation of 'obvious visual appearance' this time around. That's definitely open to change later on.

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This shit is starting to REALLY piss me off!!!!

AI should be completely and permanently banned from every and all porn in general!

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To me, the only proper way to use AI Generated art, is to use it as a reference. That seems like a good way to go about it. Especially if you're trying to come up with landscapes or poses.

You feed the info into the algorithm, then use the artwork it produces as a REFERENCE (Not Trace) to draw YOUR OWN art. Many professionals use live models, real life landscapes and other artist's styles (H.R. Giger's art is referenced A LOT) to come up with their own pieces. Alex Ross takes photos of live models in costumes to use as a reference for many pieces he's done.

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Life has been a bit of a pain, so I'm going to throw all of chapter three up in one fell swoop. I've also included a couple images with a really loose breakdown of how the AI workflow works on a project like this.

The kinds of workflows people think about- where you type in a prompt and get an image- are definitely doable. I think of those as fishing expeditions where you toss out a net and see if you catch anything good. Sometimes I'll go through that to create references for my own sketches, and sometimes I work directly over them- just depends on the goal. The less specificity you need in the output, and the less complexity there will be, the more freedom you can give the AI.

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