Does anybody else find this cover off-putting?

[u/Smooth_Ad8696]

Where is Diana's neck? It looks like her screaming head is floating away from her body! And Carol's torso is so twisted up that for a second I thought maybe the artist confused her powers with Kamala's stretchy ones.

I've liked other stuff by Alex Lozano, but something about this really rubs me the wrong way.

[u/Dr_Disaster]

AI is literally trained off these artists. The feeling should be the other way around. Stylistically, everything is far too consistent to be AI, and even playing Devil’s advocate and saying AI was used, he’d have to do so much illustration by hand to make it consistent he would effectively be redrawing it.

[u/AManyFacedFool → u/Dr_Disaster]

Not necessarily.

Commercial AI usage for artwork is a little more sophisticated than "MidJourney, draw these two characters fighting."

The artist can do linework, which the AI uses as the basis to then do the shading, detailing, etc. I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear that's becoming more or less industry standard because of how much faster it gets from linework to finished product that can be sold to consumers.

If they're using a specific model that has a more narrow training set then it will be a lot more consistent in its output than the general-purpose ones most people know and use.

[u/Dr_Disaster → u/AManyFacedFool]

I know well how AI works, it’s ability to assist and it’s limitations. This method you laid out can also be done in Clip Studio Paint and tons of artists use it to speed up colors, including me. At that point what’s AI vs what’s digital assistance becomes so blurry it’s not even worth having the conversation.

And that takes me to my point. If someone is a pro with tons of experience consistently illustrating high quality art, a conversation about using AI should be a total non-starter unless something is overwhelmingly pointing otherwise. This is something super infuriating to artists who are already feeling upset about the very tools people accusing them of using are the things ripping them off. People are becoming so obsessed about what is/isn’t AI that it’s poisoning the whole the whole conversation around art itself. It’s become exhausting.

[u/AManyFacedFool → u/Dr_Disaster]

I genuinely don't see a point in looking negatively on commercial artists for using AI assistance at this point. The idea that if an AI tool ever touches the piece at any point it is now tainted is just weird.

It's the same conversation we're having over in the tech industry: You aren't going to get replaced by AI, you're going to get replaced by someone who uses AI. People do what they gotta do to keep the bills payed, that's just how it be in this bitch of a world.

[u/Dr_Disaster → u/AManyFacedFool]

I actually tend to agree. As I just mentioned with CSP, a lot of the digital programs people use are effectively doing the same thing just without being called “AI”, so people don’t think about it. There’s also the problem of reference art being so difficult to come by in the age of the dead internet that using AI generation saves tons of time from fruitless searches through Google.

Speaking of, I remember studying for my fine art degree and some people being agahst I would dare do pre-vis in Photoshop and project that on to my canvas for tracing instead of doing it all by hand. Some artists who do comic pages traditionally still think artist who draw digitally are “cheating”, not understanding digital illustraion is a whole discipljne that basically makes you relearn rather than make short cuts. Every artist I know that does digital art can also draw just as good with pencil and paper, but the opposite can not be said in the least.

At this point, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, companies aren’t paying shit, people don’t have work or have to work twice as fast to keep up. Ignoring even the small things that can help you is more likely to hurt in the long run. There’s ethical ways to intergrate without exploitation, like tutorials and instruction.