Unpopular opinion: AI art tools are making traditional artists better, not replacing them

I spent a week last month running a little experiment where I used DALL-E to generate rough concepts for my pet portraits, then painted over them by hand. Ended up finishing 4 pieces in 5 days, which is double my usual pace. Do you think using AI as a sketch tool is cheating, or is it just adapting to the times?

3 comments

3 Comments

charles_price13d ago

Man, I feel you on this one. I tried the same thing with some landscape pieces last month, and it honestly saved me from spending hours trying to get the lighting right in my rough sketches. I don't see it as cheating at all, it's just a faster way to get past the boring parts and focus on the actual painting. The thing is, you still have to know your craft to make the final piece look good, the AI just helps you skip some of the grunt work. Sounds like you found a solid way to boost your output without cutting corners on quality.

oscarh1613d ago

@charles_price next you'll tell me tracing is a legitimate art form too.

theathomas13d ago

A friend of mine who does watercolor landscapes told me a story last week. She was frustrated with a forest scene she had been trying to sketch for three days. The tree shadows kept coming out wrong and she was about to scrap the whole thing. Out of desperation, she plugged her rough description into an AI generator just to see what kinds of shadow patterns it would come up with. She used that as a reference, not as a final product, and finished the painting in one afternoon. The piece ended up selling at a local gallery show two days later. I think that says more about the artist's skill than it does about the tool.