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Artists vs AI; Counselling Course Concerns

11 months ago1,140 words

While AI can produce high-quality art quickly, in my experience, art's value comes from the creation process, at least in the sense of personal pride. Also, I've been losing sleep over doubts about the social dice roll I'll be making next week...

I used to draw a lot, and poured many, many hours into refining my skills. But then I suppose distractions like uni came up, and I got more into 3D modelling, so my drawing skills ended up stagnant and neglected. Most of what I've drawn over the past few years has been quickly-sketched concept art for game projects.

Generative AI is a prominent feature of the Zeitgeist, though, and my mixed feelings about that led me to follow communities of artists on Reddit, which are apparently full of scorn and fear directed at the 'AI bros' gleefully automating their creative hobbies or careers away. Immersing myself in that rekindled my desire to draw, so:



I drew this the other day. It's one of several pieces of concept art I drew to refine the main characters of my Dreamons game; I posted the rest on ∞ my Patreon ∞.

It took me a couple of hours, and objectively speaking, its quality is far below what generative AI can produce in seconds (some artists try and comfort themselves by claiming the art produced by AI is technically lacking; I think they're delusional, or grasping at straws, and it's only going to keep improving anyway). But I keep opening up the image to just stare proudly at it! Not because it's great art, but because it's my art. Probably similar to how parents feel about their objectively mediocre offspring. Our emotional connections to things are what give them meaning and value to us, rather than their intrinsic qualities.

The comments in the anti-AI-art communities that ring most true to me are those that talk about how cheap or valueless each individual AI-produced image is. They're 'good', even amazing, in a technical sense, but because they can be produced with such little time and effort, there's no reason to really become attached to any single one. I create a new Art folder on my PC every year, and I sometimes look back through them as a way of essentially revisiting the past (I suppose other people use photo albums - digital or otherwise - for this, but almost all of my experiences are personal and digital). Someone on Reddit wondered whether any of these 'AI bros' even remember their first, second, or tenth generated image. I wonder that too.



That concept art was meant as a step towards making further progress on either Dreamons or the non-game thing I worked on recently but have yet to show (but which I recently decided will focus on these same dreamon characters)... and that's still the plan!

But I've been knackered - as they say here in the UK - for the past two or three days due to poor sleep. It's so frustrating how much of an impact that can make to psychological wellbeing, but it's not as if you can just decide to fall asleep. It wasn't that I stayed up late or anything; I just woke up hours earlier than I would have liked to, and just lay there in the dark with my eyes shut trying to fall back asleep and failing.

This happens sometimes - and seems related to mental illness, either as an exacerbator or result of - and it's always frustrating when it does, especially if I have plans. Like planning a day out only for it to be pouring down with rain on the day.

This time, it's likely due to worries about this counselling course that I'll be starting next week. Not because of anything to do with the course content - if anything I'm anticipating it being trivial - but because of how rarely I leave the house, and how long it's been since I last interacted with people other than one-on-one like with the recent counsellor.

Mostly I'm just aware that I'm hoping it might offer me a rope out of the pit I'm in - in the form of even a single meaningful local friendship - though based on past experiences I'm also expecting to be disappointed.

If one of my coursemates is a woman around my age who's similarly weird, lonely, and open to connection, then that could blossom into all kinds of new experiences for the both of us, and my life could take a must less tragic trajectory as a result of it.

But if instead my classmates are barely 20, or 40+ and married with children, then any interactions are likely to be superficial and restricted to the classroom, and I'll leave feeling hopeless and miserable.

The latter is by far the most likely outcome - it's how things went whenever I went to local groups and such in the past - and I know that I shouldn't be putting all my eggs in one basket, but...

Later in the year I should also try things like volunteering or getting some part-time job or something, but it all just feels so bleak based on how many times I tried in the past and how my efforts never bore fruit just because the other people at the things I went to weren't even in the class of people it'd be appropriate or meaningful for me to connect with.

I've also been thinking a lot about how I should engage more with online communities, like maybe I could try engaging with art ones again... I met my ex on deviantART, after all. But I'm much older now, and I don't think I could manage long distance again. Plus I'm terrible at mustering up the motivation to post anywhere online, I take days to reply to messages, if I even reply at all... And everyone seems to use group Discord servers, which isn't how I prefer to interact at all. I prefer something one-on-one and less ephemeral and realtime(ish), at least at first.

It all just feels like an insurmountable amount of effort, and knowing from past experiences that there's no guarantee of 'success' - and a very real chance of attracting malicious attention instead - keeps me paralysed. Bleh.

At least I'll be trying the counselling course, despite my doubts. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. I can but hope. The isolation is killing me.



I also meant to use this post to finally get around to checking last year's goals and making some new ones for 2024, but I'm really tired and it's taken me much longer than I'd prefer to muster up the motivation even to write this (I meant to write it on Friday; it's Monday evening now). So maybe next week.