ai and traditional art fusion blog

Bio-Booster Armor Garfield: Extended Opener, 1989

In the late 80s, anime was hyper-violent, and licensing was out of control.

Quite a bit! As is my custom, I used Vidu for this, using the Q3 model.

Stage 1: Assembling the Monsters

The first step was expanding the cast.

The original Bio-Booster Armor Garfield only featured Jon, Liz, the Garfield armor, Roy, Wade, and the Sheep twins from U.S. Acres. Three Farmanoid designs weren't going to cut it, so I wound up making new designs, both for the V1 characters and the previously unused US Acres characters Booker, Sheldon, the Worm, Blue and Cody, as well as all three of Orson's brothers Mort, Gort and Wort.

The more complex characters needed multiple angles, simpler ones I could manage with a single view.

Most of the Farmanoids are also referencing a specific zoanoid, Gort/Gregole, Roy/Vamore, Worm/Elegen, etc. Odie took the role of Guyver III, while Nermal took on the role of Guyver II. Orson became a Zoalord based on Hamlicar Barcas (get it?), etc.

Humans also needed similar expansion. Turns out Jon literally has no friends that aren't Lyman or Liz, so his cousin Doc Boy became the basis of Tetsuro's counterpart. Al Swindler seemed like the perfect human form for Roy.

Stage 2: The Shot-for-Shot Sections

If you want to know why AI isn't likely to be very effective in traditional film/TV workflows, try making a shot-for-shot remake of something. The first half I tried to match the OVA opener, and despite having access to Vidu Q2's video-reference feature, it was only really useful on the mega-smasher (chest beam) and armor-up sequences.

For a lot of sequences I wound up storyboarding out major frames to guide the gen, like with Lyman's gun-drawing animation, the Side view Farmanoid leap, the arm-blade extensions, etc.

But for the most part, if something used the old-school anime 'sliding image' technique, I had to do it manually because the AI wouldn't do things that simply.

For the Lyman gun zoom, I wound up making a double-wide animated loop combining a scrolling and zooming background, a still frame of Lyman, some smoke loops I made with simple morphing frames, and the same lens flare re-upscaled three times to produce three slightly different flares I could cycle through and then rotate.

80s anime was full of all kinds of little tricks to get the most out of 1-3 frames of animation, tricks that are super-easy to do with basic video editing software.

In other cases, I'd get close results, like Nermal stomping on Garf's face or Garf decapitating Roy, that needed tweaking, so a bit of compositing and overlaying helped bring them up to project needs without spending a ton of extra credits generating false starts.

Garf wind up with Nermal's face scar because the AI got confused with their similar designs? Roy still has a head, isn't bleeding, and Garf's using an entirely new blade instead of the one on his arm? Time to do some tracking and compositing.

Step 3: Putting it Together

If your thought was 'you just prompt it' then you've fallen for the joint AI industry/AI critic campaign. For those that don't use premiere, blue is a clip, pink's a still or text, and green is a nested sequence of more clips.

"A drawing of a dog holding a bone."

Everyone yelling “AI art isn’t real art!” seems to believe they’ve cracked some universal truth — that anything made with a tool must be effortless and brainless.

But here’s my question: who actually told you that prompt + click = result?

Was it Midjourney’s Discord thumbnail at 512x512?

Was it some meme of a soulless cyborg churning out anime faces?

Or was it your own lack of experience masquerading as a hot take?

Because let me walk you through a basic “click to result” StableDiffusion flow:

First, you invent a scene. You visualize the lighting, expression, tension, texture, story — a full-blown internal composition.

Then, you write the prompt. Oh, and not just one. You write 30. And you tune them. And you test what each word actually does.

You get a “draft”? Congrats. Now you start fixing: Inpainting the face that melted like a crayon. Outpainting the background that doesn’t match your story. Rebuilding the pose because the character has 3 elbows and no spine.

Then upscale? Oops, it ruined the eyes. Fix again.

Then composition shifts? Fix again.

Then color grading? Details? Harmony? Fix. Again. And again.

Until the scene feels right — not perfect, but alive.

Now tell me… what part of this was “just clicking”?

This isn’t about “soulless machines.”

This is about people who think effort = brushstrokes and nothing else.

People who think their suffering is what makes their art real.

And people who refuse to acknowledge that creativity can live beyond the tools they were taught in college.

❝Creativity is not a medium. It’s not a job title. It’s not your suffering. It’s the ability to turn a vague feeling into something you can share — and that doesn’t go away just because you used a model.❞

So tell me again —

The problem isn't with your imagination, it's with the fact that ai generated images aren't original, not truly. They pick and choose creations from other people without their knowledge or consent (and often against their wishes), then collages them together, then mislabels it as "original art," when it's actually plagiarism and theft. There are dozens of other ways for you to express your imagined scene or character that don't involve theft and actually encourage human artists rather than soulless machines (for characters, you can use picrew, gacha, etc).

The main reason artists are in an uproar is because we're basically powerless to stop these algorithms and machines from taking our hard work (that often takes hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months or years to complete), desecrating it and making it into something it was never intended to be, and then claiming that this fake brain machine made an original creation.

You can come up with a beautiful idea in your mind, but in the end it's not you or the machine who made it, it's the people who did actual art before that point in time. You can tell the website or app how to change details on the work to fit your ideas better, but you can never claim that you made it all on your own and that it's 100% an original work. It will always be influenced by the hands of those who did the work and then had it stolen from them. The algorithm ai uses can't actually create something like a human can; it can only ever use what it finds online and then twist it to squish it into the mold of your prompt. Ultimately, no matter how involved in the process you are, you're still reliant upon someone else to do it for you. There's nothing wrong with not being an artist or designer with the ability to create this perfect art of your dreams. The problem comes when, instead of asking someone with those skills to do it for you and then giving them credit, you tell a machine to cut and paste fragments of stolen art that people poured their souls into, and then say it's just as good, just as thought out, just as meaningful, just as skilled, as people who have spend years, even decades, learning and improving those skills.

Not to mention, generative AI is TERRIBLE for the environment and is actively causing problems with the water supply in the poorer neighborhoods where these ai plants are being built. Instead of endorsing an actual artist, ai not only steals work and credit, but also the basic human right to water. Ai is poisoning our planet. We've lived this long without it, we absolutely can and should continue to survive without it.

Beethoven went deaf before he wrote one of his best known symphonies. Monet was color blind. Van Gogh had mental health issues and addiction problems. John Bramblitt is blind and still creates gorgeous paintings that sell around the world today. Frida Khalo was bed bound and had chronic pain. Sarah Biffin HAD NO ARMS and had only vestigial legs, lived in the 17th century, AND SHE PAINTED WITH HER MOUTH INSTEAD OF GIVING UP. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE HUMAN SPIRIT IS - DETERMINATION TO DO IT OURSELVES AND TEACH OURSELVES WHATEVER SKILLS WE NEED TO ACHIEVE OUR GOALS AND DREAMS. Often the biggest obstacle to not being able to do some skill or have some specific talent is your own belief that you can't do it, and thus won't actually give the time, patience, blood, sweat, and tears it takes to gain that skill. Our technology has made us so impatient that we often won't bother learning or doing something if it'll take more than an hour or two.

In short -

1) generative AI is theft, it steals art and credit

2) it demeans artists who have spent years honking their skill and cheapens their blood, sweat, & tears

3) it's soulless and can't ever be truly original

4) it's horrible for the environment and for the people who live near the plants for these servers and machines

5) ART CAN BE LEARNED, YES IT TAKES A LONG TIME, BUT EVEN A STICK FIGURE IS BETTER THAN WHATEVER MOCKERY OF HUMAN CREATIVITY A MACHINE SLAPS TOGETHER IN AN INSTANT

Final note - if I see someone advertising a product with ai, I immediately assume it's cheap and not worth my time. If a business can't bother to hire an actual graphic designer, then they can't afford to make a good quality product, and I will not even consider buying it.

AI GENERATED IMAGES CHEAPEN HUMAN CREATIVITY AND SOUL.

thank you for coming to my TedTalk, here is a really good skit made by a real person named Miranda Mars that really helps: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8DKuYeC/

I am currently going through a rather difficult period in my life, and I would be lying if I said that it was not caused by the spread of AI among the masses. I'm really scared of AI. Every time I come across products made with artificial intelligence, I catch myself thinking that the end of the living world has come. Any media - whether it's videos, pictures, photos (can this word even be applied to AI?), images on products... It scares me how easy it is now to replace a human being with a soulless algorithm that has been trained on the tears of artists, animators, and creators! The internet scares me because it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the truth from the lies with the spread of this damn AI. But I've strayed from the topic.

Do you want to create/drawing? Well, learn how to draw! Especially if you can already picture in your head what the result should be. After all, the value of art lies in the creation, in the process, in the soul that you put into the drawing. Is it hard? Yes! Creativity and drawing are hard! BUT that makes them more valuable!

So it's better to pick up a pencil and start drawing yourself than to defend AI, which steals from others and kills creativity and soul wherever it can reach.

Since then:

– China recognised authorship when a human edits or directs the final output,

– multiple jurisdictions are shifting toward hybrid authorship,

– and some creators don’t even consider copyright the moral backbone of art to begin with.

But "raw AI gens" is the important part there.

The USPTO has been pretty clear on this for the past two years, the machine-generated parts are public domain, but the parts that aren't can be protected. It all functions exactly like any other public domain material in that regard.

Yeah, you can gank raw gens day in and day out, but you can't really be certain how much work someone's done to any given image unless they tell you.

Maybe that song is 100% AI, but if it's been remixed in post, or if the lyrics are human authored, the human author has a claim.

Maybe that image was 100% generated, or maybe the AI was just used to edit the photo, or the image was composited together from multiple gens. Photoshop works on AI gens just fine.

If that video is more than 10 seconds long, then you should probably err on the side of assuming mixed rights.

--

And as for the "Learn how to draw" aspect. I did, and how to sew, and how to puppeteer and puppetsmith, and how to paint (on canvas an miniatures), and how to propbuild, (along with a dozen other skills in my jack-of-all-trades-box) and now I can't do any of it because when my hands aren't shaking they are in agony from the arthritis, the pinched shoulder and neck nerves, or both.

I can still work a mouse and type, though not nearly for as long as I used to. I can still edit, composite, and color, sometimes, so that's what I do. With AI, I can parlay those skills into executions of my weird fauxstalgia and unreality projects. I can get things done in the windows of functionality before the pain kills my momentum.

So if you're after inspiration porn, I'm playin' through the pain even when it's AI-assisted work. There's going to come a day when even that will be too much, and I'm enjoying the time I have until then.

So, here's a challenge:

Two sets of comic pages.

On the top, we have "Stunning True-Life Tales of Science Fiction #1 - Robots Ruined the Internet" which was made with public domain comic scans de-colored, composited, re-inked, and re-colored into a new context.

One the bottom we have three pages from "The Secret Origin of Wally Manmoth" which was made with public domain AI gens de-colored, composited, re-inked and recolored into a new context.

The exact same process, except for where the public domain images came from, the first is art by actual human beings that fell into the public domain because the copyrights weren't renewed, back when that was still possible. The second is AI gens made with Midjourney and Dall-E 3, made from math obtained by studying what is essentially the entire human zeitgeist, as manifest in the searchable internet.

I don't really see how one demeans the human spirit while the other does not, or how one is more moral than the other. Further, I've been doing digital photocollage for decades, often with almost entirely copyrighted materials, nary a peep about it.

There's no avenue to hem out AI art that doesn't take out entire mediums of established art. Collage is just the most easy comparison, given how many people mistakenly liken AI to collage.

Also, prompting isn't what it used to be.

Prompting has gotten a lot more complicated as the technology has advanced. For video prompting, for instance, it's rare to just type in an entirely textual request. Most systems use a starting and optional ending frame, several now have multi-keyframe options, and then there's reference-to-video (and image).

For example, with Vidu, a prompt usually winds up being a main prompt establishing the shot direction, and separate reference prompts for the locale, characters, and props.

You can text prompt all you like but you'll never get the above shot with pure text prompting, much less in such a way that allows the characters to be consistent shot-to-shot, scene-to-scene.

Simple prompting couldn't really be considered expression, but at a certain point, you're prompting chunks of script and stage direction.

For the above video, I did the character design work, the concepts, the script, the editing, the sound editing, all the text and graphic design elements (minus the Arkanoid logo), and I voiced the announcer (with Suno filtering).

There's no question that this would qualify as "a significant amount of human expression" were it cut together with appropriated public domain movie and TV clips, or even with unambiguously copyrighted material (as in AMVs). And its hard to get more transformative than 'broken down into math, averaged and cross-reverenced with the math extracted from the entire publicly searchable internet, then reconstituted into new images from that math, prompt guidance, and random jpg noise.

Then, to find the offset from my vegetarian diet, I used this article from the NIH Library of Medicine. It states that an omnivore diet produces 2.23 ± .01 kg of CO2-EQ per 1000 calories and a vegetarian diet produces 1.6 ± .02

Now, let's just remove the rounding errors for simplicity's sake and figure out the numbers for a year (assuming a person consumes 2000 calories a day), that's (2.23 × 2) × 365 = 1,627.9 kg of CO2-EQ per year for an omnivore diet and (1.6 × 2) × 365 = 1,168 kg of CO2-EQ for a vegetarian diet. So compared to an omnivore diet, a vegetarian diet will produce 460 fewer kg of CO2-EQ.

Then, for my car, I used this article from the US Department of Energy. In my state, in a year a gas vehicle produces 12,594 lbs of CO2-EQ per year (5,712.5 kg) and an electric vehicle produces 2,158 lbs, (979 kg). Meaning compared to a gas vehicle, an electric vehicle will produce 4,733 fewer kg of CO2-EQ.

Now, 460 + 4,733 = 5,193 kg offset in a year.

Like. He made a ceramic sculpture of an AI girlfriend, then generated an AI image of the sculpture and called them one and two in a series.

He made ceramic "phones" and inscribed them with cuniform and ai image hieroglyphics that he carved into the clay.

I've talked a lot about how I think that AI has a place in the creation of art and I think Dwyer's work is genuinely a perfect example of someone using AI to create art.

The Garden Guardian

It grows food on its back to lure other grazers to help protect it.

"If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally."

It is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mor­tal enemy, and that the confusion of their several func­tions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled

Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it.”

Photography was invented in the 1820s and though it remained a fledgling technology in the few decades thereafter, many artists and art critics still saw it as a threat, as the artist Henrietta Clopath voiced in a 1901 issue of Brush and Pencil:

Despite the devastation of photography as a professional field, more people are practicing photography as an art now than at any previous point in the history of the medium. While the former is regrettably and might have been prevented with robust labor action, the latter can only be viewed as a negative outcome by the most insufferable kind of gatekeeper. Unfounately it seems to be exactly that type of person who is most adamantly opposed to genAI.

Leaving aside the advent of 3d animation and mocap and the hubub that followed it, 2d Animation has seen the loss of traditional cel painting to digital production, and with it all the people who had to manually trace, paint, arrange and photograph those cels.

Then Flash/Vector Puppet animation delivered a 360 spinning suplex to traditional cel, with Blender already mid-swing with a folding chair.

Those innovations nuked thousands of jobs, but it also made everything from Homestar Runner to BigTop Burger possible. The technology that cost the jobs also made indie animation viable.

And as for Graphic Design,

I was in college for Graphic Design from 96-01. The industry was in a tizzy at the time because Adobe InDesign had dropped and it did automatically all the things QuarkXpress had required complex three-key commands to accomplish. It was pure snobbery and protectionism, and I could see that even at the time.

That said, it's hard not to feel your brain boil when you run into yet another youtube rant about AI's impact on artists-

my favourite piece of "AI art" is something that was not intended to be AI art at all, and was made and posted online as a joke. which is "salmon in the river", from 2023.

this is how the AI apparently understood the above prompt. salmon filets jumping in water.

in this case, not only do i think this is interesting art, but i think it is interesting art only because it was not made by a human. like, this reads to me as art about alienation and commodification, right? obviously we all know that under capitalism products become separated from the labour and processes that created them. you buy a shirt and you don't think about the hands that sewed it, and so on. the commodity form hides its own origins. and food in particular hides not just labour, but life. the animal disappears. like, if you think about how meat reaches you at a western supermarket, typically it arrives on a styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, cut into shapes that don't resemble the body they came from. a chicken breast doesn't look like a chicken, and likewise a salmon filet does not look like a salmon. many times people actually find it gross or distasteful to see the animal! the filet is literally the shape that says don't think about it.

so the art, then. the filets are appearing in the river, which is where the living salmon would be. the commodity form is occupying the space of the creature. the erasure itself is swimming upstream. that's sick!!! and the wrongness of it, the visual absurdity, is exactly what reveals how much work the commodity form normally does. We're used to seeing filets in kitchens, on plates, in supermarkets. In those contexts, they look right. they look like what salmon IS! it's only when you put the filet in the context of a living animal that you suddenly see how strange it is and how much has been removed. it's good art!!!

AND YET if human artist had made this image, i don't think it would be very good art. filets swimming upstream as a commentary on commodity food culture is fine but it would feel very on the nose in a banksy, makes-u-think kind of way. this would be a human saying "here's what I think about how we relate to what we eat." like imagine this as a political cartoon, right? immediately the exact same image would make me want to fucking roll my eyes. it would be kind of insufferable!! and to me i think that's because it is making an argument. the artist has to be visibly making a point and the finger is always wagging. we live in a society, bottom text. UGH!

whereas, when an AI produces filets in the river, it's not making a claim. it doesn't think and it doesn't care. it is just outputting based on what it's been trained on and based on the prompt. it's saying "here's what salmon actually means in the aggregate of human visual culture." it says something in and of itself that an AI image generator was asked to create salmon swimming in a river, and it produced filets. boneless, skinless, ready-for-the-pan filets, floating serenely through the rapids. and that's because the AI was trained on us. it was clearly not primarily trained on, e.g Coast Salish art like on carved salmon with eyes and spirits or more generally on cultures that really focus on holding the sustenance and the creature together. instead it was trained on an aggregate blob of the internet, including the very massive and alienated western commercial relationship to food. our images, our photographs, our stock photos and food blogs and recipe sites. and in that corpus, salmon is overwhelmingly a filet. when you throw everything into the pile and ask "what is salmon," the commodity form rose to the top.

thus when the model produces filets in the river, it's not really making an error in the same way we would; it's just accurately reflecting what "salmon" means in the aggregate, and putting it in a context that makes it seem incredibly absurd. it literally works as art because it's not A Guy saying eyy, look what you've done, it's just showing what we've done, without commentary or judgment and without even knowing it's showing anything at all.

but then ALSO. was this really an "error" generated by an AI? or was this a human who prompted it to make a picture of salmon filets in a river and posted it as a glitch for internet points? i don't know!!!

and at first this bothered me, because I've been so hard on arguing that the image only works because it wasn't made intentionally. like, that the lack of human intent is what gives it evidentiary weight and what transforms it from trite political cartoon into Good Art.

but i literally think that's still true. if a human made this, if someone deliberately prompted an AI to produce filets in a river and then framed it as an accident for heckin reddit updoots or even legitimately to make a political point, then what they created is a piece of art about the difference between intentional and unintentional meaning. they used the AI as a medium, but more importantly, they used our expectation of AI failure as a medium. The art isn't just the image; it's the image plus the caption plus our willingness to believe it.

Vera Molnar, 2 demi-lunes, 2007. Acrylic on canvas — 39 19/50 × 78 3/4 × 1 in | 100 × 200 × 2.5 cm. Courtesy Oniris Art.

Vera Molnár was a Hungarian media artist who lived and worked in Paris, France. Molnár is widely considered to have been a pioneer of the generative art aspect of computer art. She was one of the first women to use computers in her fine art practice. Wikipedia

Born: January 5, 1924, Budapest, Hungary

Died: December 7, 2023 (age 99 years), Paris, France

If after reading this you are curious to learn more about "what we're all about", we strongly recommend joining our Discord. We don't bite, despite the mascot.

Text under the Read More.

You notice this in how they overlook the ways automation already has largely replaced a lot of manual crafts for the production of everyday objects, which they never seem to mind. They don't care if their soup bowl (for example) is mass-produced and more affordable, even if it means not buying a handcrafted one.

But also it means they just... forget there are forms of art that don't involve "picking up a pencil" even in a metaphorical sense, like directing. That's not unlike what you do by giving a model instructions and then refining those instructions to create a scene that looks like you envisioned.

i dont always agree with hank green on everything but i think this video has a lot of good points and if youre worried about ai's environmental impact i recommend watching it. the tl;dw is

ai water use even generously estimated is a literal drop in the bucket compared to things like agricultural water use

a lot of the considerations about water use are more wrapped up in where you are and what source of water youre using than a simple number (a data center in tucson will cause far more damage than a data center in the PNW, for instance)

ai power use is not currently a big issue but is projected to potentially become one if ai companies scale up in the way they say they want to (theyre investing in a lot more data centers, the combined impact of which will be a significant strain on power grids and may cause rising electricity prices)