#about ai

Which is, ironically, a huge part of why I almost reflexively recoil at how it's used in the corporate world: because the world of business, particularly the entertainment industry, has what often seems like less than zero interest in appreciating it as a novel medium.

And I often wonder how much less that would be the case - and, by extension, how much less vitriolic the discussion around it would be, and how many fewer well-meaning people would be falling for reactionary mythologies about where exactly the problems lie - if it hadn't reached the point of...at least an illusion of commercial viability, at exactly the moment it did.

See, the groundwork was laid in 2020, back during covid lockdowns, when we saw a massive spike in people relying on TV, games, books, movies, etc. to compensate for the lack of outdoor, physical, social entertainment. This was, seemingly, wonderful for the whole industry - but under late-stage capitalism, it was as much of a curse as it was a gift. When industries are run by people whose sole brain process is "line-go-up", tiny factors like "we're not going to be in lockdown forever" don't matter. CEOs got dollar signs in their eyes. Shareholders demanded not only perpetual growth, but perpetual growth at this rate or better. Even though everyone with an ounce of common sense was screaming "this is an aberration, this is not sustainable" - it didn't matter. The business bros refused to believe it. This was their new normal, they were determined to prove -

And they, predictably, failed to prove it.

So now the business bros are in a pickle. They're beholden to the shareholders to do everything within their power to maintain the infinite growth they promised, in a world with finite resources. In fact, by precedent, they're beholden to this by law. Fiduciary duty has been interpreted in court to mean that, given the choice between offering a better product and ensuring maximum returns for shareholders, the latter MUST be a higher priority; reinvesting too much in the business instead of trying to make the share value increase as much as possible, as fast as possible, can result in a lawsuit - that a board member or CEO can lose, and have lost before - because it's not acting in the best interest of shareholders. If that unsustainable explosive growth was promised forever, all the more so.

And now, 2-3-4 years on, that impossibility hangs like a sword of Damocles over the heads of these media company CEOs. The market is fully saturated; the number of new potential customers left to onboard is negligible. Some companies began trying to "solve" this "problem" by violating consumer privacy and charging per household member, which (also predictably) backfired because those of us who live in reality and not statsland were not exactly thrilled about the concept of being told we couldn't watch TV with our own families. Shareholders are getting antsy, because their (however predictably impossible) infinite lockdown-level profits...aren't coming, and someone's gotta make up for that, right? So they had already started enshittifying, making excuses for layoffs, for cutting employee pay, for duty creep, for increasing crunch, for lean-staffing, for tightening turnarounds-

And that was when we got the first iterations of AI image generation that were actually somewhat useful for things like rapid first drafts, moodboards, and conceptualizing.

Lo! A savior! It might as well have been the digital messiah to the business bros, and their eyes turned back into dollar signs. More than that, they were being promised that this...both was, and wasn't art at the same time. It was good enough for their final product, or if not it would be within a year or two, but it required no skill whatsoever to make! Soon, you could fire ALL your creatives and just have Susan from accounting write your scripts and make your concept art with all the effort that it takes to get lunch from a Star Trek replicator!

This is every bit as much bullshit as the promise of infinite lockdown-level growth, of course, but with shareholders clamoring for the money they were recklessly promised, executives are looking for anything, even the slightest glimmer of a new possibility, that just might work as a life raft from this sinking ship.

So where are we now? Well, we're exiting the "fucking around" phase and entering "finding out". According to anecdotes I've read, companies are, allegedly, already hiring prompt engineers (or "prompters" - can't give them a job title that implies there's skill or thought involved, now can we, that just might imply they deserve enough money to survive!)...and most of them not only lack the skill to manually post-process their works, but don't even know how (or perhaps aren't given access) to fully use the software they specialize in, being blissfully unaware of (or perhaps not able/allowed to use) features such as inpainting or img2img. It has been observed many times that LLMs are being used to flood once-reputable information outlets with hallucinated garbage. I can verify - as can nearly everyone who was online in the aftermath of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Dashcon Experience - that the results are often outright comically bad.

To anyone who was paying attention to anything other than please-line-go-up-faster-please-line-go-please (or buying so heavily into reactionary mythologies about why AI can be dangerous in industry that they bought the tech companies' false promises too and just thought it was a bad thing), this was entirely predictable. Unfortunately for everyone in the blast radius, common sense has never been an executive's strong suit when so much money is on the line.

Much like CGI before it, what we have here is a whole new medium that is seldom being treated as a new medium with its own unique strengths, but more often being used as a replacement for more expensive labor, no matter how bad the result may be - nor, for that matter, how unjust it may be that the labor is so much cheaper.

And it's all because of timing. It's all because it came about in the perfect moment to look like a life raft in a moment of late-stage capitalist panic. Any port in a storm, after all - even if that port is a non-Euclidean labyrinth of soggy, rotten botshit garbage.

Any port in a storm, right? ...right?

hello Anon! :)

From what I can see, the cover looks pretty legit human made to me. Thank you for reaching out about this tho! I absolutely didn't check the book covers before rebloging the post.

I'll give hints as to why I think it's not AI, and globally will take the opportunity to give some tips to spot AI in general for anyone interested in that. I'll try my best to explain myself, but if anyone needs more explanation I'm very willing to do so, so don't hesitate to ask!

The cover in question:

I zoomed in on the picture (we have a large sized image here, which is great to identify potential AI use) and I can't seem to find anything that rises red flags to me. I see the brushes used (I even have some of these in my brushes collection), I see the stuff painted by selecting an area and painting it. I can see how things have been made in every elements, which in AI, even if it *looks* cohesive from afar, it always lacks logic once you start looking for how it's been drawn. Here everything looks fine to me.

Exemples of the kinds of details that are typically unlogical AI (Tales of Nebula JRPG & Vileborne - Game on Tabletop, all are AI + lazy overpaint):

Again, real people aren't perfect at drawing everything, but here we have some really incoherent designs: illogical layering, melting lines, melting elements. • What is going on in this leg protection? What are these elements made of? What shape do they actually have under the layers of fabric? What is this orange strap in the middle of everything? • I mean, that horse's main is melting with the sword's guard lines?? • There is a purple fabric that looks like gushing out of the sleeve/fist. • The fabric's folds are defined in a too sharp AI typical rendering. • The chest to shoulder piece is made of one block which makes no sense at all practically speaking, the metal have folds that looks fabric like. • And in the last one it's basically a mess of lines melting together. Easiest detail to pick here: there is a bone? strap of fabric?? joining the beak of the bird's skull on the right which is a typical kind of line melt AI makes (fusion of two distinct elements through the shapes).

And I know, these can be very hard to pinpoint when you don't draw yourself, but these make no logical drawing sense. There is sketching stuff roughly, and there is making non sense on a finished drawing.

BACK to the book cover:

For the boy's leg, I think it only have to do with the difficulty of the angle + the loose jeans around the calves and ankles (because oh boy it is hard to draw feet from behind or front and to feel that there is a leg under loose pants y__y ). We have one leg folded a little under the bench, the other extended forward. That's a hard position to draw accurately but a good idea to give dynamism and interesting angles for the general shape of the boy.

It can be really hard to achieve tho, and overall, it's important not to forget that professional artists can absolutely struggle to do something perfectly rendered/anatomically accurate. Again, I don't see any brush work that reminds me of AI slop. There is a chance the artist here worked without references or couldn't find how to make it look more accurate (which is fine too) or could also have lacked time to work.

I searched for the artist's name but couldn't find it on related book post (not that I searched for hours) but! I did find a post on artstation for an alternative cover and from what I can see I think it is the same artist (or they copied the style very well) You can find it here:

They posted 2 wip steps underneath the illustration, which is a reassuring element as well.

Which brings me to this: you can absolutely stumble upon some fake wips (sketch drawn over the AI slop afterwards) and it makes ZERO logical building sense (Vileborn - Game on Tabletop) :

Nobody I know or seen drawing on the IRL or on the internet ever construct buildings like this. Nobody can mark lines in the void like this without a proper boxes shapes beforehand and follow it without a single change has they made the clean. I mean those lines DIDN'T changed one bit. These marks lines are completely randomly marked over the AI slop to justify a wip sketch people asked for when rightful doubts were voiced. That's just not something anybody does, especially if you are doing a full painting rendering behind. You need to understand what you're gonna give depth to. These makes no sense construction wise, they give you zero info about what you're supposed to draw.

On the alternative cover we see on Artstation, all the sketches lines makes perfect sense to me. The shapes doesn't stick around for the final result (you can especially see it in the background) and that's a sign that things had been thought, evaluated and changed/adjusted/corrected by a human eye. Again, there is a use of brushes (especially for the trees who are all the same shape except for the ones closest to us, which you'll never get with AI) and that's also a human intervention indicator.

What I can't a hundred pourcent be sure of : Was there any AI stuff generated to be used as a reference for creating the sketch? That nobody could ever tell. Maybe. Maybe not. The sketches looks pretty human made to me (and not a flat "non information telling" line like you can have with tracing over an image) but we can never know if AI never was involved in anything for sure.

Another kind of typical AI stuff (ESPECIALLY FOR LINE ART) I still see in recent stuff that crossed my feeds on different socials are these (all gathered on AI generated manga websites):

One of the greatest ways to spot AI in line art stuff is the eyes. • Weird swirls in the irises. • Never same shape of the pupil (not perfectly round can be a style thing, I myself like to make them a bit squared, but here there are blob shaped pupil + weird irises which is a winning AI identification). • Also here we have a bonus point for the first image where the glasses melts with the eyelashes. • And what can also trigger your AI red flag sense is the wobbly lines for the eyelid meanwhile the style is going for something clean and round. • I don't even know how to call the last one with all the messy lines and double or triple eyebrows and weird stone looking nose lol Very good exemple to see how AI melt lines of different elements together tho (eyelashes becomes a hair strand becomes the ear on the right).

Meanwhile, a real drawing by human (Midnight Children by Shin-ichi Sakamoto) :

Note on this specific exemple: This artist does use some already made flowers and hair strands, but all have been hand drawn beforehand (by him and their team) to be used while creating the manga, a bit like using stamps, and then the drawing is reworked to make it all look cohesive. You can check how they work here.

Casca - Berserk - Kentaro Miura:

Manben episodes and videos to see how artists work <- Can help with understanding a finished drawing and see how things have been made while looking at the finished product, it helps seeing if things makes sense in images in general.

To finish this post:

Please don't forget that everything human made can be unperfect, even in professional fields. And while it is sadly inevitable to question if something is AI made nowadays, an inaccuracy isn't a proof by itself. AI is making less and less obvious clumsy mistakes, making it harder to identify.

This is all a hard thing to detect overall, so don't hate yourself for not noticing something was AI generated.

Again, thank you Anon for bringing this up!! Hopefully I didn't make a fool of myself by thinking it's not AI lol

Don't get me wrong: I know AI is bad, but the words you're using are wrong. Instead of approaching someone who uses AI and giving them ideas for why they should stop, you're actively doing the opposite: throwing them to the wolves, laughing at them, and generally giving them more reasons to use it. You're no better than the people who use AI.

If you want people to stop using it, actively ask them, but always be polite. Find them alternatives. "Don't do this" doesn't work, but "Don't do this, do that instead" does. Find them tutorials, options. Encourage them to use other methods. Support them when it comes to letting go of the tool.

Right now, some of you're creating an echo chamber. And there will come a point when it will be too late. Some people on the internet don't even know what's going on with AI, or its origins. They're completely unaware, and you act as if they're actually responsible for the very weight of the universe.

Das ist richtig simpel. Ich will meinen Gedankenstrich zurück. Ich mein's ernst. Fucking ChatGPT, Gemini, Co-Pilot. Le Chat und wie ihr alle heißt. Gebt mir meinen fucking Bindestrich zurück. Der war weit vor euch da und es war glorreich. Diese herrlichen im wahrsten Sinne abwegigen detours auf einen schönen Bilderbuchgedankenabzweig, um dann fix wieder auf die Hauptstraße zurückzuschwenken. Das waren noch Zeiten. Alle meine wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten hatten Gedankenanstriche. Alle meine Lyrik- und Prosatexte hatten sie.

Und dann seid ihr gekommen und habt euch das eingeheimst - ihr kleinen, gefühllosen Technikmonster.

Nicht mit mir. Ich sage: F*ck you very, very much und erobere mir den zurück. Let's reclaim the Bindestrich! Der gehört uns!

Und wenn ich vor jedem meiner gottverdammten Texte ab jetzt einen Disclaimer setzen muss, dass ich, ja ICH dort ganz ohne KI-Hilfe einen eigenen Gedankenstrich gesetzt habe und auch jedes anderes Wort selbst geschrieben habe, so be it.

im really sorry :(((

hm it seems like they deleted. they did have a running blog and other art in the same style on their page when i commissioned them. the ribbons are woven through the curls, and i dont see what you mean by warping, not sure that's proof of AI. they also sent work in progress previews fwiw.

First of all, hi. Long time no see. Many of you have certainly noticed that I haven't posted anything new in a very long time. 2025 has been a very difficult year due to family matters, along with my health declining and essentially impairing me to this day. This is not the focal point of my post, however, so I'll skip the details.

In general, I lost my motivation and whole creative vibe, only focusing on work and my personal situation. I completely lost track of who I was and who I wanted to be, which I'm still investigating right now. This inevitably dragged me away from all that used to give me joy in the past, such as art and video games. Not because I don't like them anymore, but simply because I could no longer dedicate my attention to these things.

Now, considering the premise, you can definitely imagine that the implementation of AI in our daily life has given me the final blow. I've seen generative content being published everywhere and gaining tons of views, likes, and followers. New AI accounts growing in the span of a few days, simply because of their pretty videos attracting more and more people who want to use the same tools for their own gain. Nowadays, AI users are earning money and fame in the blink of an eye, while real creators have to deal with comments questioning the truthfulness of their work. Nobody believes you can make something by yourself anymore.

I'll be honest with you guys. As an artist, I've been dealing with demotivation for years. The algorithm is a damn beast, especially on Instagram, TikTok, and other similar platforms, which means even high-quality content is essentially cornered. While I never wanted to make art for fame, I eventually started doing it mainly with that goal in mind. I wished to be recognized, to work and earn in the field, to create things that people would love and consider worthy. I failed. Because whenever I posted a new work, I always felt like it was becoming useless. It was barely seen by other people, appreciated, or shared. Then AI came into the picture, and I realized everything I was doing had lost its importance.

I wondered why I should constantly struggle to make something people don't care about seeing anymore. Why would I waste my time and efforts on real art when all that everyone seems to crave right now is AI?

Don't get me wrong, AI can actually be an extremely useful tool for artists as well, even though it is very controversial and is extremely harmful for the environment. I also know that creating good AI content requires proper subscriptions to different services, prompt refinement, many tries, and additional editing to put things together. Still, AI is trained over existing data. Meaning, real artworks, videos, and songs are constantly taken without consent and used to feed AI tools to make them better and more efficient. People make money out of something that could easily become straight plagiarism, and that has already happened in a bunch of instances with lawsuits.

Then, one day, a guy commissioned me to create a group picture for him and his friends, featuring their Street Fighter avatars. He contacted me out of the blue to request a character change, because one of his pals told him my art was generic and he didn't want it. I know I shouldn't let these things affect me in the slightest, after all, we all have our tastes and preferences. But considering I was already in quite a bad place emotionally, that made me reconsider my entire journey as an artist, and I noticed my latest renders were indeed lacking a soul.

I stepped away from it, took a long-ass break, tried to rediscover myself.

I'm doing my best to get back on track. In the end, I still ADORE art as it's been engraved in my DNA (my grandfather was an artist and a jazz musician), and I could never truly forget about it, even though the mere thought of it would make me sad. In the end, I decided that I wanted to start fresh and learn again, improve, become better. If I cannot beat AI, then I'll "use" AI as an incentive, as a motivation for me to produce content again.

I sincerely wish to express my gratitude to the ones who commissioned me still, despite AI taking over. The fact there's someone interested in human work and willing to pay for it should not be taken for granted.

I don't want to make any promises here, but I plan to post new 3D stuff in the future. Most likely it will be for old fandoms as well as new ones. For the ones who are still here, I'm glad to see you. For those who left or are considering unfollowing, no hard feelings. You have my full understanding here.