#chen rambles

So... am I really the only one who does feel a siren song?

I see artists everywhere talk about how they don't want AI imgen. How they love the process of creation itself too much for that.

And I feel kind of bad because... I kind of don't? At least not always. Maybe not even often.

I do enjoy looking back at it. Watching my own timelapses is pretty fun! But my favorite part has always been the results. One of the happiest memories in my life was when I drew a sweet friend of mine and the piece came out as I had imagined it.

Most of the time they don't.

So much of my art journey has been pushing through painful, ADHD driven frustration and Rejection Sensitivity. I've broken down crying while painting in class. It... hurts sometimes. And most of the time, the reason I could keep going was because if I didn't push through that pain over and over, the art wouldn't exist in the end.

I have actually found a new appreciation for my own art lately. My style is very unique, and I stumble and tumble through the process a lot, but the results are very me. I love that when I draw my player characters in TTRPG and stuff. Or others in Art Fight.

But sometimes I have bigger projects where I know that there is so much art to do. And I already sometimes need so many hours and to swallow so much pain for one single piece.

And then I look over at the AIRP community and how joyfully people create images of their characters because it's not about art there, it's mainly about having nice visuals to go with some writing. And it's hard not to want that. It's... difficult not to want to take this tool and stomp all of the necessary assets for a small Visual Novel out of the ground and just do the writing and have the thing I want to exist exist!

Am I really the only one who feels that way?

I just... can't argue with myself based on artistic merit on this topic. Yes, it's fed with aggregated art that was pirated. But you need to understand that my art journey began with tracing, and tracing bases helped me through some difficult art blocks. You need to understand that in art school, I was literally taught how to take photographs from the web, collage them and then paint some details over the result because that's literally what mattepainting is. I respect everyone who says that those methods still aren't stealing to the same degree, that's a valid opinion. To my brain, the difference is... not comprehensible enough to click emotionally.

I have other reasons to abstain from image generation, there are more than enough - mainly environmental ones.

But I just feel very lonely with the temptation, you know? It seems so easy to shrug off for everyone I see, and it just isn't for me. And the rhetoric very much makes me feel like that makes me an inherently worse artist and person than others.