It is important, as artists and as fans of media, to be able to recognise, portray, and appreciate POC features on characters (shock fucking horror). As artists, make it a part of your study to draw POC, to learn how to draw different features. Ranges of eyes, different facial structure, lips, noses, varieties of skin tones. This is obviously important for, you know, basic human decency, but it ties in with GenAI.
Machine learning and datasets have always been saturated with whiteness. The IT sector is overwhelmingly white and always has been. The models are training off a very white internet. GenAI skews white (and anime-style but we're not talking about that today).
So when it comes to GenAI and faking semirealism, it'll give you skewed results when it tries to represent characters that aren't white. It especially struggles with Black characters. So you, discerning reader, must be able to spot tells that a human, an artist, should be able to represent. Does that art look rendered to a high level, but Davrin's got a narrow nose and his palms are the wrong colour?
Hey. Don't bean soup me. You - critical thinker, you - know there are many more AI tells than just misrepresenting a character's features or skin tone. You know this. I'm holding your face in my hands you know this. Say it with me - alone, these tells don't guarantee AI.
What I'm saying is - if you go about your days on the internet comfortable believing that you don't have to put care and time into depicting POC, if you're happy to do that because all your OCs are white and why would you need to learn? First and lesser, you're gonna get fooled by AI. Secondly and more dire, you're gonna perpetuate this very pervasive attitude I've seen where "the art is there, the Black character is there, who cares if they don't look accurate, at least they're there" which is harmful. It's lazy. It's saying: "white characters are the only characters who deserve to be depicted accurately."
Look inward, look outward. Look at what you're supporting with your reblogs. Care more. Respect more.
Care more.
