But they conveniently leave out that it costs money to do anything with AI. It’s more like “open to anyone with a credit card.” The vast majority of people don’t have computers powerful enough to run generative AI models locally, and even then, server farms with a billion GPUs will always produce better results
This means that people have to rely on corporate platforms where you buy tokens that you use to get pulls at the various AI slop slot machines, hoping you get something decent. The mechanics more closely resemble a gacha game than any kind of artistic process
By contrast, learning how to draw, animate or make 3D models costs nothing. There’s free tutorials and tools everywhere, and you can also just pirate commercial ones if you want
I felt MUCH more creative just tracing other’s art (for personal practice, they don’t survive long enough to be saved). I felt more creative finding a cruddy lego comic I made when I was 8. I felt more creative seeing a pallet my neighbor threw away and taking it to use for scrap wood for maybe making a cat tree. All more creative then trying to wrestle an “ai” to make a blurry ugly mess. The BEST piece I got still had odd eyes and muddy lighting.
I can barely draw a straight line. I can barely TRACE a hand. Yet I’ve gotten better. If I had the time/energy/drive, I could become decent, even without spending 10 million hours. I’ve just accepted certain personal limits. Like a slight natural shakey hand. It was frustrating wanting to paint minitures, but I got over it and had a hell of a time painting a simple landscape ala Bob Ross.
I’ve had a better time THINKING about evangelion and how I might make a game based on all the admin and engineering aspects the anime glances over. Not even the “art” stuff about it… but also thinking about the times it talks about the environment, its relation to late 90s tech, purity, the supposed “accidental” use of abrahamic icons, its seemingly forward projected critic of certain anime tropes, the disatisfaction with there being no clean end of anything human… And I still have to watch more then just the first series.
Besides everything else, I love leftist theory/thought because of the actual freedom it provides. (“Leftist”, “Theory” here being a bit loose.) Accepting what is and improving what can and needs to be is such a detoxifying mindset. Perfect would be nice, but sometimes you just can’t be, and you have to learn to forget your notions of perfection. I’ll probably never get over ~specific, fairly minor, chronic disorder that I shouldn’t add to my dox~, but I can tune out the distress 99% of the time, and the 1% I can cope with.