Compare and Contrast
Those awful, awful hands
The following post uses my illustration for my serial Faire Exchange, which I might as well announce I am currently prepping for publication via Draft2Digital. Details coming soon.
I fed the following prompt, based on one of my own illustrations, into three AI generators:
“A ten-year-old elf girl is sitting with a smirk on a teacher's desk in front of a whiteboard. She is wearing a green cloak, and a blue dress with gold fringe. Her left hand is raised and glowing like a hot iron. She has five fingers on each hand. Each finger has three phalanges.”
I think the results speak for themselves. None of the AI generators gave me a blue dress, and none of them seem to understand what “sitting on” means. They also failed to get the glow right.
And of course, there’s the hands. Those horrible, horrible hands. The Stable Diffusion image at least kind of gets the number of fingers right, but they’re too long and the knuckles too pronounced, and there seem to be extra fingers buried underneath. Believe it or not, it took a few tries to get that one, because the others were just so unbelievably hideous.
It may be a tired point, but AI art is not very good. It’s hard to read a lot of pro-AI articles without feeling like somebody’s trying to sell me something. But if the Master’s in Education I just got has taught me anything, it’s how much digital technology relies on hype rather than results. I’m obviously not against high-tech: I drew that illustration on my computer using a Wacom tablet. But digital art has long since proven itself. As for AI, it’s actually kind of remarkable how the single most obvious, ubiquitous, and notorious flaw in AI art has gone so long without being corrected.
Boosters of AI art like to portray this as at least taking care of the tedious parts of the creative process, but for me it’s the opposite. The work put into planning, executing, and revising a picture is the entire point. Artistic skills are like a muscle, and all the sketching, painting, correcting, etc. helps you, just as practicing scales and rehearsing helps a musician. That illustration is altered from the one shown here, and I added a few more tweaks just for this page. Because I want to put the work in. Because it refreshed my memory on a few CSP functions. Because it’s my work and I want to present my best effort.
I won’t claim my work is flawless, but I have yet to see a way for AI to genuinely help me grow as an artist. Whatever it can do, I can do better.