AI is losing the "AI look"

Here’s a riddle for you.

What is unwelcome everywhere, but somehow seems to always find a warm, rotten bed to expand out of ?
What stinks and drives peaceful, decent people away, and yet is never cleaned out ?
What hurts and damages everyone, and yet always becomes accepted in the end ?

You got it…
Progress.

Progress is like death: you either accept it and live your life knowing how important it is, or you become paralyzed and irrational.

Stare into the abyss of death, and your life will be revitalized.
Stare into the abyss of progress, and your work will be energized.
Stare into the abyss of AI, and your art will grow immune to it.

In this spirit, from my AI researcher standpoint, today I will strive to give you a good, quick and formative look at the AI field.

1- Losing the AI look.

The ‘AI look’ is something that we artists have long hoped to be our saving grace.

Talk about how the AI field finds ways around every single ambush

Let’s for example look at something called Reinforcement Learning. You can think of it as carrot-and-stick learning for AI models. It’s been a staple of all the big AI models over the past couple years, because it allows AI researchers to align a model’s outputs to human preference.

Now here’s the big reveal :

You can use Reinforcement Learning to carrot-and-stick the AI look out of AI Art models. And it’s been done (see sources at the bottom). Check out this image :

…So how is this going to look in the future ?

AI researchers are heavily funded, and absurdly motivated. They’re very smart too. The only thing that they won’t optimize for is what they can’t conceive of. (I’ll have a post on this soon on this substack)

And thus, in the future, there will be a cat-and-mouse game between AI and Artists. As AI catches up, Artists will have to come up with new styles and conceptions, that AI artists and their specialized knowledge won’t be able to deal with.

And thus the cat-and-mouse game will go like this, starting from today :

• the ‘AI look’, having overcome its limitations, becomes indistinguishable from the general, “this isn’t made by AI” look

• Artists are forced to invent a new, weird look — a new Art Movement.

• AI catches up again

• Repeat.

We are seeing the start of this dynamic, and it will unfold in all its creative desperation over the next few years. I’ll happily be a part of it, bringing strategies and advice to artists on this substack.

2- Beyond prompting

The argument that text-based prompting limits AI Artists is long gone. If you were one of the latecomers, wake up. Just look at this recent model from EbSynth :

From text-based prompting, to real-time human-AI collaboration, from static screen displays to moving AI-made worlds, more and more boundaries are being shaken.

It becomes harder and harder to find solid ground to stand on as a “mere” traditional artist.

Looking for such solid ground ? Read till the end. And maybe even subscribe.

3- The beast breathes down my neck

I’ve been intensely practicing my rendering skills over the past few years. And now, stuff like the new TikTok AI model comes out. It can turn this :

into this :

Why learn to render by hand in this world ? Have I wasted my time ? Have you ?

Stop and think about this for a second. Your entire future as an artist will be a cat and mouse game with AI art models. How can you play the cat-and-mouse game, if you don’t have the agility and experience of a battle-hardened, veteran mouse ?

You’re not wasting your time. You’re building understanding and agility that will allow you to slip through the AI Researcher’s precise but uncultured hand.

The AI beast has come quite a long way, hasn’t it ?

All this progress… Rot climbing up the walls, rust all over the car, and cracks in the ceiling… And it’s becoming accepted by everyone. The new generation doesn’t even conceive of a world without AI art. We could have saved a lot of time if we knew two years ago, that the AI beast wasn’t going to be stopped.

And what have we done in the meantime ?

Personally, I have a bunch of projects on this substack, doing what I can to help the world of art thrive in the future, regardless of this AI inconvenience. If you’re looking for solid ground to stand upon in this confusing, depressing age, check out the ideas below :

• Your new role as we give birth to a new intelligence : the god artist.

• Building, together, a new definition of art that’ll be completely safe from AI

• Avoiding the pitfalls and misconceptions that waste years of our artistic lives.

• Establishing the facts about what’s going on right now in the world of Art.

sources :

1- https://tencent.github.io/srpo-project-page/

2- https://ebsynth.com/

3- https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedream4_0