SamDoesArts, the Artist martyr against AI

Yesterday, while looking around youtube, I struck gold : I found an artist who has gone up frontally against the AI beast, and defeated it. He has endured its bites and targeted attacks.

Before AI Art even started to make waves, his style was already called “overdone” and “average”. And when he rose up, the most enthusiastic AI engineers banded together to take him down. The subsequent events I’ll relate in today’s issue serve as a powerful blueprint for any artist trying to make it today. A blueprint that has worked immaculately in a real, high-stakes situation.

This is the story of SamDoesArts.

Many young artists today are considering giving up.

They ask themselves : “With generalized precarity in the art world made worse by AI, isn’t this suicide ?”

I am both an AI researcher and an aspiring artist. If I can leave the world of AI research for the world of art tomorrow, I’ll do it. So I’m here to tell you, if you go into a “rational” job, you’ll waste your life. Worse, you’ll participate in humanity’s downfall. And if you go into an artist’s job, you’ve got good chances of making it, as long as you educate yourself right.

Here’s how.

Sam Yang is a toronto-based artist who ‘made it” during the TikTok boom. His half-realistic, half-anime drawing style, and intuitive grasp of dramatic lighting gained him explosive following online. We’re talking millions of views, over and over, and over again.

His formula was a relentless stream of tutorials, mesmerizing speedpaint videos, and honest behind the scenes footage. Another main attribute was his lively, engaging personality.

He strikes me as the kind of person who doesn’t ever think he’s done enough. Always working on refining his technique, putting more effort into other people, and improving himself. His relentless posting schedule is one marker of this. But even more so is his drawing proficiency.

This prowess of his was so great that a slew of copycat artists rose up across the internet, mimicking his style of illustration. Nowadays, everyone recognizes this art style : the “attractive girl genre”, also called “instagram drawing aesthetic”, etc. But when he came up with it, it was new ! So he could have been pissed about all these copypaste artists.

But instead of being annoyed, he made it a point to welcome all those copypaste artists into the community. He said that imitation is a normal early stage of learning Art.

This, alongside his technical mastery and bright personality, constituted yet another reason for everyone to appreciate him. His success didn’t plateau with all the copycats, and things followed their natural, comfortable course.

He even became an advocate,

For Sam Yang in the early 2020s, life was good.

Of course, as a conscientious, hard-working person, he always has a reason to not feel absolutely ecstatic about everything. But the excitement of community building, the financial success, and the deep meaning that his Art and Advocacy gave to his life, must have been amazing. He was living the normal life of a successful online artist.

As always happens in happy circumstances, a kind of positive, dreamlike haze must have emanated from him. So around the year 2023, when he first encountered an AI Art website, it must have been hard to register.

A putrid visual interface. A front page full of flashy, uncoordinated images. No mention of any artist names, to reach out to, chat with or admire. Endless tech jargon.

“What in the world is this ?”, he may have asked himself. But then he moved on, and the ugly sight only occupied a small space in his mind. He had real things to attend to : his practice, his book publication, his desire to become a gallery artist. He wanted to come home to his beloved community, and forget about this cave-roaming beast he had caught out of the corner of his eye.

But then people started messaging him, telling him some of these things called AI models, had started targeting his specific style. The concept of a computer being able to replicate you on command is a hard thing to grasp. He was an established figure, with power and experience in copyright disputed. It wouldn’t be too hard to get what he wanted. So he decided to reach out to these AI people.

The snapback was immediate. Not only did he not get a proper answer, but the websites seemed to gain in boldness. Their models got better. On X and various other social media, they dug up evidence of him supposedly tracing art early in his career. Once again, his visual style’s popularity was vehemently criticized.

His very friends in the art community started to turn against him. They said he was too aggressive and would cause damage to his community by picking fights.

Everything was turning against him.

Is Sam Yang someone who ignores problems when they are small, and finds himself destroyed when they grow too big ?

An artist’s style is their identity. It is akin to a voice, or a face : a way to make your message identifiable, a kind of “identity stamp” you apply to your message. Until AI “Art” was a thing, this visual identity could be trusted as a stamp of approval by the artist on the work’s message.

When people trained models specifically on his style, they put his approval stamp on things he did not agree with AT ALL. They put his livelihood, and the meaning of his life in peril. What’s more, they did the same to everyone around him. His community was panicking. His peers were scattering and adopting contradictory, confused stances on AI ‘Art’.

But though he’d already been bitten and hurt, the onslaught had stopped. The beast had wondered to some other part of the forest, focusing on somebody else. As a result, more and more artists were bucking under the pressure and adopting AI as a “tool”.

And the beast was feral. Crazy. AI proponents were uttering words like “an artist has no right to speak to gods”. Facing such unpredictable people, it would be better for Sam to keep a low profile, until the situation clears out.

His first instinct was to do deep research on these models. He learned everything he could about them, to understand the situation, and forge a proper long-term view for his art and career.

Then, against his better judgement, he decided to record a video against these image AIs, vehemently opposing their reckless introduction and use cases.

As soon as he pressed “upload” on that video, the gloves were off. He found himself the target of the nastiest, most grotesque attack. A bizarre attack on his livelihood, his reputation, and most importantly, his morale.

The owners of the platform Civitai organized a context among all their members, for who would produce the model that best imitated Sam’s style. They named it the “battle of the Sams”. To pour salt into the wound, they even purchased the smallest, cheapest possible print from Sam’s website, and offered it to the winner of the context.

They claimed to be “supporting artists”.

In the face of this malicious attack by these clearly unwell individuals, what did Sam do ? With artificial intelligence determined to demoralize him and take him down, what did he do ?

What does a big dog do when a chihuahua barks at it ? Nothing.

He didn’t have to do anything. The AI models mimicking him were pretty good at it, but it didn’t matter. From this exchange, he had understood that his qualities went far beyond a fixed style.

And today, two years later, SamDoesArts is thriving. He has become an even better activist, wise, and his art career is moving fast. His debut book, “the art of sam yang”, is a complete success.

And in the meantime, none of his detractors and the insane AI people who organized the “battle of the Sams” gained anything from the affair. They are all just as nameless and desperate as always.

I don’t want to waste too much of your time, but below is the true nugget of this post.

What do we learn from this SamDoesArts example ?

There are qualities that he displayed in the fight, namely authenticity, the human touch, integrity, and hard work. These are often presented as solutions to the AI problem as an artist. They are most often dismissed as wishful thinking.

And it is partly true that they aren’t the whole story. Sam’s approach to defeating AI still has its limits. It relies heavily on his past success, and may not even work in the next ten years.

Other artists have found deeper, more long-term, promising avenues for defeating AI. I’ll be covering their success stories in this newsletter, so subscribe if you want more of this insight.

To finish, the truest thing to draw from Sam’s example is that AI is like a ghost (this is even how OpenAI’s own Andrew Karpathy describes it).

And as I recently heard in an Alan Watts talk,

“As soon as you see a ghost, walk straight into it. You’ll find that it disappears instantly”.

This is what Sam Yang did. And this remains your task to do this everyday.

See you next time

ArtPostAI.