be prepared for Ai generated artwork

[The Vector Doctor]

So Illustrator has updated their software today and there is an emphasis on ai generated artwork.

You can draw a box on the artboard and type in pretty much anything and it will generate vector art for you. I can just picture the oddball things you may receive

I typed in frog in a pickup truck and got this

This could get interesting. I see all kinds of potential issues

 

[The Vector Doctor]

now instead of "nephew generated logos" expect ai generated signs and logos

 

[The Vector Doctor]

I typed in striped pattern and got this hot mess

 

[Bobby H]

I've already been having to deal with some of that crap in customer provided artwork. The generative "AI" stuff in Adobe Illustrator is live-traced from raster-based results. While the stuff might be "vector-based" it sure isn't all that clean, much less production-ready. Worse yet, the "AI" functions almost always bake various amounts of odd, uncanny valley nonsense into the artwork. It's like the "AI" photographs where a guy's hands will have 7 fingers. Correcting the errors means re-drawing those objects.

More and more I think the whole "AI" thing is a scam being perpetrated by stock trader bro bean counters. Create software bot operations that eliminate human workers. Craftsmanship gets totally de-valued. I've seen discussions going on about stock photo agencies, such as Adobe Stock, getting overwhelmed with AI-generated stock image submissions, many of which are blatantly violating copyrights.

I'm sure the private equity jackasses are all salivating over the "opportunity" to use AI tools to eliminate human staff in companies they buy up (and ruin). It's easy to imagine one of these vulture capital firms buying a bunch of sign companies and then using some AI-driven schtick to replace in-house designers. You still need human beings to apply vinyl, do fabrication and installation work, etc but it's all about race to the bottom economics. Any of those workers in the newly bought company could expect to be paid less. The vulture capitalists seem to forget one big thing: if you downsize too many workers you're not going to have any customers either. Customers are people who have jobs and enough spare money after basic living expenses to buy stuff. 70% of our economy is driven by that.

 

[The Vector Doctor]

i want ai that does something like "create a circle filled with 50 randomly placed stars". Or "create a fill with diagonal lines 1 point thick that are spaced 10 points apart"

 

[Bobby H]

You can already sort of do that using Astute Graphics' Space Fill plugin. The Randomino plugin can help with the random-ness. But you have to fiddle with the plugin controls rather than merely type something into a text prompt.

 

[drvinyl]

i want ai that does something like "create a circle filled with 50 randomly placed stars". Or "create a fill with diagonal lines 1 point thick that are spaced 10 points apart"

good news

they are called postscript fills

 

[GAC05]

Gotta be careful with this.
I put 'Trump 2024' bumper sticker in the text prompt.
Said it would not do it. It then closed and deleted my Illustrator install, canceled my Adobe account, and signed me up for a 30-day MS Office 365 subscription trial.

 

[Johnny Best]

Hero’s, did they send any illegals to Guam?

 

[The Vector Doctor]

good news

they are called postscript fills

yeah but those don't exist in Illustrator. What program is that?

 

[drvinyl]

yeah but those don't exist in Illustrator. What program is that?

coreldraw, its a really good way to crash corel too if you are not careful with the inputs

 

[Boudica]

now instead of "nephew generated logos" expect ai generated signs and logos

I've already been seeing them for some time. I can spot ai generated "artwork" a mile away. Here is the kicker... some of it comes from "professional design" agencies, that are charging a lot of money for logos and layouts.
Used as a tool for something quick and easy is one thing. Using ai and then charging exorbitant design fees like you did something that Marge the office manager couldn't do - should be a crime.

 

[White Haus]

Thankfully (and shockingly) the ability to generate vector text still hasn't caught up yet. Easy to spot AI garbage when it's riddled with mistakes and words that don't make sense.

I'm surprised that the combination of digital art AI and something like text generating AI like ChatGPT haven't been combined yet, that I know of anyways.

 

[Boudica]

Thankfully (and shockingly) the ability to generate vector text still hasn't caught up yet. Easy to spot AI garbage when it's riddled with mistakes and words that don't make sense.

I'm surprised that the combination of digital art AI and something like text generating AI like ChatGPT haven't been combined yet, that I know of anyways.

Shush, they might hear you.

 

[MNT_Printhead]

I had an employee using chatGPT to take his college classes the company paid for, He is not in my department and never will be again.

 

[drvinyl]

its just a tool, idc if its welded correctly and the lines are clean which is more than most pro studios can even do who am i too complain?

logo design is a mugs game anyway, im glad i dont really deal with it in my end, i just take your terrible art and charge more to actually turn it into something practical in the real world, whether its designed by a designer or AI chances are iam the one that will have to clean it up or weld it correctly anyway.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

its just a tool..

I'm not to sure about that. I think that's what it's being hocked as, but a of now, it's results are not really all that stellar. And unlike other tools where one can say that it's a skill issue of the user, it abstracts too much away that the user isn't really in charge of the end result as much as we would would like to think. Especially now that we have things like nightshade around to skew how the modals handle their "learning".

When it comes to people, it seems to do far worse. Fingers, ears, legs, even how the head connects to the neck are all tell tale signs of something that is supposedly AI generated (I say supposedly, because even though this is being sold as "AI", it really isn't, it's a glorified web scraper right now. Sometimes how zippers go into other parts of the body, it seems like the zipper "melts" right into the model. These are things even a horrible artist wouldn't do. They have other mistakes for sure, but that wouldn't be one of them.

I also remember about a week or so ago, most of the models were down. No one can access them. I reckon a lot of people couldn't get their work done, because of that. One of the things that I worry about the 2nd or 3rd generation of users that only have known this tool (this wouldn't be the first example of this). Pretty much like auto-trace/power trace and any other derivative that one can think of. That has been hocked so much to people and we have users now of software that that's all they know and they typically only know it from within one software package (which further contributes to vendor lock in).

Even disregarding the legal implications of using this (at least here stateside), this doesn't improve the situation. It will probably only work in very specific situations (and those will be heralded as examples of it's great ability and how we can skip the artist, the photo shoot etc) and where it doesn't, it could be so far off that having done things totally from scratch would have ironically been easier and better(but that knowledge on how to do it that way will have been lost).

 

[Goatshaver]

I use AI on occasion. I do a lot of cannabis labels and strain labels. so the most I use it for is to generate a background for a cannabis strain that will likely only get used once. For me it's been super helpful for getting something quick done, but if someone is looking for a logo or branding. Nope, not a chance I'd use it. I'll send them to someone with artistic talent.

 

[Medina Signs]

We have had this discussion before and I am left with this question to the forum. How exactly are copyrights going to be applied. If you pay for the AI service, and it was your creative input that generated the art, is it not yours?
If you are using a free service, is it yours. And if not your creation, who gets the claim on the copyright?

 

[WildWestDesigns]

We have had this discussion before and I am left with this question to the forum. How exactly are copyrights going to be applied. If you pay for the AI service, and it was your creative input that generated the art, is it not yours?
If you are using a free service, is it yours. And if not your creation, who gets the claim on the copyright?

At best, one could hope that the prompts themselves may hold some copyright. Right now, if it's not substantially done by a human (I would argue it should be totally done by a human, but I digress), can't claim.

The problem with AI is the source material. How is it sourcing it's learning materials? That's what is up in the air. Even companies that say that they are doing things ethically, I wouldn't trust them at all. About the only way that one may get around this, is running a local instance of AI that doesn't have access to the WAN and only training on in house datasets.

I would imagine companies would lobby to have that change considering the talent pool that they have to pull from is not really talented at all anymore. But I personally wouldn't touch it even at that point.

As to "creative input" and even prompts themselves, I liken it to the customer that comes in and says that they want this, that and the other, but outside of that, they have no other input outside of that. Do we consider the resulting artwork the clients from the get go or not?


As I get older, the more and more I want to go back to analog and I do like my computers, but I don't like all of these abstractions (and this can actually be seen with computer in general as well with the current generation of users). Sometimes too much isn't a good thing in the long run.