/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>6542333
That's a stupid image. Current Disney is already awful, and I wouldn't care if it went out of business altogether, much less laid off 90% of its art department. But there's no way AI could match the creative output of Disney's golden age artists, and anyone who thinks otherwise has shit for brains.
As to the second point, I'd be absolutely fine with big tech hiring poor artists in hopes of imitating the top artists to train their AI. When I think of the very best artists of the recent past, people like Frank Frazetta and Mort Drucker, they had and continue to have many imitators, and yet nobody would mistake the imitators for the original. Drucker's art in particular (see picrel) is light years beyond AI's capabilities, because it combines expressive linework, intelligent stylization, intent and context, all things beyond AI's comparatively dumb way of producing images.
Third point: Who cares? Are we supposed to weep that "average joe" has to pay for art? Or are we supposed to believe that "big corporations" aren't the ones already pushing for, and benefiting from, unethically trained AI art?

Mort Drucker, who passed away in 2020, was best known for the caricatures he draw for the movie parodies in Mad Magazine. His appealing, springy line and skill at drawing hands, shoes and clothing folds were also widely admired by other artists including Charles Schultz (Peanuts). I thought it might be worth mentioning a few things about Drucker, most of which I learned from a documentary film that's available to rent on Vimeo.
>He only ever attended one life drawing class; he felt embarrassed and never went back.
>Although he greatly admired painters like John Singer Sargent, Drucker said he himself couldn't paint, and always needed to have his line.
>He saw that other artists avoided drawing hands and decided to tackle and conquer that challenge right off the bat. Asked if he looked at photo reference, he replied that it was much quicker to just use his own hand, but that he'd since reached the point where he didn't need to look at anything.
>He was well into his career before he got up the courage to try coloring his work ("I never even had a box of crayons as a kid," he said). He took one of his assignments to Frank Frazetta (who lived nearby) and asked Frazetta to color it for him.
>He used the same beat-up drawing board for his entire career. He drew with a regular mechanical pencil, and inked with a Gilotte nib pen. He colored with Dr. Ph. Martin's colored inks, and Higgins russet ink for skin tones. He never owned a computer.
One thing in particular that struck me about Drucker is that he had a positive and grateful outlook. He was humble, praised other artists, and explained that the three dots in his signature stood for "God Bless America," because he felt lucky to have been born in the USA. Anyway, people achieve greatness in art in different ways and by different means. Remember that if you're down about struggling with one prescribed path or another.