zachweinersmith.bsky.social
Author of Bea Wolf, A City on Mars, and the comic SMBC
Website: www.smbc-comics.com
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersmith?ty=h
New book: http://www.acityonmars.com/
4,744 posts
45,930 followers
586 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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I think also you cannot overstate the appeal of an enthusiastic unjudgmental empty vessel pretending to be your friend.
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I’m an artist, man. Quality is a thing we sneak into people’s consumption like parents putting broccoli under cheese. You think most people care if it goes away?
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As an American tourist I expect to be informed that my great grandfather drank in this very Irish pub regardless of my actual ancestry.
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I wish.
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Nice that he’s still using pickup lines even after marriage!
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“Consider a a firm which employs more than 85% of ELON GET YOUR DICK OUT OF THE VENTILATOR THIS INSTANT!”
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Like I’m trying to explain the idea of monopsony while a guy is setting fire to the oxygen system while tweeting
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It's a weird situation: I was speaking with one of the writers, and he did not understand: he saw the sketches, he saw the guy draw, so he couldn't imagine that was I.A.
Apparently the guy was in a rush and used his sketches as a prompt to generate the final illustrations. But for non-artists...
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I’ve had this one bookmarked for over a decade now. Panel 3 is perfection
www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-1...
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We doing favourite SMBC comics now?
This one is mine
www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-li...
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I keep this one in my bookmarks whenever I feel like crying: www.smbc-comics.com?id=3088
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We put in a video ad when COVID started as a temporary offset to the insane drop in rates, but I think it ultimately turned people off. Also, I hate ads.
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Much obliged, but don't worry about it! If a book of mine looks interesting, please buy it, but other than that just enjoy.
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I think you can create a gpt that'll act like a condescending unhelpful stackexchange user, if you miss it.
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If so, the last panel should be a dystopia the humans are all fine with due to some hidden fetish.
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I think the arts (and crafts) are where the labor theory comes closest to being true. Meaning, people will pay extra for you to do it in a more labor-intensive way. Like, I'm pretty confident artisan soap actually obeys labor theory.
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Hey, @ryannorth.ca, time to retire
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This is the literal best joke ever.
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Also CGI replacing practical effects, drum machines, even hand-loom work getting replaced. There's a long tradition, for better and worse.
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That definitely makes sense. I wonder if we'll start seeing more illustrator contracts that explicitly forbid AI?
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Yeah, I mean I dunno what he did, but speaking for myself, if I had generated an AI image and traced it, surely I wouldn't have had the duplicated arm. I can imagine still missing some of the shirt cuffs, by you'd have to be pretty distracted to not notice a whole extra arm while tracing.
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Like I think a lot of people are doing the "toupée fallacy" about AI generated art. That is, you think toupées always look fake because you never detect the ones done well. And doing AI art well is getting way easier on something like a quarterly cadence.
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Incidentally, separate from the ethical aspects, I don't even know the legality part? Like it at least looks like they either generated AI straight up, or generated AI and traced. But, suppose they had the AI generate rough pencils. Is that OK?
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I guess what interests me here is this appears to have gotten all the way through publishing, and the "AI errors" if that's what they are could've been fixed with about 5 minutes of effort. Which suggests it's possible other artists really have basically copied AI templates and got it through.
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The one that seems pretty likely to be AI is there's a panel that appears to have a duplicated arm, which is duplicated in a very AI why. Hard to describe what that means, but basically it's done a way where you it'd be plausible if there weren't a first arm already.
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What's interesting to me is even the AI indicators are dicey. Like, most of these are things a real artist might do by accident, e.g. forgetting the line for a shirt cuff, occasional stray lines. There *is* a three-eyed rabbit but frankly it'd be weird for a modern AI to do that?
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There are also places with the wrong finger count. It's a cartoon, so not so weird, but a little weird that sometimes it's 4 fingers and sometimes 3.
There's a discussion here on www.reddit.com/r/RealOrAI/c...
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There are suggestive things, e.g. places where a line that indicates a shirt-cuff wasn't drawn. Also what you might call style mismatch, where (unusually for a human, but not impossible) the background has lots of details but the foreground is a simple style.
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Apparently the authors hired off of Fiver. What's interesting to me is that the art is, to my eye, borderline. The main reason it looks like AI is that it has what I think of as the OpenAI "house style" which is a kinda cutesy American style.