left: art by gutterbunny. right: AI art.
I have a question for artists, and I'd like some artists here on Cohost to weigh in on this. I think we can all agree that using AI art is pretty fuckin bad considering the models almost unilaterally use artwork without permission from the artist, utilizing an "opt out" method rather than an "opt in" method. Overall, pretty unethical and it sucks and it should stop doing that! Agree on all of that.
However, i'm not an artist; i'm a commissioner. I'm somebody who pays artists to draw my character in beautiful detail in their own styles, with their own artistic flairs displayed proudly in each piece I pay for. However, fursona design is exceedingly difficult. If I wanted to create a new fursona, I'd either have to use an entire short story's worth of words to describe what I'd like my new fursona to look like, or very crudely draw it and add about a paragraph to describe details i couldn't render properly.
My friend was futzing around with Microsoft's Bing AI as she often does just to see what it makes, and she got curious. She decided to use prompts that vaguely described my own fursona, and it spat out a design that I actually really vibe with. It's heavier on the punk look, with lime green hair rather than emerald green, a tattoo on its shoulder exactly where I have a tattoo (despite that not being in the prompt), and a bushy fox tail. Her wrists also fade to the same green as her hair, which kinda gives me an "unripened banana" vibe that I also like. The colour pallette is cool, the attire is cool, the neck fluff is really Sonic-esque which I adore, and her face is proportionally identical to my fursona's.
So, my question: how do artists on Cohost feel about commissioners who use AI art to design new fursonas or redesign current ones? Is this still considered unethical because it uses AI at all, is it a grey area because the AI art is being used to inspire real artwork, or is it ethical because the artwork actually being paid for and created is from an actual artist? I'm genuinely curious about artist's takes on this, because I wanna make sure I'm not doing anything unethical by way of using a machine learning algorithm to redesign or create fursonas and OC's.
I'm personally of the opinion that it's better to avoid using it altogether, but I'm not an artist, so I'd like to hear what other artists think! Please be kind to each other when replying, this is a very sensitive topic and given that I'm not an artist, I wanted to field this question to the actual professionals who have a much more valuable opinion on this topic than I do. <3
EDIT: To be clear, my application for machine learning artwork would be as reference to help an artist create a new reference sheet for the sona/OC. The ML artwork would NOT be used as general reference for artists, but for one artist to reference while creating a reference sheet that would then be used as a reference in the future.
