Liandro
Ceará, Brazil
I draw cartoons and teach about art, design and creativity.
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The guy from BluishDot
•
3mo
added comment inCan art die?
Hello Liandro! Good to have you back with some thought provoking questions.
I’ll start by saying that I find this to be a very complex topic with a lot of variables which would require hours of discussions to cover everything. My thoughts on this are also not finalized and might change as I come across new information and discover new perspectives. I’m also talking about this in the framework of making money as an artist. I don’t think that artists who just want to create art for their own enjoyment will be affected by AI.
I’ll tackle each question one by one and try to keep tangents as short as possible.
“Do these predictions make sense to you?”
Pretty much yes. And it’s sad to see that this is the direction we’re heading in.
“Do you think “AI is killing art”?”
I’m not sure I would use the word killing. I don’t see how you could “kill” art. Maybe if you are able to completely erase it (physical or digital) and have no record of it whatsoever, then sure, that could count as “killing” it. But I don’t think AI is killing art.
What I do think, however, is that effortful human-made art will be drowned in a vast sea of AI generated, cookie-cutter, financially viable products, designed to maximize profit and increase user retention as much as possible. I also think that, unfortunately, this will be a successful business strategy for many studios. To me it looks like the majority of art “consumers” don’t really care how art is made, only what they see as the final result.
But let’s say I’m wrong, and most people do care how art is made. If I were to see a movie like Klaus and find out that it’s 90% generated by AI, then it would start feeling empty and superficial. However, for a studio, that might not matter. With a low enough cost to produce such movies they might need a smaller number of consumers to make a profit. And at the end of the day, that seems to be a major variable for everyone involved.
“Do you feel empowered enough as part of an art community to “hack the future” or so?”
Yes, I think there are enough artists taking this situation seriously who could, through unified effort, enact change.
One piece of the puzzle, that I think might help artists to “survive” this wave of AI, is to include themselves and their process in the marketing of their art. If more people start to associate the care, thought, and effort put into making a piece of art with the actual artwork, that might become a huge advantage over anything touched by AI.
As an example, I often go back and watch the behind the scenes of the LOTR trilogy. The amount of passion, attention to detail, and effort put into making those movies is, I think, incredible. That for me will always be light-years ahead of anything that an AI might generate.
“And how do you feel about this whole scenario we’re currently living and witnessing?”
It’s very disappointing. I don’t think that this was the area of human society that needed such a jump in technological automation.
In recent years we had more movies, TV shows, and games come out than ever before. The problem is that most of them are bad. Unfortunately, instead of focusing on quality over quantity, we’ve just made quantity cheaper.
There’s a lot left to be said about education, the mind numbing effects of social media, and passive content consumption in general, but I’ll end it here for now.
I’m looking forward to more discussions like these in the future!
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3mo
Hey, @The guy from BluishDot, thank you for the warm welcoming! 😄 Indeed there's so much more to mention. It feels invigorating to read your sensible and down-to-earth words, thanks for sharing!
@goatsurgeon
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3mo
Mine dies every day. I sketch a bunch of stuff and throw it in the garbage right after. It served as a workout, it's clutter if I keep it.
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3mo
That's a courageous exercise of detachment! 😅
added a new topic
Can art die?A couple days ago, I got an e-mail from an artist whose work I've admired for long and from whom I hadn’t heard in a while. He used to call himself an "art hacker" and seemed to be what many of us would call "succesful" - he had good jobs in the entertainment industry, got well paid for them and was able to create amazing illustrations with innovative concepts, solid construction and beautiful rendering.
Then, around 2020, at what he said was the peak of his career, he quit. No, he didn't die - in fact, he said he was "alive and well". But he did quit his art jobs, "killed" his artistic persona, completely left the art industry and openly donated 90GB of his stunning digital artwork to public domain. He said it was a deliberate decision of "creative destruction" in face of realizing that, basically, mass-production entertainment was a flawed institution in our society. By quitting his career as an industry-standard concept artist, he said he could free his creative energy from restraints and direct it to fulfill other objectives.
As generative AI came around and started becoming more popular in the latest years, he wrote again. He said “AI is killing art” and seemed very concerned not only about the future of art jobs, but also about the future of humanity and modern society overall.
And below is the most recent message I got from him:
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“By the end of 2025, most traditional artist jobs will be gone, replaced by a handful of AI-augmented art directors. Right now, around 5 out of 6 concept art jobs are being eliminated, and it's even more brutal for illustrators. This isn't speculation: it's happening right now, in real-time, across studios worldwide.
At this point, dogmatic thinking is our worst enemy. If we want to survive the AI tsunami of 2025, we need to prepare for a brutal cyberpunk reality that isn’t waiting for permission to arrive. This isn't sci-fi or catastrophism. This is a clear-eyed recognition of the exponential impact AI will have on society, hitting a hockey stick inflection point around April-May this year. By July, February will already feel like a decade ago. This also means that we have a narrow window to adapt, to evolve, and to build something new.
Let me make five predictions for the end of 2025 to nail this out:
1 Every major film company will have its first 100% AI-generated blockbuster in production or on screen.
2 Next-gen smartphones will run GPT-4o-level reasoning AI locally.
3 The first full AI game engine will generate infinite, custom-made worlds tailored to individual profiles and desires.
4 Unique art objects will reach industrial scale: entire production chains will mass-produce one-of-a-kind pieces. Uniqueness will be the new mass market.
5 Synthetic AI-generated data will exceed the sum total of all epistemic data (true knowledge) created by humanity throughout recorded history. We will be drowning in a sea of artificial ‘truths’.
For us artists, this means a stark choice: adapt to real-world craftsmanship or high-level creative thinking roles, because mid-level art skills will be replaced by cheaper, AI-augmented computing power.
But this is not the end. This is just another challenge to tackle.
Many will say we need legal solutions. They're not wrong, but they're missing the bigger picture: Do you think China, Pakistan, or North Korea will suddenly play nice with Western copyright laws? Will a "legal" dataset somehow magically protect our jobs? And most crucially, what happens when AI becomes just another tool of control?
Here's the thing - boycotting AI feels right, I get it. But it sounds like punks refusing to learn power chords because guitars are electrified by corporations. The systemic shift at stake doesn't care if we stay "pure", it will only change if we hack it.
Now, the empowerment part: artists have always been hackers of narratives.
This is what we do best: we break into the symbolic fabric of the world, weaving meaning from signs, emotions, and ideas. We've always taken tools never meant for art and turned them into instruments of creativity. We've always found ways to carve out meaning in systems designed to erase it.
This isn't just about survival. This is about hacking the future itself.
We, artists, are the pirates of the collective imaginary. It’s time to set sail and raise the black flag.
I don't come with a ready-made solution.
I don't come with a FOR or AGAINST. That would be like being against the wood axe because it can crush skulls.
I come with a battle cry: let’s flood the internet with debate, creative thinking, and unconventional wisdom. Let’s dream impossible futures. Let’s build stories of resilience - where humanity remains free from the technological guardianship of AI or synthetic superintelligence. Let’s hack the very fabric of what is deemed ‘possible’. And let’s do it together.
It is time to fight back.
Let us be the HumaNet.
Let’s show tech enthusiasts, engineers, and investors that we are not just assets, but the neurons of the most powerful superintelligence ever created: the artist community.”
—
Now I’m a fan of creative debates, so I figure bringing this discussion here could help put our minds to think together.
So what do you guys think? Do these predictions make sense to you? Do you think “AI is killing art”? Do you feel empowered enough as part of an art community to “hack the future” or so? And how do you feel about this whole scenario we’re currently living and witnessing?
Stay well! <3 And let’s share ideas!
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3mo
Hey, @Anubhav Saini! Long time! :)
Overall, I think this is an intriguing and interesting drawing! Since it's an imaginative piece, you can rest assured that it's okay being more loose with proportions. I also think you've captured a good expression for the hand, so I don't see any issues to address about gesture.
Now I do see a structural aspect that could be brought to attention: by looking at the drawing, I feel as if the telephone doesn't quite conform to what should be the volume of the hand, so I'd suggest making a few adjustments in its position considering the roundness and thickness of the back of the palm where it's standing. Here's a draw-over to illustrate what I mean.
Hope this helps!
And hope everything's fine with you.
Keep it up!
Hey, @Stephen Archibald! If you can afford the time and energy, I'd suggest making up a weekly or monthly schedule for your art studies and practices, dividing each session by topic, according to what you want to learn or to which skills you'd like to develop at the moment.
However, if you work full time, have kids or live under any other condition that limits the time you can dedicate to art, I'd say you can let go of what you already know for a while and prioritize investing in other things that can help you keep learning and growing as an artist. In my experience, once we've learned some solid skills, it's okay to spend some time focusing on other things - it's very unlikely that we'll "unlearn" what we'd already developed. Of course, later on, when we decide to pick up on something we had taken time off from, we'll probably feel kind of rusty and need some time to get reacquainted with the practice, but that doesn't mean we've lost all the previous mileage we'd built. Even if we do need to take a while to remember some concepts or shape up techniques, the "recovery" is much faster than when we're learning everything for the first time.
Hope this helps!
Here's my personal take on your questions, @Robert: the only deal breaker for making art in general is simply not wanting to make art, not feeling moved by or interested in the act of making it. If, for any reason, at any given time, you somehow felt compelled to start making art, that should be enough to justify making it. You say you don't really have a reason to do art in the first place, but I think that the mere fact that you somehow got interested in learning drawing fundamentals, even if just mildly, is enough of a reason. Sometimes, we don't even have a rational explanation for why we make art, we just "feel" that we want, need or should. The way I see it, art is a sort of existential practice. Of course, it can be a job or a career path, too, but not only and not necessarily. We make art because it makes us feel good, human, connected, valued, significant in some way, whether big or small. We make art because, on any level, making art matters to us.
Of course, growing as an artist is a lifetime journey, and figuring out what we wanna say with our art (or if we have anything at all to be said) is part of maturing our skills, our minds and ourselves throughout that journey. The feeling of "not having anything to communicate" at the moment could be a sign that there are other aspects of art-making that we might need to grasp before finding our own voice: maybe we need to level up our knowledge of the fundamentals, or our technical skills, or maybe we need to keen up our critical observation of the world and consider how our art could have an impact on it, or maybe tune into our own emotional and subjective motivations, or maybe we need to get to learn more about other artists and see how their shaped their journeys so that we can have some models of what can be done, the possibilities. We don't need to have a precise route all the time, but just constantly reassess our journeys, see if we like where we're headed towards and let our intuition guide us to readjust whenever necessary. Scott McCloud (a famous comic book author) compares an apple to the process of maturing as an artist: the desire to make good art is often the red shiny surface; as we go deeper, we start to deal with the other layers (fundamentals, techniques, influences...), and the ideas, "what we want to say" with our art, the major purpose of doing it, is in the seeds, and might only reveal itself after some time.
Bottom line, you don't need to force yourself to be creative, and you certainly don't need to force yourself to have your own artistic voice figured out early on. As you keep learning, practicing and evolving, the need for creativity and personality might gradually emerge, and you might naturally feel the calling to start making more and more sense of it.
Wow! This sounds like great news, @Anubhav Saini! I'm glad to have been able to help you somehow along your path so far. Keep going! And congratulations!
Hey, @Anubhav Saini! It seems to me that the idea behind your drawing is rooted in strong personal feelings…
Since you tagged me, I believe you’re expecting feedback, so hope you allow me to share my perceptions.
I understand that the “4 people” in the saying is a popular way to refer to “other people” in general. In your drawing, you chose to depict exactly 4 other characters in the scene - as if there were literally just 4 people that could say bad things about the main character and, if just these people got out of his way, he could be “free”. I think that playing with the literality of the words is witty and opens up a path for humour - but I believe that showing the people with their faces covered and a gun pointed to the back of their heads becomes a bit too violent and explicitly shocking, which, for my personal taste, kind of takes away the humour aspect. Personally, I think I’d rather try to find a more subtle and perhaps metaphorical way to explore the same concept so that a violence component wouldn’t obscure the wit and humour. But, of course, this is just my personal opinion - a lot of the choices artists make depends on their individual takes and on the intended audiences, so of course you’re free to take other directions that might make more sense to you if that’s the case.
Ah! And I should say that I’m noticing some visible improvement in your illustration technique compared to previous artworks I’ve seen you post before. Looks like your studies are paying off!
Hope this helps in any way. If you need anything else, feel free to let me know.
Best regards!
Thank you very much and the I feel a lot of rage when these other people try to make us feel down and especially when they try to provoke my parents
@gman_arts
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1yr
I have a question for you that learning human anatomy is necessary for cartoons or not ? As I make cartoons for my 2d animations .
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1yr
Good question, @gman_arts! I think it depends on the style of cartoon that you’re going for. If it’s realism-based cartoons (think of Disney movie characters or comics superheroes), then, yes, it’s essential to be very familiar with realistic anatomy because those kind of stylizations rely deeply on it and require anatomical believabilty. For a more simple-shaped or stick-figure kind of cartoon (think of South Park or Peppa Pig), then I’d say it’s not necessary to delve into anatomy - although it might still help to know basic figure construction so you can maintain proportions and know where to place each part of the body, even if stylized. Hope this helps!
