Selections will be based on quality, creativity, presentation of process, and more. Process is important. People should at least be able to attempt to replicate what you did. The entire point of the competition was to create this blog post, a simple collection of how-to tutorials that can get anyone up-skilled in a short period of time. Even if you hate everything about AI, here’s why I think it’s worth spending time on this…
The AI genie is out of the bottle. The more true experts I speak with, the clearer this is. No matter how one feels about AI—and I have plenty of misgivings—the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. This is true for hundreds of sectors and millions of people, including artists. I’ve watched family members work their asses off as artists, I wanted to be a comic book penciler for 10+ years, and I’ve paid traditional artists hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years. It’s a world that is near and dear to my heart. But… there is no going back to the way things used to be. In fact, there is no compelling way to stall things for long. So the question for me isn’t “How can we stop AI art?,” as I don’t think it’s possible, but rather something like: “What can artists do to get ahead of the curve?” or “How might proactive artists position themselves to benefit from this?” or “How can artists limit the damage of AI and carve out, or preserve, good niches for themselves?”
There are dozens of other similar questions we could ask, but I think the initial answer is the same for all of them: Learn to use AI tools. To kickstart your art career, and even if you plan on using more traditional methods… learn to use AI tools . To turbocharge your own art by streamlining mundane tasks… learn to use AI tools . To learn the current weaknesses and blindspots of AI tools so you can plan around them… learn to use AI tools . Most high-calibre artists have nothing to fear, many would-be artists have a lot to look forward to, and all artists have something to learn. If you would spend 10 hours at a weekend course that promised to improve the odds of a good living for the next decade, I think you should commit to spending 10 hours seriously using and scrutinizing the better AI tools. Even if you hate everything this represents, even if it’s an opponent you want to defeat, this is akin to watching tape of an opponent before a boxing match. Whether you want to surf the tsunami, dive through it, or get the hell out of the way, you need to understand the wave. To do that, you need to study it, and the sooner the better. The best defense is sometimes an early offense. I hope you find this post helpful, and please leave comments with other recommendations. I’m sure I’ll get a few gems and a boatload of screeds, but such is the spice of the Internet. This blog post is a rough draft and merely a starting point. And if you think the pace of AI development has been fast in the last six months, the next 12 months are going to make your head spin. I think the key is always returning your eyes to the road ahead of you instead of the rear-view mirror.
Just a few notes on structure before we dive in:
We included both “Winners” and “Honorable Mentions,” but all are included because they offered unique value or a unique approach.
I heavily weighed the incorporation of character traits. As I mention again below, it’s easy to make *something* pretty with AI, but to make a very *specific thing* with parameters and characteristics is much harder. For that reason, I tended to reward rougher art with better trait matching vs. polished art that used fewer traits. Some tweets are no longer live, and we’ve indicated that with a comment.
Special Honorable Mention
I am putting the below Twitter thread by @JPEGHODL first, as the thread itself represents an excellent Midjourney 101 tutorial for people who haven’t used Discord much. This is placed here upfront, as many of the submissions use Midjourney:
Entry #2… pic.twitter.com/ZgauVCMbCG — JPΞG HODL
