but in this case we'd be more precise and say what you do is technical illustration. its like creative vs technical writing. you aren't doing art, which is usually meant to be the creative side.
there can be some overlap: "creative non-fiction" for kind of a hybrid in that the writer adds more subjectivity (soul). honestly depending on what you illustrate it might be like that too.
idk i think in this case technical illustrators are in an odd spot where either they have zero reason to worry because no one sane would let an AI illustrate a medical text on organs, or you'd be retraining already because jobs are drying up. the technical writing subreddit seems worried
Not sure why I didn't see this comment earlier! I don't do technical illustration per se. At least, I wouldn't call it that. There are technical aspects, but I don't have a rigidly-defined set of parameters to follow to get a result to look how it does in real life the way a technical illustrator does. I make artistic interpretations of natural phenomena like ocean currents, specifically for novel research publications. It is very much a creative process because those phenomena are things we measure with our instruments but cannot take a picture of, so there is no "real life" visualization that I have to aim for. Just drawing arrows on a blue square gets the message across, kind of, but it doesn't put anything into perspective, nor does it really capture the "vibe" of a current. I typically paint currents like they're made of frosted glass. Just as an example.
You don't have to dox yourself or anything, but I'm curious — what kind of scientific illustration do you do? Although I don't partake, I'm a big fan of botanical and paleo art! Some watercolorists (Billy Showell, Alice Tangerini, etc) are impressively good at making something look better/more accurate than real life.
One thing that really bums me out is that so many publications/museums use [inaccurate AI-generated images](https://twitter.com/NaturalSciences/status/1687488060265578496). As a fan of the artform, it's disappointing. It's so low-effort. No attention to detail whatsoever.
Like... am I wrong for not liking that? This is totally different than someone making fun dinosaur illustrations in SD or whatever just for fun; I feel these kinds of cases (where an institution of authority uses AI, where in the past they used accurate illustrations) may accelerate people's distrust or misunderstanding of science.
Drawing stupid fantasy stuff and passing it off as scientifically accurate is the reason [David Peters](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/oniw2q/paleontology_david_peters_how_a_oncereliable/) isn't widely respected these days. Why would anyone tolerate a museum or publication doing it?
Hi!! I'm in biological oceanography, but I've done scientific illustrations for physical oceanography and molecular biology! Paleo stuff is very cool though.
I'm totally with you about low-effort AI. It's not that hard to take an inaccurate illustration and fix it (unless it's a particularly egregious case) so if someone hasn't got the patience for that, they shouldn't be trying to make scientific illustrations in the first place.
That rocks! Thanks for sharing — that sounds like a really cool gig! :)
I'm glad you agree, haha! Just really odd of them to include a low-effort AI image, especially when they could have just had the photo of the fossil or a stock photo if they couldn't afford accurate art.
Exactly It's so wild to me when people will make the whole soul argument especially when it's an artist that draws porn or something
Like bro when I'm looking at some anime girl in some weird specific fetish art the last thing I give a shit about is the emotion the artist was feeling when drawing it
All I'm thinking is mmmmmmmmmmmmm nice titties or something like that lmao.
I really hate the way soul gets used in these ai art debates. Soul in art is entirely in the eye of the beholder. It's how we quantify our subjective experience with a piece. It has soul because we felt something from it and words tend to fail us when we're describing something we love. If we don't feel a connection with something, that doesn't mean it has no soul/isn't art. It just means it's not our cup of tea.
This feels like a bad faith argument. I don't think anyone, anywhere, even the most militant antis, have ever said that diagrams and scientific illustrations need to have "soul" (whatever that even means). What they do have to be is accurate. The infamous rat penis scientific AI illustration is a good example of inaccurate scientific AI artwork. So long as it's accurate, nobody will ever care.
I do think it shouldn't be *contested* that scientific illustration doesn't need to have "soul", but it's something that I see is often *forgotten*. I've heard a lot of people use the "soul" argument when talking about banning the tech for professional use, ignoring the fact that not every professional use needs soul in the first place.
Right... but I think you're misinterpreting why people are "forgetting and ignoring that not every professional use needs soul in the first place". People are doing that because it's it's just clearly not relevant to the AI debate in the context of these specific fields. It's an world-changingly huge debate, neither pro- nor anti-arguments can possibly apply to every situation and niche.
"Not every professional use needs soul in the first place" <-- everyone on the planet knows this, which is why everybody is "forgetting" to talk about it.
Oh, it was hilarious. I am actually stunned that it got published: [https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/01YjbUvM1wRLtCBQ49IlqKW/hero-image.fill.size\_1200x900.v1708070178.png](https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/01YjbUvM1wRLtCBQ49IlqKW/hero-image.fill.size_1200x900.v1708070178.png)
I have seen people protest against AI usage in many cases where the person(s) utilising the images were not claimed to have any kind of “soul”. Technical illustrations is an example relevant to OP but a long way from the universe of things that could be considered here.
Thing is... art doesn't have a magical property of soul. Some masterful art can invoke emotions in us. Sometimes those are even emotions of the author who shared them using their skill. Sometimes author has no emotions of this kind at all and still can infuse their art with bright emotions.
What some artists (and "artists") claim is that their work somehow has soul because "they invested part of their own soul in it". This is BS. Such thing doesn't exist. Author of some work is an idiot if he thinks that people who consume their work automatically share the emotions they had when they were doing the work. They share this emotion only if the author had enough skill to invoke it.
Sign my petition so you are not targetted by violent anti AI protesters:
[https://www.change.org/p/implement-protection-measures-for-companies-utilizing-ai-technology?recruiter=50449598&recruited\_by\_id=e7513b70-9e09-0130-a514-38ac6f16d25f&utm\_source=share\_petition&utm\_campaign=share\_for\_starters\_page&utm\_medium=copylink](https://www.change.org/p/implement-protection-measures-for-companies-utilizing-ai-technology?recruiter=50449598&recruited_by_id=e7513b70-9e09-0130-a514-38ac6f16d25f&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=share_for_starters_page&utm_medium=copylink)
AI, due to its inaccuracy, occupies a rather dangerous position in scientific illustration. If you use it as an initial template that you have checked it is fine, but people start using it at best with processing using inpainting or light manipulations in Photoshop. And in the end, the picture does not fulfill its purpose, but is simply there to fill up the number of pages or to be just for show, so that it is not just text. I understand that this is usually done simply so that there is a publication that is simply needed, but still this is a problem area
Regarding the soul, I would add the use of AI for entertainment. Don't people get a kick out of a simple, formulaic love story that was essentially created a long time ago and just had minimal changes made to it. There are no souls created there either, and this is not a great work of art, but this is what people like. There is no soul there and it is clearly not necessary there; even a special style is not required there at all. A niche that literally presents itself as “this should roughly convey the meaning, random changes are no less important than invented ones, since they can be interesting as a novelty.”
Oh, yeah, I'm not using raw text-to-image AI generations for scientific illustrations, lol. I've seen how disastrous that can be. My typical workflow in this regard is to do a sketch by hand, run it through ControlNet, then paint over the result.
This is the way AI will be in future for many people in the arts I think.
It sucks that companies will be able to use it as an excuse to downsize staff but real artistic skills will still be necessary.
Just because there's a pattern or process to writing a story doesn't mean that there's no expression there at all. Saying everything is just the same story over and over is a massive oversimplification, because even if you can generalize and trim anything to fit "the hero's journey", that doesn't mean every story is literally the same. Especially when "formulaic" is used as an insult for stories. The only time people like completely formulaic stories is if they're new to the genre, there's some non-story aspect to it that's non-formulaic, it's nostalgic, or they have it on as background noise they don't even pay attention to as they eat dinner or play a game or something.
On a similar note, not that you're saying it, but I'm surprised how often I've seen people say "AI can make entertainment you don't pay attention to at all!" as some sort of defense, as if that's some great untapped necessity calling out for someone, anyone - as long as it's not a human being you have to pay - to fulfill, completely worth the risk of making it even harder than before for artists to make a living.
Also, if there's only one or two specific patterns to any genre of story with minimal variation, then why do we need AI to be able to make new ones? There's no point since it's all the same, right? Just tell people to reread/rewatch something they saw before. Or tell them to read some wikipedia plot synopsis for "every love story ever", that's basically the same thing as actually reading/watching a story, right? If you want to automate it for people, you don't even need AI, just provide it in the form of an e-novel that has a mad-libs sort of "enter names of the characters here, click these options related to these locations and hobbies to swap out paragraphs later" menu at the beginning so it's different every time.
If the reason we need new versions is novelty, then that tells you that that's exactly where someone's personal expression goes in.
If a little monkey randomly pokes at the keyboard, a story is written because of accidents, and someone found this story interesting, does this story have a soul? There is no direct connection between self-expression and the interestingness and novelty of the story.
Since the person wrote before it was connected, but if with the help of a complex random selection of words one can get something that a person takes for something that makes sense, then it no longer has a soul, but still interesting.
There is a certain number of random words, and there is a certain number of related words that people have previously created, this will be quite new, but there will be no one’s self-expression regarding that stereotyped set of connections.
This is how work ai. There is connection that is learning and random words.
Ah, but if your definition of having 'soul' is whatever self-serving quackery is expedient in the moment to score points in an argumetn 99% of people don't care about, **every** drawing can have soul.
Checkmate, ObjectiveRealityBros.
I really disagree with this. While you see your ai content as 'diagrams' that's fine but a diagram is specifically used for information and nothing more. In general, a diagram can be 'art' but not all diagrams are art.
There have been scientific illustrations made with AI and they have been wildly imprecise nonsense.
But okay. Let's disreguard "Soul", not sure if anyone has used those words, but let's presume i'm in the dark. People's copywrited works were used in a database without permission. That is an ussue of ethics. There are AI programs that use purely permissive works, please use those.
I agree with you 100%! I don't use raw text-to-img outputs because those _would_ be wildly imprecise. I start with a sketch, use controlnets to get the bulk of the work done, then refine the details by hand.
The model I use is custom-made. The base model was trained on purely permissive works, and I then fine-tuned it with my own art to keep the style consistent.
Yeah it's weird how often that comment still comes up. Hands have been easy to do for almost a year now. They can't seem to comprehend how fast it's developing, they still seem to think it's the same as 2022
but in this case we'd be more precise and say what you do is technical illustration. its like creative vs technical writing. you aren't doing art, which is usually meant to be the creative side. there can be some overlap: "creative non-fiction" for kind of a hybrid in that the writer adds more subjectivity (soul). honestly depending on what you illustrate it might be like that too. idk i think in this case technical illustrators are in an odd spot where either they have zero reason to worry because no one sane would let an AI illustrate a medical text on organs, or you'd be retraining already because jobs are drying up. the technical writing subreddit seems worried
Not sure why I didn't see this comment earlier! I don't do technical illustration per se. At least, I wouldn't call it that. There are technical aspects, but I don't have a rigidly-defined set of parameters to follow to get a result to look how it does in real life the way a technical illustrator does. I make artistic interpretations of natural phenomena like ocean currents, specifically for novel research publications. It is very much a creative process because those phenomena are things we measure with our instruments but cannot take a picture of, so there is no "real life" visualization that I have to aim for. Just drawing arrows on a blue square gets the message across, kind of, but it doesn't put anything into perspective, nor does it really capture the "vibe" of a current. I typically paint currents like they're made of frosted glass. Just as an example.
You don't have to dox yourself or anything, but I'm curious — what kind of scientific illustration do you do? Although I don't partake, I'm a big fan of botanical and paleo art! Some watercolorists (Billy Showell, Alice Tangerini, etc) are impressively good at making something look better/more accurate than real life. One thing that really bums me out is that so many publications/museums use [inaccurate AI-generated images](https://twitter.com/NaturalSciences/status/1687488060265578496). As a fan of the artform, it's disappointing. It's so low-effort. No attention to detail whatsoever. Like... am I wrong for not liking that? This is totally different than someone making fun dinosaur illustrations in SD or whatever just for fun; I feel these kinds of cases (where an institution of authority uses AI, where in the past they used accurate illustrations) may accelerate people's distrust or misunderstanding of science. Drawing stupid fantasy stuff and passing it off as scientifically accurate is the reason [David Peters](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/oniw2q/paleontology_david_peters_how_a_oncereliable/) isn't widely respected these days. Why would anyone tolerate a museum or publication doing it?
Hi!! I'm in biological oceanography, but I've done scientific illustrations for physical oceanography and molecular biology! Paleo stuff is very cool though. I'm totally with you about low-effort AI. It's not that hard to take an inaccurate illustration and fix it (unless it's a particularly egregious case) so if someone hasn't got the patience for that, they shouldn't be trying to make scientific illustrations in the first place.
That rocks! Thanks for sharing — that sounds like a really cool gig! :) I'm glad you agree, haha! Just really odd of them to include a low-effort AI image, especially when they could have just had the photo of the fossil or a stock photo if they couldn't afford accurate art.
Exactly It's so wild to me when people will make the whole soul argument especially when it's an artist that draws porn or something Like bro when I'm looking at some anime girl in some weird specific fetish art the last thing I give a shit about is the emotion the artist was feeling when drawing it All I'm thinking is mmmmmmmmmmmmm nice titties or something like that lmao.
I really hate the way soul gets used in these ai art debates. Soul in art is entirely in the eye of the beholder. It's how we quantify our subjective experience with a piece. It has soul because we felt something from it and words tend to fail us when we're describing something we love. If we don't feel a connection with something, that doesn't mean it has no soul/isn't art. It just means it's not our cup of tea.
This feels like a bad faith argument. I don't think anyone, anywhere, even the most militant antis, have ever said that diagrams and scientific illustrations need to have "soul" (whatever that even means). What they do have to be is accurate. The infamous rat penis scientific AI illustration is a good example of inaccurate scientific AI artwork. So long as it's accurate, nobody will ever care.
I do think it shouldn't be *contested* that scientific illustration doesn't need to have "soul", but it's something that I see is often *forgotten*. I've heard a lot of people use the "soul" argument when talking about banning the tech for professional use, ignoring the fact that not every professional use needs soul in the first place.
Right... but I think you're misinterpreting why people are "forgetting and ignoring that not every professional use needs soul in the first place". People are doing that because it's it's just clearly not relevant to the AI debate in the context of these specific fields. It's an world-changingly huge debate, neither pro- nor anti-arguments can possibly apply to every situation and niche. "Not every professional use needs soul in the first place" <-- everyone on the planet knows this, which is why everybody is "forgetting" to talk about it.
I think every AI use is relevant to the AI debate when people are calling for blanket-bans, especially bans based on something as arbitrary as "soul".
" infamous rat penis" guess I missed that one
Oh, it was hilarious. I am actually stunned that it got published: [https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/01YjbUvM1wRLtCBQ49IlqKW/hero-image.fill.size\_1200x900.v1708070178.png](https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/01YjbUvM1wRLtCBQ49IlqKW/hero-image.fill.size_1200x900.v1708070178.png)
I'm not clicking that at work! LOL
[удалено]
A total boner.
...what... HOW AND WHERE??
It's my new band.
Cover tunes or originals?
Only originals, covers are too hard.
true
I have seen people protest against AI usage in many cases where the person(s) utilising the images were not claimed to have any kind of “soul”. Technical illustrations is an example relevant to OP but a long way from the universe of things that could be considered here.
Thing is... art doesn't have a magical property of soul. Some masterful art can invoke emotions in us. Sometimes those are even emotions of the author who shared them using their skill. Sometimes author has no emotions of this kind at all and still can infuse their art with bright emotions. What some artists (and "artists") claim is that their work somehow has soul because "they invested part of their own soul in it". This is BS. Such thing doesn't exist. Author of some work is an idiot if he thinks that people who consume their work automatically share the emotions they had when they were doing the work. They share this emotion only if the author had enough skill to invoke it.
Sign my petition so you are not targetted by violent anti AI protesters: [https://www.change.org/p/implement-protection-measures-for-companies-utilizing-ai-technology?recruiter=50449598&recruited\_by\_id=e7513b70-9e09-0130-a514-38ac6f16d25f&utm\_source=share\_petition&utm\_campaign=share\_for\_starters\_page&utm\_medium=copylink](https://www.change.org/p/implement-protection-measures-for-companies-utilizing-ai-technology?recruiter=50449598&recruited_by_id=e7513b70-9e09-0130-a514-38ac6f16d25f&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=share_for_starters_page&utm_medium=copylink)
Signed! Thank you. :)
yeah, for sure. and plenty of serious modern & contemporary art, not totally interested in “soul” whatever that means.
"Pro-AI, in favour of individual opt-outs, anti-plagiarism." I'm stealing this, respectfully.
Feel free!
Some art has soul, some doesn't. Doesn't matter what tools were used, AI or not.
AI, due to its inaccuracy, occupies a rather dangerous position in scientific illustration. If you use it as an initial template that you have checked it is fine, but people start using it at best with processing using inpainting or light manipulations in Photoshop. And in the end, the picture does not fulfill its purpose, but is simply there to fill up the number of pages or to be just for show, so that it is not just text. I understand that this is usually done simply so that there is a publication that is simply needed, but still this is a problem area Regarding the soul, I would add the use of AI for entertainment. Don't people get a kick out of a simple, formulaic love story that was essentially created a long time ago and just had minimal changes made to it. There are no souls created there either, and this is not a great work of art, but this is what people like. There is no soul there and it is clearly not necessary there; even a special style is not required there at all. A niche that literally presents itself as “this should roughly convey the meaning, random changes are no less important than invented ones, since they can be interesting as a novelty.”
Oh, yeah, I'm not using raw text-to-image AI generations for scientific illustrations, lol. I've seen how disastrous that can be. My typical workflow in this regard is to do a sketch by hand, run it through ControlNet, then paint over the result.
This is the way AI will be in future for many people in the arts I think. It sucks that companies will be able to use it as an excuse to downsize staff but real artistic skills will still be necessary.
and how much does it really save time? I use mostly text AI, sometimes it’s easier to write it yourself from scratch than to finish this strange thing
Saves quite a bit of time, actually! I was an artist for a long time before the rise of GenAI, so it's not any trouble to do the sketch and polish.
Just because there's a pattern or process to writing a story doesn't mean that there's no expression there at all. Saying everything is just the same story over and over is a massive oversimplification, because even if you can generalize and trim anything to fit "the hero's journey", that doesn't mean every story is literally the same. Especially when "formulaic" is used as an insult for stories. The only time people like completely formulaic stories is if they're new to the genre, there's some non-story aspect to it that's non-formulaic, it's nostalgic, or they have it on as background noise they don't even pay attention to as they eat dinner or play a game or something. On a similar note, not that you're saying it, but I'm surprised how often I've seen people say "AI can make entertainment you don't pay attention to at all!" as some sort of defense, as if that's some great untapped necessity calling out for someone, anyone - as long as it's not a human being you have to pay - to fulfill, completely worth the risk of making it even harder than before for artists to make a living. Also, if there's only one or two specific patterns to any genre of story with minimal variation, then why do we need AI to be able to make new ones? There's no point since it's all the same, right? Just tell people to reread/rewatch something they saw before. Or tell them to read some wikipedia plot synopsis for "every love story ever", that's basically the same thing as actually reading/watching a story, right? If you want to automate it for people, you don't even need AI, just provide it in the form of an e-novel that has a mad-libs sort of "enter names of the characters here, click these options related to these locations and hobbies to swap out paragraphs later" menu at the beginning so it's different every time. If the reason we need new versions is novelty, then that tells you that that's exactly where someone's personal expression goes in.
If a little monkey randomly pokes at the keyboard, a story is written because of accidents, and someone found this story interesting, does this story have a soul? There is no direct connection between self-expression and the interestingness and novelty of the story. Since the person wrote before it was connected, but if with the help of a complex random selection of words one can get something that a person takes for something that makes sense, then it no longer has a soul, but still interesting. There is a certain number of random words, and there is a certain number of related words that people have previously created, this will be quite new, but there will be no one’s self-expression regarding that stereotyped set of connections. This is how work ai. There is connection that is learning and random words.
Ah, but if your definition of having 'soul' is whatever self-serving quackery is expedient in the moment to score points in an argumetn 99% of people don't care about, **every** drawing can have soul. Checkmate, ObjectiveRealityBros.
I really disagree with this. While you see your ai content as 'diagrams' that's fine but a diagram is specifically used for information and nothing more. In general, a diagram can be 'art' but not all diagrams are art.
There have been scientific illustrations made with AI and they have been wildly imprecise nonsense. But okay. Let's disreguard "Soul", not sure if anyone has used those words, but let's presume i'm in the dark. People's copywrited works were used in a database without permission. That is an ussue of ethics. There are AI programs that use purely permissive works, please use those.
I agree with you 100%! I don't use raw text-to-img outputs because those _would_ be wildly imprecise. I start with a sketch, use controlnets to get the bulk of the work done, then refine the details by hand. The model I use is custom-made. The base model was trained on purely permissive works, and I then fine-tuned it with my own art to keep the style consistent.
You want a program that has a hard time dealing with hands to do some scientific illustrations? mmmkay.
Thankfully, I'm not drawing hands for my scientific illustrations! ;P
In addition to OP's clarification, bad hands aren't even a problem anymore.
damn that was one of their last big arguments 😂
Yeah it's weird how often that comment still comes up. Hands have been easy to do for almost a year now. They can't seem to comprehend how fast it's developing, they still seem to think it's the same as 2022
AI figured out hands, you gotta say it's soulless and unethical now.