Hi friends, mod here.
I want to take a moment to address the issue of low-quality AI-generated content that occasionally gets posted in this community.
While /c/comicstrips hasn’t had a specific rule about this until now, it’s become clear that some AI-generated comics being shared fall well below the standard of quality we aim to maintain. These low-effort posts not only disrupt the overall experience for readers, but they also devalue the hard work of the illustrators and artists who contribute original content here.
Starting today, a new rule is in place:
AI-generated comics are no longer allowed in this community.
Thanks for understanding and helping keep /c/comicstrips a high-quality space for everyone who loves comics.
So if you’re ok with low quality, why then you object about AI comics quality which is mostly significantly higher than “stick figures”?
There’s a difference between “low quality” and “simple”. Cyanide and Happiness, to use their example was simple, not low quality.
XKCD also a great example
yes. Yes. it is.
Because I believe stick figures are of a higher quality than AI. An AI generated comic shows me that you cared so little about it that you couldn’t even draw stick figures. And this has nothing to do with effort, but artistic intent. It shows that whoever did it had no desire to inject themselves into the comic and would rather have it look generic and bland. Fidelity does not equal quality.
Because AI “art” being posted around isn’t even consistent throughout the panel, and is often devoid of effort and context so even when it’s not that interesting, it’s not even pleasant to look at.
Comic artist like C&H and Oatmeal, while having terrible art, at least are funny and with context. There’s human in it, and they can call the style their “own”, even if it’s stick figure it’s stick figure with distinction. AI art just make you think “is this made from AI?”
You want people to appreciate AI comic? Sure, do the touch up first and make everything consistent.
Oatmeal is actually pretty well drawn. Not a good example. Xkcd would have been a better one.
Fair point. XKCD, Casually Explained, and MinuteScience all are stick figure but they still have some distinctive way to do their thing.
Absolutely! AI comics just lack soul.
Because generative AI is a lazy shortcut for the untalented or dispassionate. If you give half a shit, put in minimum effort and draw a damn stick figure in MS Paint.
because AI is lazy
You don’t even have to draw the stick figures yourself.
And how does it is differ from AI?
It differs from AI in that it’s completely unintelligent and doesn’t try or pretend to be intelligent or creative in any way. It leaves all the intelligence and creativity up to the user. It involves no “training” on large quantities of scraped data. It won’t do anything it isn’t explicitly told to do. The exact placement and pose of every stick figure, the precise layout and size of the individual frames, the exact content of every chunk of text is all explicitly and precisely specified by the user of codecomic. (In a source code file.) Also, a given source code file will only ever produce exactly the same webcomic whereas generally with generative AI, the exact same input can be used to generate a bunch of candidate images from which the user must select the “best.”
With something like Stable Diffusion, it does rely on lots of training data and the user’s only input into the content of the “generated” output is to throw a word-salad of keywords at it and tell it to “discern roughly something that fits these keywords”. The user doesn’t specify the exact location of anything in the resulting image. The user doesn’t have control over what exact text appears in the resulting image (and typically AI can’t even do text that’s sensical). At best the user can “influence” what’s output by tuning the keywords and hope with their fingers crossed that the Stable Diffusion model does roughly what the user has in mind.
Something tells me you didn’t even read what is there.