(I am part of a group that builds UI on top of open models, but we stopped working on our Krita version for that reason.)
I think in 3~5 years an painting app without AI generation feature is just like a painting app without pen pressure today. It's still usable, you can make great art with it if you have the skill, but it will be so out of fashion to a point it starts becoming cool again.
As far as I know there's a sizeable number of devs who don't intend to ever rely on copilot, and I would expect the a similar trend in the drawing community with amateurs and pros not specially anti-AI, but not wanting to have a random generator meddle with their art.
But again, some of the Krita team have had strong ideological positions on many themes. Luckily you can keep using the software whether you agree or not (and you can contribute, too).
Do your thing.
I'm on board for this on the basis that the creator should ultimately get to choose how their work is released. Open Source has to be a choice. But dang, I would hope that one of the outcomes of a project like this would be more public domain digital art.
((the root cause is that an economic system fundamentally based on scarcity == value doesn't make sense when applied to things that are essentially infinite, and kludgeing in artificial scarcity to make things work is not a good take))
I have a suspicion that art is to humans as fancy tails are to peacocks: the difficulty is the point.
I believe this is why we have art galleries proudly displaying oil paintings of fruit bowls, but don't do this for random food snapshots.
It's also why photographs as a category were initially dismissed (in an era that had come to praise extreme realism in paintings), but when photographers went on long trips to visit unusual places, people, and events, those photographs suddenly did count as art.
Bit of overlap between arts and knowledge shown by the wiktionary entry for the Latin "ars", so this can be extended to the way Socrates didn't like writing, and the desire for hand-made foods and durable goods over mass produced foods and products.
Mm. I’ve spoken to a number of artists who have expressed similar feelings of despair, frustration and anger.
There are many upset people over this technology, and calling it a meme diminishes them to meaningless copycat haters.
I don’t think that’s true; and doing it, really reallllly makes them angry.
Consider: this attitude it part of the reason why that attitude exists.
:|
If the stable diffusion folk hadn’t gone crazy cloning every art style they could and laughing about it, we could all have had a very different AI art future.
…but apparently we can’t have nice things because (some) people suck.
Every one of those conversations has been their kid telling me they will never touch AI, AI is evil, AI is the death of art and artists, and they refuse to see it any other way. One is graduating this year, wants to be a concept designer for high concept film and games: a role that is leaning heavy into generative art simply for the variations it generates. They refuse to discuss how their intended industry already uses and is adopting AI generative art en mass.
Times when I wish I had the eloquent voice of another.
As a web developer who started out in 2001/2002, I watched as custom web design jobs dried up, and more and more people (and ahem artists) started using online tools to create a templatised website on the cheap.
Did I throw a tantrum? Nope! I learned to do backend dev so I could make my own automation tools.
Seriously, just embrace these new superpowers already.
They're generally licensed with CC-NC-BY plus no derivatives (akin to GPL), but I don't want my images to be taken to a training set to feed a generative model without my consent, because you're violating the license terms I put on it.
Same is valid for my code. I stopped using GitHub, because it devours any and all open repositories regardless of its license and without asking for consent.
This is not about scarcity, but respect and ethics mostly. At least, from my perspective.
Yeah it must be a meme.
Anger about using AI is less justifiied.
Most people aren't really willing to smash the state though (I understand, that's where all my stuff is) so look for less drastic ways to protect themselves.
I'm not entirely sure how any of this relates to artists agitating against AI, unless they are themselves seeking to create artificial scarcity to prop up the market value of their services, now that the supply of art ability is no longer as constrained as it previously was.
it's quite simple. artists offer to make their art for a price, as a 'service'. then, something comes in, that pirated their previous works, and offers to make imagery in that art style for free (or at a low low price), undercutting and displacing that artist.
really it's a 'yet another spin on piracy'. cause that's just the 'services' part, besides the 'selling works/artwork' which has long been rife with piracy, but the 'pirating what's been offered as a service' thing is new. piracy expanding into 'services' field as well. services (particularly those that rely on someone specifically taking their time to do something, and not just 'press button, service gets performed unattended') are scarce. there's only so many hours and so much time in one's life.
Krita is almost 20 years old and is more focused on painting than on image editing – but personally, I use it for both, liking the UI much more than that of GIMP.
Obviously they both manipulate images so there's lots of overlap in features, but the idea of painting or drawing in GIMP seems really alien to me. I'm sure the interface and pen support was even worse when the Krita project was started.
I'm actually more confused by the converse: why do people keep using and recommending Gimp when Krita has existed for decades and is so much easier to use?
Because it's possible and someone wants to. Same reason why we have multiple Linux distros, multiple databases, multiple browsers, multiple text editors.
Are you surprised that open source software in general is duplicated? Or is this specific just to image editing software. If yes, what makes image editing software special so that having a second option is surprising?
Yes, open source promotes collaboration. It also promotes forking and starting new projects.
Krita is actually quite old. The reason you haven't heard of it is probably that it's more focused on digital painting than on general image manipulation.
There are actually more than two.
Krita on the other hand is designed for drawing and painting.
The fact that you think there's only one open source image editor out there is fascinating.
the video is mindblowing because on one hand, adobe photoshop announced this as "their own next big thing" and here we have an open source software replicating this same thing, so cool.
edit:
this also means photoshop doesnt have the "moat" they seem to have built around the generative ai thing and their software.
Off the top of my head, this plugin is from Nov 6, 2022, and I know there were others before this (or maybe it was just this shared in earlier form). https://github.com/sddebz/stable-diffusion-krita-plugin
Stable Diffusion heralded an explosion in generative AI that predated ChatGPT. Weird how OpenAI got all the credit when it was Stable Diffusion that first opened the gates.
Stable Diffusion came out much later than DALL-E by OpenAI, so I'd say they deserve some credit.
Nah that is an early version of a plugin that uses A1111 as the backend instead of ComfyUI (it does have a newer and maintained replacement, but its not the one in OP, which uses a ComfyUI backend.)
Sure, Krita is not Photoshop, but for the tasks certain creators will be doing in the next decade, they won't have a need for Photoshop anymore.
Interesting to see that the video is 2 months old.
That is already true for not just Photoshop, but for almost any kind of proprietary software. If you are willing to embrace the caveats and DIY nature of FOSS, for almost every task FOSS Software is good enough (and sometimes better than proprietary).
I think one of the major reasons of popularity of proprietary software vs FOSS is marketing.
https://youtu.be/Ly6USRwTHe0?t=127 <-- "now draw the rest of the owl"
Very inconvenient? Yes. Completely useless? No.
For even better latency perception, you could hook into the generation steps and have TAESD [1] decoding intermediate latents.
[0] https://huggingface.co/collections/latent-consistency/latent... [1] https://github.com/madebyollin/taesd
Uh... I'm not happy with this trend. Thankfully there is an option for using a ComfyUI, a torch based project as a backend.
I assume it's the case because the automatic ComfyUI installer that comes with this project doesn't know how to install/configure ROCm. Using your own ComfyUI installation works perfectly. I'll open a ticket with the author of the project to discuss this.
Source: I installed this yesterday on my Ubuntu computer with a 7900xtx and ROCm in Comfy
(With the dominance of CUDA, choice of a GPU on Linux gets even harder. It used to be a clear "fuck you Nvidia" if you wanted to use Wayland, but Nvidia definitely has the lead when it's about video editing and machine learning.)
How else are you supposed to support AMD in Pytorch on Windows?
Its not an option for using ComfyUI; its an option to use an external ComfyUI instance instead of one embedded in the plugin, this uses ComfyUI one way or the other.
I mean. Say you get "good" at using this. What's the life expectancy at any kind of creative outlet you could have that would support you? I mean if we're talking this is fun as a toy, yeah ok. I could see that. But as a job? When everyone can paint no one is paid for it.
I suppose that we could all go back to paying people who can physically lift things or wait on tables, but that's about it.
I want to use this, but then I just think "Holy shit, what if I get good at this and then get my hopes up like I did with React? What am I going to do, sell artwork that anyone can make for next to nothing on the internet?" I believe I could probably come up with some cool paintings, but the question is "why"? Everyone else on the internet will generate all the possible content it's possible for me to come up with anyway, so why does it matter?
And if that makes me care about "money" then yeah, I care about money. So what?
All of that being said I'm now going to draw a latex glad ninja being molested by a demon. Also I'm broke and living in a homeless shelter. But I can get a supercomputer to make me draw sexy girls so I have that going for me.
But most visual art is not just single pictures in a vacuum. Say you want to make a game with 2d still-art, or say a comic. You will need dozens or hundreds of images and they will have to be tied together by a common design — characters and style that look similar in the different images, and most of all you have to have a story to back it up. This is not something AIs can do well, not for a long while, but a human artist now may do significantly better than before with help of "dumb AI", such as the featured Krita plugin.
Finally, most artists don't think like you. It's not "pointless" to do something that can be technically repeated by other humans or AI. You do art because you want to express yourself.
I've seen this sentiment a bunch of times, but I don't agree. Most people practice skills and make art in order to demonstrate their value to society. Art (and media) doesn't exist in a vacuum, it surely exists for societal reasons.
A person may want to make a game or a comic, but the reason they want to make those things, instead of just consuming existing media, is also to demonstrate their value to society. But they won't have any value either when everyone else can easily make games and comics.
>A theoretical nice thing about Krita and art in these past decades was that you could be an 18 year old with some ok drawing skills, a thinkpad, a secondhand wacom tablet and a version of krita
You never needed a computer for that, just a pen/pencil and paper.
For digital painting in particular though, that only became possible in the recent years. Free digital painting software sucked until recently, so 20 years ago every 18 years old just pirated commercial software. And drawing tablets only became cheap and good after Wacom battery-less patents expired (alternatively, with the advent of iPads with pens that a lot of parents bought for their kids, and cheap drawing software in the App Store).
I'm not even starting on 3D, which always required beefy hardware. Tinkering with Maya/3DSMax/Lightwave in early 2000s required a really powerful gaming PC. These days you can at least rent a powerful GPU for peanuts to run the AI model.
One note about the installation on Ubuntu is that you need to install Krita first, run it, and then copy the plug-in to the desired folder - otherwise there is nowhere to copy it to.
My test prompt (to compare against other models):
> (masterpiece, best quality), a giant made of rock, highly detailed, rock texture
For Cinematic Photo XL this produces a picture of rocks. For Digital Artwork XL I get a nice scene with a complex rock structure. Both take about two minutes.
It seems to work well and the integration into Krita seems quite nice. The settings are suitably simple, but would be nice if more was exposed in an advanced window or something.
Does anyone have any idea what would very long mean on a 4GB VRAM card?
"Tested on a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 under Ubuntu with 4GB VRAM. (...) lowered the canvas to 2Kx2K and it seems to just about be okay. My test prompt (...) produces a picture of rocks. (...) I get a nice scene (...) Both take about two minutes."
Cloud GPUs is supported if that is an option:
https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion/blob/main/doc/clo...
