diy meets ai
Gabu presents what I interpret as her raison d'être (reason for being) on her blog's home page:
I strongly believe that DIY is gonna save us from A.I.
On the flipside, I stumbled upon u/justanotherpeep's thread on the ComfyUI subreddit: I’m a career artist (since the 90s) and used my illustrations to make an animation with comfy ui. Take some time to visit their post, watch their video, and maybe even leave a kind reply if that suits you.
They describe themselves as an artist "working in the illustration and animation industry" with generational feature film experience (Shrek, anyone?). Their video's overall creative workflow infuses DIY with AI: Procreate for their art, ComfyUI with the built-in WAN 2.2 template for animating their art, and ElevenLabs for modulating their voice. Them "only using AI to animate" what they "drew, photographed, illustrated, and scripted" gives them "the ability to be an entire studio" from the seat of their chair.
Like how DIY projects take time, learning to harness generative AI animation well took them "6-7 months of a LOT of trial and error". Yet, they explain how capable, quick, and cost-effective the actual process can be. With only 8 gigabytes of GPU VRAM, a 5 second high-resolution generation takes around 20 minutes. Meanwhile, hosted services like Comfy Cloud (currently in public beta) "can run gens in 20-30 seconds."
I find myself agreeing with many of u/justanotherpeep's sentiments:
- Learning new software can be a fun change of pace to software you already know how to use.
- It will be exciting to see what AI can generate in the near future.
- It's the skills, not the brush, that make the art.
It's nice seeing fellow AI art enthusiasts be receptive to and appreciative of hybrid creativity, the underlying workflow, and the creator themselves. The discussion even netted the creator a reference to a similar show to check out, appreciate, and even take inspiration from. However, the reply from u/2jul resonates best with me:
Love this. This radiates your creativity and story you wanted to tell. AI just enabled you to actually get it done.
That community welcome makes me wonder if my thoughts on AI in general are better served elsewhere, in spaces actively accepting and encouraging its use. For how inspirational and thankful my Internet neighbors have been, how much affinity do they have with this current, deep-seated interest of mine?