So I’m going to write another blog post, and this is a very long overdue one about AI, as usual. There’s been so many blog posts about AI…..
This one might be a little hard to read, and that would be because I’m not using any AI to clean it up or anything like that. This is coming straight from the mouth piece and thenHand edited by me as a human.
First off, what is AI slop?
AI slop sucks. It’s something that took little time to make, usually looks pretty bad and we’re usually tired of seeing stuff that looks like it.
Honestly, it’s almost insulting that we have to give our time, our precious human time, for some machine garbage that just took seconds to make. When we see AI slop, it feels like we’re being cheated for that human time we have, and it’s pretty understandable why we’re annoyed.
What else is LAME about AI and what we’re seeing now?
Aside from wasting our time looking at low-effort, low-quality junk spamming our browse section, it’s also, a threat to the artist. These people spend a long time building their skills, working to create stuff that we really like. Now these technologies are working to actively replace them, indifferent to their needs to pay their bills, feed their family, and just maintain their livelihood. To make things even worse, these technology companies are building these things by basically stealing all the hard work that they’ve created by just copying it and recreating it using technology instantly.
That really sucks, I think, even more than the first part about AI slop. The first thing spams us, but the second thing actually hurts people.
So what’s the situation with AI and GrowGetter comics?
This isn’t the first blog post about it, but it’s definitely been some time since the last blog post in the current one.
First off, there is no AI-generated art on GrowGetter Comics
There wasn’t any before
There never will be
GrowGetter will not die when AI gets better, there is nothing AI can do itself that will kill GrowGetter – This I am almost sure of, because.
I am almost sure at one point those who subscribe will stop subscribing because the AI-generated content will simply be so good that people will stop wanting to support the artists and the new content that humans can make alone. When this happens, so be it, but we’re making plans to try and figure out what to do with the artists so they don’t lose their source of income eventually.
We are blessed here in our Patreon to have many loyalists who have been subscribers for years. Sadly, some of them have not even contacted me yet or responded to my messages too much, and that’s okay. As long as I can make them happy, I am happy.
We can’t always make a comic each month. That’s the best of all time, but we do try to make good ones, and we do try to have variety. We listen to what everyone tells us very seriously, including those who send us DMs.
This year we’re going to have a really great series to finish out the year, and we’re going to finish out worst to first. We have a new artist that’s been training in the wings and a couple other surprises, so the second half should be pretty nice again with no AI.
There is a confession, one of the comics’ penmanship was written by me. The idea was by me and everything. When it came time for the dialogue, I got lazy and I did use AI on the dialogue. I used it once, and someone thankfully called me out on it. I won’t do it again. We have a human rider now that fills in the dialogue for me if I write a comic and just can’t think of what to write. Again, to be clear, there is no AI art on the site.
One thing that might come up for a vote, who knows, maybe next year, would be the idea of using AI to turn some of the old comics into a 9:16 version. Since a lot of people are looking at this on a cell phone, we might be able to use some technology to make things more readable or some other stuff. Even if something comes up for AI on a vote, it won’t be new content creation of AI. It would just be utilizing AI to help make reading easier or to translate into more languages or stuff like that.
There will be a new version of the site releasing soon. We’ve decided to add a couple languages, and we’re testing out AI translations for those languages. We’re also gonna have a function where someone can tell us if the translation is wrong, and they can submit what they think is a more localized version.
As a reminder to those who may be new here or haven’t read anything in a long time, we keep a number of artists employed, and they are able to feed their families. Multiple family people
The biggest main artist here actually suffered a heart attack a little while ago because of the community here. We’re able to support him and allow him to get through the hospital, and today he continues making comics month after month, along with a couple others.
We’ve been able to accomplish a lot. We’ve taken a lot of really old series that were beloved by some of the old timers and recreated them in full color, full story. For other ones which were only an issue or two created, we created all five or seven issues.
We have to think about what this means for the future as well. It seems almost guaranteed that eventually the next Growgetter will come around and probably recreate some of these stories. For that, we are totally happy and we’d love to see it, of course, if the writers who made those stories approve of it. Any story written by me, GrowGetter, is approved for anybody to write and recreate, and I hope they keep recreating them well.
Okay, now let’s get into the situation with AI and what’s the latest in here.
Most people will say that AI is going to wipe out this particular industry. Many, many, many commercials on TV now utilize AI. Some of them are completely AI-made, and the rate of that happening is only getting bigger and bigger.We have to look at 3D CGI animation. After Toy Story, more and more happened, and if 2D animated movies are still made in Western, I just haven’t really noticed them, but it seems like 3D basically took over.
AI is taking over, and we have a responsibility here to our artists to not put our head in the sand and worry or be ignorant of it and then let it take everybody else out.
So, there are lesser artists who never got much work with us, and they just can’t get work in general. It’s likely because their artistry skills are just not so great when it comes to illustrating or coloring or things like that. As a producer, I have to think about what I do with the funds that we get here and try to make the best decisions. There’s a huge amount in the Hall of Rejected Artwork that still is paid for but doesn’t make it to the light of day because it just doesn’t look good enough. A lot of those were generated by a lot of artists who tried to work for us. Nice people, but just didn’t make the cut.
For those people, we have been giving them a chance, and we’re giving them more work to do some AI artwork and a completely different channel. Something unrelated here that we almost don’t promote at all.
We have two things going on, and I’m sorry to say, but I think it’s the future. I really hope to be wrong.
3DMuscleComics.com
This is something that mostly I have been working on, but I’ve been able to hire some other artists to make some cool comics and do some things using some of our proprietary techniques.
Here is a comic called “Batman 66” (note there are a few versions)
Personally, I think it’s actually kinda good, but let’s talk about what it isn’t. In my opinion, it’s not AI slop, and this is why.
Again, AI slop is something that is extremely low effort. These comics are not low effort. These comics take hours and hours and hours and hours to make, with revision after revision, and then the formulas and methods to make them are also very complicated and require a lot of work. To make these, there was nothing at all like inserting prompts and editing images and things like that. It was a lot of systems developed, testing, changes, SOPs, and all kinds of stuff behind the scenes. Literally months of work to get the basics of it going.
Half the comics we have aren’t even on launch yet because there’s just so much work to do to clean up all the loose edges and things like that.
If someone is actually interested in making this kind of stuff with me, send me a DM.
So is A.I. slop lame? Yes.
These things get generated super quickly with low effort? No
Does this stuff take away from the other artists? No,
Quite the opposite. Those artists who can’t get work have been able to give work again.
Absolutely, we’re gonna upset some of the Patreon people here that we put time into something like this, but we think that with AI eventually replacing all the hand-drawn stuff, hopefully we can have the best by that time. For those of you who are bothered that we’re touching AI at all, I’m really sorry. It’s a decision to have to make because when AI does wipe us all out, we will have a backup plan, and when people are using AI to make content, we’ll have great content.
MuscleGrowthAI.com
This is actually a much different project, and it’s actually kind of interesting because we learn a lot from people through this one.
What we do here is take an AI image generation model, apply a bunch of our own rules, filters, and changes over it, and create something that has a bit on the proprietary side and allows people to generate their own muscle comic fantasies and things like that. This has actually been really helpful because you get to learn that there are many different, very particular niche interests that many people have. Sorry everybody, but your images you generate here are not totally private because we just need to make sure nobody’s generating anything they shouldn’t, and we have a billion safeguards in place anyway. I guess our usual blond superhero is shared amongst a lot of users, but clearly not the majority. If anybody is a GrowGetterComics subscriber for a while, please send me a DM. I’ll give you a coupon for a number of free credits there.
Okay, I could write a lot more, but we’re going to stop here for now. If someone’s read it all the way and they enjoy it, please tell me, and I’ll continue to write more of these things. Thank you, everybody who has read it. Most of all, thank you all subscribers who keep this thing alive and continue to keep it going
