Fuck AI

That is unfortunately just human nature. The tool here is not to blame, but the person using it. People were making drawings of people unconsentually well before ai, then with the addition of photoshop the issue became even worse. Now AI is just the next step in allowing humans to follow their darker interests.

But the tool is so much more valuable than that.

If society isn't built around competition and exploitation, the usage of AI can be limited to renewable energy. Whereas now, every gram of hydrocarbon and uranium will be burned to win the race for global domination.

What market structure is a good model for decentralization? Socialism generally involves a central authority deciding on resource allocation, and most other approaches also have an emphasis on centralization.

Machine Learning is especially useful for many different kinds of research as an advanced mode of statistical analysis.

Text and image generation is not especially useful in any field other than to cut corners on paying human artists and writers and programmers to do the job properly.

It's also going to be used to eliminate positions where "talent" and "skill" aren't required, which is where a gigantic portion of a lot of countries populations work.

When ownership decides "I own the AI that run the factory and the AI inside the Robots that perform all the physical tasks in the factory, so why the fuck should any of my profit go to pay parasites on society?" that's when we get into the "let them all starve" portion of capitalism...

There are some really good quotes from famous painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saying that photography is devoid of all artistic merit, and that it should never and will never be taken seriously as an art form. Every time a new tool comes along, the art community freaks out. It happened with the invention of the camera, it happened with the invention of digital art software, and we are currently watching it happen with AI. Eventually, it'll just be another tool in an artists toolbox.

To avoid panting with black is a common truism for traditional painters that will save your saturation in the lower values of your painting. When painting a naturalistic scene in a traditional medium, you are in a loosing war against the cost of saturation. (saturated pigments tend to be more expensive.) Ivory black and lamp black are very cheap pigments, hence the mixture of black paints tends to have more pigment vs medium. Also, Pigments lose saturation over time. so vibrant paintings you made 10 years ago can start to become grey.

The area of your painting where the saturation loss will become more daunting is the shadows. They tend to be a cool temperature and have a lower value and saturation. This is one of the reasons why it's dangerous , especially for a student to use black; And this is the reason why a lot of traditional painters plot their shadows with washes of earth pigments: Burnt sienna, burn umber etc.

The other reason is convenience: Leaving you some space at the bottom and top of the value structure for final touches. Once you reach the floor value of pure black it's hard to go back up, especially if the rest of the values are down with that black. Same for white. If the key of your painting is too high, it's hard to add any detail without just burning the rest of your picture. So keeping some floor and headspace for the final details can save you a lot of headaches! And this is especially true for black paints since they tend to have so much pigment in their mixtures

In digital media it can also be beneficial to avoid blacks, or at least clip-mask them into a black with a little temperature in them at a early stage of coloring. I can't really explain the reason for this exactly, but neutrals and especially black and white have a lot of visual pull in a monitor that displays thousands or millions of colors. Just adding a hint of temperature to your blacks and whites can make them gentler on the eye and keep the colors from becoming muddy*.

(*Muddy colors are a result from disorganized value and temperature structure between your lights and shadows.)

So your teacher was right, he was just either too lazy of busy to explain all that shit!

Edit: I remember my very cruel first semester painting teacher gave us an assignment of making value swatches for 15 hue-degrees of the color wheel. We had to make 10 swatches of low saturation greys (grey mixed with a hint of color pigment) From the lightest we could manage to the blackest. He would make us repeat the whole set if one swatch was "too saturated" or if a value scale was off. IT WAS HELL. I am not sure if that exercise was intended to make us despise black and white tubes or give us an idea of how different the proportion of pigment and value is between painting tubes. I developed an irrational fear of adding black to lower values.

My art teacher in middle school would rant for hours about how awful Photoshop was for the industry, as "Photoshop effects" in movies are so noticeable. She was part of the group who wanted to ban CGI and Pixar because it wasn't real art.

Crazy how my socialist world view gets proven right time after time. Reality really does have a left wing bias, huh?

Yeah, so we take AI out of companies who only want to make money even if it hurts people and give it to a democratic elected government which will use it to help people or they will be voted out

We can choose a less shitty power structure if we want.

Oh, we can use it. We can use it to replace your job and make our boss more money. We just think that is bad.

Socialists can even use calculators! Wheels! Smart phones! Any kind of technology.

Yes, let’s