Mr. Doodlezz

What if it's exactly what the artist wants? Did Pollock, for example, put thought into the marbles that rolled across the canvas and the drips that created the works that are now praised? I very much doubt it, and to me personally it looks completely random. But what if (and maybe that's what he wanted, apart from the choice of harmonising colours and the general direction in which they moved) that's what his works are about? The complete randomness?

Still, what does that even mean? I get the feeling you're trying to troll me. It's kind of working, though.😄 There is no indication how to determine what is bad art and what is not, for humans or AI, so it remains highly subjective.a majority thinks a work of art is bad doesn't make it bad per se. It just proves that it's controversial, not in tune with popular taste or understanding. Many artists faced rejection because their style was new, unconventional, misunderstood or, to put it very simple, bad and out of step with the period in which they lived. These artists, such as Van Gogh, Monet and others, are now studied and highly regarded in universities and art schools. Are there and will there be critics who claim that the work of these artists and future artists is bad? Of course! Do these or any other critics ultimately decide or define (and therefore think) for you or me what is good and what is bad? Definitely not! But do they influence large groups of people aka the mainstream? Yes. Is the mainstream the measurement of things? Unfortunately, for unconventional artists, and for most of the time, yes. Does all the above make and artist's work actually bad? Nope. The only arguments where I personally could see »bad« as the fitting label are questionable intentions/messages being conveyed or the subject/matter/issue (such as abuse or violence, although this is also a matter of context, e.g. if it is about awareness of the subject). Oh, and what some people might sell as AI-generated art, of course, ha. Back to the question and AM's idea to flood the internet with bad art: How to determine what is bad art and what is not, for humans and AI? AI doesn't care if we think something is bad, it doesn't criticise its training material the way we might look at and judge art, unless it's also trained to ignore certain aspects. I think they have also grazed and stored enough material to be able to generate a wide range of styles that are compelling enough for the industry to use as a tool as it is, looking at some ads and commercials I came across. That's why I had to chuckle at the idea of flooding the internet with bad art. Because if we take everyone's or every group's opinion into account, it's already full of rubbish. For some reason/s one group thinks pixel art is bad, another thinks comics are bad, another thinks 3D rendering is bad art, another thinks someone's child's drawing is bad art, another thinks digital/traditional art is bad and so on ‒ but of course no one's ultimately right, no one's ultimately wrong. Regardless of this discussion: There's always use for it for AI and information to be extracted, even if it's just the stroke of a doodle from school or »my nephews kindergarten crayon drawing«. Someday someone will need a crayon drawing for their project and enter the prompt »photo of a crayon drawing of a 4 yo depicting a spaceship landing on mars, 16:9 crumbled paper, shallow DOF« or something like that, because they need it for a poster, ad or movie or what ever. And it will create just what they need, based on my nephews »bad« art. Actually, it's already happening.

The thought I tried to imply was rather what makes art bad – isn't that highly subjective? Art that one might think is bad because it’s off the norm might be appreciated by many others and vice versa. Even if it does not follow basic principles, it could still be intended as a statement or style. But I feel I'm drifting off topic here and entering a philosophical space. 😁

Fun idea! But what’s bad art? Is it really bad if it’s intentionally bad? 😁 »Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.«

I think with this approach we would put more energy into our work and possibly even exploit the work of others if also using AI as a foundation or tool, but inevitable we would produce the next wave of training material that improves AI performance and does not fix the real problem at all. Also, for me, it's not the use of AI and certainly not the fear mentioned in the video posted above that bothers me. I admit that I toyed with DALL•E a few months back and even based one of my works on a generation, but that’s when I wasn’t fully aware what it means and stopped right then and there. Ultimately, the way in which creatives have been, are and will be exploited for the common good (if you really want to call it that) is my biggest concern, and I don't think we can or will be able to change that retrospectively, or control it in the future, without developing counter-measures now to protect work we don't want to find in any training set. ––– By the way, the often heard argument »if you don't want it to be used by AI, don't put it on the internet« bears the same mindset as »if you don't want strangers to hit on you, don't dress like that« – both statements are absolutely wrong, selfish and ignorant for obvious reasons, and miss the real intention.

At least students can name the few artists they passionately studied over years instead of automatically detecting and extracting characteristics of endless works of the internet's entirety in mere minutes. No student learns to imitate their master, to prove how perfectly they can imitate them. The reason why artists study a master is because they revere their style, they want to create something similar themselves, out of pure enthusiasm for creation and to pay respect. AI is the complete opposite in almost every respect. Absolutely no respect for artists, absolutely no personal connection to the result, instant disposal and re-generation. It's just there to mass produce and make a profit for the two end users (provider and generator) in it, but not for the real artists. There is absolutely nothing creative about it, apart from the tapped training material.

Exactly! I had »looks like the finger painting my kid made during breakfast« in mind. 🥲

My take on the matter: AI is based on the back of an entire community, our community, designers, photograhpers, 3D artists and other visual creatives. Most of us creatives have never asked for something like this because we don't need it – we can come up with the ideas ourselves, that's the essence of real creativity. Artists are never named as sources in AI-generations, let alone get paid for it. But who get's paid instead? The providers – nice exploitation! The ultimate goal can only be to replace the majority of this community because it is cheaper, easier and accessible directly by the industry without prior experience. »An AI could have generated that (and about 20 variants in less than an hour) and would be way cheaper than you, so why should I commission you in the first place?«. Or »Here's a bunch of generations for reference I like, do it like this.« It seems to me that as a designer you are forced to follow suit, otherwise you cannot keep up. And in doing so, you are betraying your own principles and all the artists and designers on whom the generated images are based. At the moment, no matter what you choose, it almost seems to me that as a creative you can only lose. It feels like we are on the brink of an evolution that is not in our favour. Incidentally, I read in Affinity's latest post on Instagram that they're looking at ways to implement AI, which doesn't surprise me any more with all that's happening on the subject, but it does make me sad. 😔

Thanks @Pauls, I tried this several times now, via the menu and via the load-up-pop-up. Both worked only for the first time I click a live filter. Right after that every time I click all option-panels moves to the second display, a HUION pen tablet that otherwise works just fine with all the applications. ☹️ At first I thought it might be because I was using the Windows taskbar on the main screen on the righthand side, but I tried all the other orientations as well, to no avail. Any other tips?

Added some variants to the app icon. The baseball cap variant was a bit tricky because you want to stay within the squircle template. Let me know how I've done and which one's your favourite. 😄

I found these visual labels that you can add to your creations, but they are not the ones I had in mind and are not very self-explanatory to me without explanation. Maybe it's also because I don't like the colours chosen, but of course that's very subjective. 😅 However, there are currently no official labels like CC. The labels are all self-initiated, even the ones I can't find at the moment. Edit: Found the other labels. Looking meh as well (why the smiley?). Maybe we can come up with some proposals …

You are right, it is not well explained. Here is my understanding after reading some other articles. Basically it's supposed to work something like reverse psychology applied to AI or even better, lying to the AI. Let's take a step back and do a mini-excursion: AI trains only with human-generated images. How does AI distinguish this? AI adds said (nearly) invisible marker/pattern to it's generated images, i.e. watermark. A kind of pattern that extends over the entire generated image. AI does not train with self-generated images. How does AI recognise these images and filter them out of the training material? See point 2, it looks for possible self-generated watermarks in the analysis and ignores these images as training material. Back to the script: By already inserting these marks ourselves and preventively into our images, you trick the AI, because it thinks it has already trained with the images. Now there's still at least one issue: Different AI's apply different patterns. DALL•E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion – probably all use some kind of slightly different pattern. I'm not sure if it is possible to create a watermark that tricks all AI's.

Hey there! I'm currently working on a project that could really benefit from 3-way or 5-way rotational/radial symmetry options. What I mean is something like this: There currently is no other way in Photo to achieve this but by using linked layers that where manually rotated by 120°. This also only works semi-optimal since the links kind of brake when you scale the canvas. I posted about this and my workaround with an example file here. Cheers!

Did you actually read the article? Because exactly the opposite is the case here! See the linked script above in my comment.

There's already this script for Windows users available, maybe someone with coding knowledge could come up with an add-on? I've also seen a kind of label that you can put on your work to make a more obvious statement, similar to the CC symbols, but I can't seem to find them again. 😟 Not entirely true though, there are ways to add »invisible« watermarks to your images. At least they are invisible to the human eye and consist of patterns that change the hue/brightness insignificantly enough that machine learning cannot properly analyse the images. 😉

Hey @Pauls, thanks for this super helpful hint! I'm on Windows and I'm not sure which box to check though. This is what I see, and I'm not so keen on resetting things by accident. 😅 Also, as an idea: Wouldn't it be super helpful to have this as an option in the top menu of applications, somewhere under Window, instead of only being available at startup? Greetings!

Possible workaround for the meantime (but I cannot test it on an iPad): Create a pixel layer. Draw a random placeholder. In the top menu go do Layer → Duplicate Linked. Move/rotate/scale/mirror the linked layer. This is repeatable as often as you like. If you edit on one layer, all other layers get updated as well. Maybe this helps? 😉 Edit: I also noticed that the official symmetry feature with brushes doesn't have an option to create odd symmetries – like a three or five leafed/bladed/planed (or whatever you call it) symmetry, as shown in my attachment. I used the above technique. Edit Edit: Resizing with the workaround kind of breaks the links. @LeeThorpe, I guess this is a bug as well? Cheers! 3_bladed_symmetry.afphoto

Thanks! Have you checked the other versions as well? There are some free forms (aka no squircle) and a colour variant based of the initial draft. 😉 And yes, one or two of them are actually flat designs, but I also prefer some variation in style on my home screen. 😁

Hey Affinity community! Over the last few days I've been tinkering with an alternative app icon for JOEY, an Android client for Reddit. I originally saw a post on Reddit where a user presented their attempt at an alternative symbol. I asked them if I could try my hand at it and refine it a bit and they agreed. These icons are the result and they were quite happy with the outcome. (Please click the preview for more details.) Any constructive criticism is welcome!

Well, good to know it's still being worked on and hasn't just been forgotten. Thank you for your reaction!

@Dan C, what’s the status on this issue? I'm sorry, we're now into V2, but keyboard navigation in the Affinity desktop apps isn't just still a massive, massive pain in the butt, but completely impossible. You've already mentioned that the development team considers this an active issue – is that still the case? And if not: Why was it deprioritised? Is there a log that contains the current state of affairs on this issue? Again, it's super frustrating to navigate the desktop apps with Tab, as you're used to doing with virtually any other app out there.

Hey @MikeTO, fresh day, fresh mind – I must have lost track yesterday with all my attempts and the various master pages. This morning I recreated the page from scratch again and was meticulous not to mirror any layouts or picture frames. It works for me now. 😉 However, the issue – the repeated mirroring of inserted pictures in a deliberately mirrored picture frame on the master page – is something that evetually needs to be monitored and fixed. For there are certainly cases in which it is planned exactly this way. Furthermore, I would very much welcome an indication of mirrored picture frames, which would make workarounds and unnecessary guessing games obsolete. For example, the diagonal lines of the mirrored picture frames could be replaced with dashed lines. This way, it's recognisable at first glance if something is different without introducing additional symbols or icons. 🤔 I am just spitballing my thoughts on how I would try to approach the indication-issue. 😁 Happy weekend!

Hey everyone, slowly but surely I'm losing my mind over here, haha. I think I've rebuild this master page at least three times by now, but every time I load images, some of them are mirrored. What's even more irritating: If I apply the same master page again, they get mirrored again. Now … what is going on here? Can someone please explain? Applying_Master_changes_single_frame_orientation.mov Even if the frame itself were mirrored (unfortunately this is not indicated anywhere, or is it?), it shouldn't be mirrored every time the master page is re-applied, at least from my understanding. I come accross this issue on almost (?) all the other master pages that use frames, hence why the master pages name ends with a 2. I tried to fix it several times now and feel like I’m running in circles, setting up the master pages from scrap over and over again. Is this a known bug? Am I doing something wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!

But shouldn't it be a simple task to perform a search and replace operation across all codes, adding the numpad enter key as a second alternative – or better still, leaving it up to users to decide which universal key can be used instead? After all, this is also possible with X other operations, tools and functions to set up yourself. I'm sure it won't be that easy, but still … hm.

Ah yes! This actually works! And since V2 you don't even have to switch to the Designer Persona to use the Select Same/Select Objects feature! The nice thing is you can even deselect single images you want to keep, that's great!