What is appropriate to post in the Share your work forum please?

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, PaulEC said:

OK, so, I ask a friend to paint a picture for me, because I'm a pretty useless artist myself. I say that I would like a picture of a woman, feeding a deer in a forest. he looks through his large library of books, finds several pictures of a woman, a deer and a forest, all by different people. He then uses these pictures, rearranging them and adding a few effects, to paint the picture I asked for. He gives me the picture, I scan it, open the scan in Affinity Photo, print it out, and put it in a cheap plastic frame. When someone else comes to visit and says that they like the picture, I proudly say that it is my artwork that I created using Affinity Photo. Am I being honest? All I did was describe what I wanted, my friend copied other peoples work to produce the picture, and I just used APhoto as a means to print it out!

I am not avoiding answering. I am thinking about it. Would you like to rephrase the exact question that you ask me please so I may answer as a superb diplomat?

William

 

[PaulEC]

You type something into a box, the AI uses a database of other peoples artwork to produce an image. You then print out the image using an Affinity app. Can you honestly claim that you produced the artwork using Affinity software? 

My own opinion is that your artistic input was minimal at best, and the use of Affinity virtually non-existent. it certainly is not something that warrants being posted in a "Share your work" forum intended for the display of creativity and skill using Affinity software!

 

[William Overington]

8 hours ago, PaulEC said:

You type something into a box, the AI uses a database of other peoples artwork to produce an image.

It appears to not be quite like that. I asked Bing Chat AI a few days ago and it appears that the AI system is trained - that was the word used - on licensed training databases and learns the styles and then produces an original artwork using that style.

I decided to ask for pictures of a lady in a long green dress feeding an okapi as I hoped it would be so unusual that direct copying would not be possible.

However, when looking at what the Bing Chat AI system could do with poetry, after the AI had produced such things as a sonnet in the Italian style and brought the name Lucy from the text that I had presented to the AI into the sonnet and I was amazed, I asked for a nineteen line poem and the AI got in a muddle, producing poems with more or fewer lines, such as twenty or sixteen and purporting them to be nineteen line poems when they clearly were not.

Yet when another person found an established nineteen line poem form that is called a villanelle - I had not known of a villanelle until then - the AI system was good at writing villanelles.

8 hours ago, PaulEC said:

You then print out the image using an Affinity app. Can you honestly claim that you produced the artwork using Affinity software? 

I think I understand what you are meaning, yet I think that the term artwork actually means the item that is being produced without reference to any assessment of artistic merit.

But in the spirit of your question, I did not produce the art, the Bing Chat AI system did, though I did have input into the process. Now can the input into the process that I contributed be regarded as artistic input? I did not produce the image, yet the image only exists because I wrote the text that influenced the production of the picture.

8 hours ago, PaulEC said:

My own opinion is that your artistic input was minimal at best, and the use of Affinity virtually non-existent.

I don't think that I claimed having had artistic input, yet I suppose that I did have a little as the picture is based on my input as well as input from other sources such as knowledge of the impressionist painting style. 

I used Affinity Designer and I now have a PDF document and a copy of that PDF document is now in the basket at  Viking Virtual Print House ready for printing. I consider that that is use of Affinity Designer. A phrase such as "virtually non-existent" is relative to what some other people produce using Affinity Designer. Nothing to do with how I used Affinity Designer.

8 hours ago, PaulEC said:

it certainly is not something that warrants being posted in a "Share your work" forum intended for the display of creativity and skill using Affinity software!

There is no certainty about it. The intention that you state was not being stated at the time that I posted. The moderator accused me publicly and my opinion is that my post was within the stated rules at the time.

Intended rules, unwritten rules, "understood" rules, retrospective rules and the like should not be part of it.

The post was polite, not unsuitable for family reading and viewing, and in my opinion was locked and removed unfairly.

I shared my work in the Share your work forum and my contribution was snubbed.

William

 

 

 

[William Overington]

Alright then, to those who have criticised not only the post that has been removed but also other things that I have posted in the Share your work forum, and to anyone else who wants to participate, please advise me, on a good-natured basis of sending by you and receiving by me, of the sort of post that you consider would be worthy of being in the Share your work forum if I could produce it. Please be specific, set a challenge if you wish, but not say to look at what other people do, what, if I can manage to produce it, would you consider worthy and good enough for you to like it.

I am not saying I can do it now. I am not saying that I can learn how to do it. But I will have a go.

William

 

[R C-R]

@William Overington, why not just follow the guidelines for the Share Your Work forum, like by just posting links to a sharing site for anything that might be considered controversial plus a good description of it in your forum post?

That way you could get direct user feedback for each of those files, which would help you get a better idea of what other content you should or should not be posting there.

[William Overington]

I have always thought that what is being referred to there is stuff "not fit for family viewing" as people say.

Nothing I produce is of that nature.

What we are talking about here is output that is regarded as not using features of an Affinity product sufficiently for the thresholds set by the moderator and some members of the user community.

The art being produced by the Bing Chat AI system is available in the following thread, there are at present twenty-five pictures available in the thread and some notes too.

https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?id=526

We have found a phenomenon that Bing Chat Ai can answer questions about some things yet not act on that information when producing pictures. For example, ask it what the word gibbous means and it will tell you about a gibbous moon, yet asking for a gibbous moon in a picture does not work. Likewise, one can receive information about the 1813 steam locomotive "Puffing Billy" but thus far it will not paint a picture of it.

Some people have been quick to say that what I have posted is not good enough for the Share your work forum, yet thus far nobody has told me what would be good enough.

William

[R C-R]

55 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I have always thought that what is being referred to there is stuff "not fit for family viewing" as people say.

I think there is more to it than that, for instance how legitimate it is to claim something as your own work if it is not clear if part of it came from a different source, be it an AI or something else.

So again, I think following the guideline is enough to avoid any possible controversy.

[William Overington]

Oh I was not claiming the picture to be my work. I was just claiming producing the nicely set out A4 PDF document as my work. I never claim the work of others as mine.

William

 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

I was just claiming producing the nicely set out A4 PDF document as my work.

Did you create all of its content yourself?

[William Overington]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

Did you create all of its content yourself? 

No. The title of the thread made that clear.

Using Affinity Designer to prepare a jpg image produced by Bing Chat AI for printing

William

 

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, William Overington said:

No.

Then IMO it is not your work.

[William Overington]

If someone writes an original poem and he or she uses Affinity Publisher to produce an A4 PDF document containing the text of the poem, nicely set out, with no illustration in the document, would that be considered acceptable for being posted in its own thread in the Share your work forum?

Or must the content be either a picture produced totally using Affinity software; or a photograph the appearance of which has been altered in some way other than only resizing using Affinity software?

William

[walt.farrell]

Just now, William Overington said:

If someone writes an original poem and he or she uses Affinity Publisher to produce an A4 PDF document containing the text of the poem, nicely set out, with no illustration in the document, would that be considered acceptable for being posted in its own thread in the Share your work forum?

In my personal opinion, no. The main creative part of the work, writing the poem, is not related to use of the Affinity applications. 

[v_kyr]

14 minutes ago, William Overington said:

If someone writes an original poem and he or she uses Affinity Publisher to produce an A4 PDF document containing the text of the poem, nicely set out, with no illustration in the document, would that be considered acceptable for being posted in its own thread in the Share your work forum?

No, as that's no big deal to do, as it can be done in whatever texteditor, Word, Wordpad ... and so on. And if your beloved Bing Ai writes the text for you, it won't be your intellectual work at all (same as via/by Midjourney etc. generated Ai images, which would be just from everywhere over the net by the AI stolen other peoples intellectual peaces of drawings/images fitted together).

14 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Or must the content be either a picture produced totally using Affinity software; or a photograph the appearance of which has been altered in some way other than only resizing using Affinity software?

Created in and with the Affinity software is usually the prefered way here, as everything else is and probably would just be a copy & paste of materia generated with other Affinity unrelated software!

[R C-R]

11 minutes ago, William Overington said:

If someone writes an original poem and he or she uses Affinity Publisher to produce an A4 PDF document containing the text of the poem, nicely set out, with no illustration in the document, would that be considered acceptable for being posted in its own thread in the Share your work forum?

What specifically do you mean by "nicely set out"? Does that have anything to do with using any of the features of APub in some unique or special way?

[William Overington]

Thank you both for replying.

It seems that it comes down to a difference of interpretation of for what is the purpose of the Share your work forum.

I had taken it to mean "Please post about the things that you have achieved by using Affinity software." 

Some other people have a different interpretation of the purpose of the Share your work forum.

I look at it from the standpoint of "For what range of uses does Serif sell licenses for Affinity software to its customers?". and "We would love to know for what applications Affinity software is being used."

So on that basis, if I have used one or more Affinity products to achieve a result, I have regarded that as something to post about in the Share your work forum.

I now recognize that some people regard my posts as regularly going off-topic.

Yet if reading about how I have used Affinity software to achieve something inspires another user of Affinity products to do more than he or she did before, then from my viewpoint, that is an effective post  in the Share your work forum.

So if I write an original poem, then use Affinity publisher to typeset in a font such as EB Garamond Italic in blue and I draw a red rectangle round it as a border, all nicely aligned so that the size overall is A4 yet the text and rectangle are within an 8 inch by 6  inch area so that it can be framed in an A4 frame from Tesco including use of the mount, then if I were allowed to post about that in the Share your work forum then it might inspire someone reading that post to write an original poem, and produce a PDF document, perhaps choosing to use a different font, doing it his or her own way. 

Going a bit off-topic is not always a bad thing. For example, yesterday there was a post declared by its poster as off-toic yert it was interesting and lead to something else and that can in fact come back round to the original topic in an interesting way.

https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?pid=3919#p3919

and the posts following it.

So it really comes down to whether the Share your work forum is for what people are applying Affinity software to achieve, or only for when use of only the Affinity product and nothing else is involved.

So depending on one's viewpoint of the STATED purpose of the Share your work forum my post that got hidden by the moderator was either on topic and good or off-topic and annoying.

William

 

[iconoclast]

In my eyes, it is very easy. Affinity Photo is an image editing software, Designer is a vector graphics software and Publisher is a DTP software. Non of them is a presentation software. So if you use them only for presentation, as pretence to advertise for AI or to misuse other peoples work, it is not really your creative work and a violation of the forum guidelines. Are you Lobbyist for AI or just a troll?

[William Overington]

10 hours ago, R C-R said:

What specifically do you mean by "nicely set out"?

Going from the poem in handwritten form with maybe crossings out and so on, to a document where the finalized text is typeset in a chosen font and size and colour, a decision made whether to have a border and, if so, what border and how the poem is positioned with regard to the application of the finished output, for example, is it for framing in an A4 frame, or is it for inclusion in a small booklet of poems.

10 hours ago, R C-R said:

 Does that have anything to do with using any of the features of APub in some unique or special way?

Not necessarily. Usually no.

William

 

 

[William Overington]

25 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

In my eyes, it is very easy. Affinity Photo is an image editing software, Designer is a vector graphics software and Publisher is a DTP software. Non of them is a presentation software. So if you use them only for presentation, as pretence to advertise for AI or to misuse other peoples work, it is not really your creative work and a violation of the forum guidelines. Are you Lobbyist for AI or just a troll?

I have not used them to advertise for AI nor to misuse other people's work.

I am not a lobbyist for AI. I am a researcher and I am exploring what AI will and will not do. For example, Bing Chat AI will answer a question as to what is a gibbous moon but it will not, as far as my experiments show, include a gibbous moon in a painting instead including a full moon.

I am not a troll. Some people may not agree with my opinions, yet they are my honest opinions and I am participating in a discussion.

William

 

 

[iconoclast]

You can of course do that, if you want, but none of the three Affinity apps is made for creative writing. Usually writers use text editors. And the writings they create will be loaded into a DTP software like Publisher to prepare them for printing. The work you do in Publisher is the design, the layout, not the text. It is even safer to follow this workflow to prevent mistakes.

For creative writing I can recommend Focus Writer by the way. It is freeware and distraction free and very simple to use. But of course there are even other apps that can be used for that.

Whatever you are, you are very stubborn spreading a topic over the forums here, that doesn't really concern the Affinity apps as they don't offer AI capabilities. You can create a feature request for it in the Feature Request Forum, if you don't already have done that. But that should be enough. What you do here in fact looks like trolling.

[William Overington]

3 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

Whatever you are, you are very stubborn spreading a topic over the forums here, that don't really concern the Affinity apps as they don't offer AI capabilities. ... What you do here in fact looks like trolling.

Well it was not intended as trolling at all. It was just sharing a document that I had produced using Affinity Designer hoping that the image would be of interest and the fact that it was generated by Bing Chat AI would be of interest. I hoped that some people might print the document and maybe frame it.

It appears that all of this thread basically comes down to a group of people each of whom has an honestly held opinion of what they thought was the purpose of the Share your work forum. Not trolling at all. Just acting on what I thought was the purpose of the Share your work forum.

William

 

 

[iconoclast]

But as far as I understand, you only used Designer to scale the document. That is not creative work. And it is not clever, because even you do it in a vector graphics software, pixel images loose quality if you scale them. Especially if you created the images with AI, it is not very clever, because the only way to scale (kind of) lossless is AI. So you should better think about your workflow.

[v_kyr]

53 minutes ago, William Overington said:

It was just sharing a document that I had produced using Affinity Designer hoping that the image would be of interest and the fact that it was generated by Bing Chat AI would be of interest. I hoped that some people might print the document and maybe frame it.

Why should someone be interested in and print/frame your by Ai software generated images, if everyone here could easily do all of this themselves using one of the many dump AI systems (Affinity Designer isn't needed therefor at all) and then also can personalize it in a much more individual way? - I'm sorry, but that all sounds very naive to me and is therefore overall more a lame excuse for me, in order to have a few conversations here in the forum because otherwise you have nothing to do, or no one to talk to.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

So if I write an original poem, then use Affinity publisher to typeset in a font such as EB Garamond Italic in blue and I draw a red rectangle round it as a border, all nicely aligned so that the size overall is A4 yet the text and rectangle are within an 8 inch by 6  inch area so that it can be framed in an A4 frame from Tesco including use of the mount, then if I were allowed to post about that in the Share your work forum then it might inspire someone reading that post to write an original poem, and produce a PDF document, perhaps choosing to use a different font, doing it his or her own way. 

Inspiring people to write original poetry is not the purpose of these forums, though. And you could use any software to do the layout work you mentioned. Word, LibreOffice, probably even MS Paint if you use Windows. It shows nothing about what you can accomplish using Affinity applications.

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Why should someone be interested in and print/frame your by Ai software generated images, ....

They might like the picture.

There are businesses that regularly publish greetings cards that artists have produced.

https://www.art-angels.co.uk/

https://www.greenpebble.co.uk/

I know that I cannot produce art of that quality or anything near it myself.

I feel that the AI generated picture that is in the presently hidden post is rather splendid, though I recognize that I feel that way because I requested a painting with certain features, namely impressionist style, a lady in a long green dress feeding an okapi and that is one of the images generated by the ai system.

https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?pid=3876#p3876

It is quite fascinating because when I had previously asked for a pastel drawing I got the following.

https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?pid=3873#p3873

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

..., if everyone here could easily do all of this themselves using one of the many dump AI systems (Affinity Designer isn't needed therefor at all) and then also can personalize it in a much more individual way

If my post inspires one or more people to do that then good.

I am interested to know how much detail can be in the text prompt to the AI system that it will incorporate into the picture.

For example, I requested a painting in the style of Van Gogh of a lady reading haiku to an elephant in a field of flowering lavender with a Roman aqueduct in the background and the Bing Chat AI did it.

https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?pid=3902#p3902

Another time I asked for a painting in the style of Claude Monet and I included things such as a stegosaurus, a garden, a pond and lilies that are flowering and it did it.

So I am exploring how much detail it will include.

What concerns me about all this is that there may be some people who are using Affinity software and are deterred from posting in the Share your work forum because of the elitist requirements that are being made.

My view is that if a CUSTOMER of Serif writes an original poem and uses Affinity Publisher to produce a PDF document with the poem in it, then as long as the poem is not unsuitable for family reading then posting it in the Share your work forum should be welcomed and encouraged.

Written before seeing Walt's reply.

William