
When bringing up the topic of AI content. I get a mixed bag of responses where some people clearly sit on one side of the fence, for, or against using it. As an artist myself, I can understand both sides. I’ve drawn plenty of art in my day, purchased tablets, looked up tutorials and practiced, and made commissioned income from it. And now anyone can go to a website, type in a prompt and generate something arguably way better than I can make, in a fraction of the time, so it’s much more efficient. And the barrier to entry for making an income or commission from art, what previously required some kind of still or practice in, is practically non-existent.
To be honest, as someone who still makes a living through adult art in the games I make, I’ve felt the impact of “more efficiently creating art” back when the use of DAZ was popularized in AVNs (Adult Visual Novels). People making DAZ adult games were able to churn out tons of images in a day. While I was lucky if ttrop and I could get even one image done per day. It’s just impossible to keep up with that kind of output. Also, all the images made in DAZ can be perfectly consistent and highly adaptable to the current dialogue. For example narration reading “she bends over”, not only can you literally show an image of that happening, but you can show that from different angles! And people seemed to pride themselves when making their updates about how they added hundreds to thousands of images to the game. While my games lack in comparison because they mainly use character standing images like traditional VNs do and I immediately hard switch into sex scenes following the dialogue. At best comparison to DAZ, in Umichan Sentoryu, I have foreplay scenes that bridge standing dialogue and the sex scenes together.
So when AI came along and made even DAZ inefficient, it made little difference to me from that standpoint, because it was already impossible to keep up with in the first place.
To me, it seems like we are at a point in time similar to when cameras were invented. Prior to that if people wanted images of themselves they could have someone paint a realistic portrait of them. The person being painted had to sit there for sometimes hours as the artist painted them. It required time for both parties, and practice from the artist, very inefficient. Now comes along the first camera. Snap photo and we’re done. At the time, it took time to render the film. But now, it’s instant, even digital.
At the time, there was panic about artists losing out on work. And now, it’s very similar. The difference being that this technology was built using the work of the artist this technology would disrupt. And it doesn’t just stop there, AI generation is already disrupting, writing industries, music industries, video industries, and more. All made with data fed from existing media without any consent or compensation.
So look, I get it. Was this ethically made technology? One could make the argument about AI looking at images and listening to music and more the same way a person could and teach itself to make similar compositions based on the way a person could without getting into legality issues. But we are essentially talking about a super person by comparison. One that took in more data than any real person possibly could, and learned how to regenerate all their life’s work consent in seconds. Then turn around and offer that back to them as a service at different price ranges or whatever the pricing model is. From that perspective it’s kind fucked up and disrespectful, not gonna lie.
However from a science perspective, there is some value in technology. We grow a species by learning from each other. Learning what not to eat, learning math, learning how to build cars and planes, how to fight diseases, and other medical breakthroughs. Someone, or a group of people created it, and the word was spread around so others can benefit from it. To me, AI can be looked at from this perspective also. It is just doing all this on a massive scale, aggregating all published human data into an easy to use interface that anyone can benefit from, provided they have basic internet access and a device they can access an AI model from.
Every invention builds off of something that exists already, making doing that thing more unarguably efficient, and debatably better, and nearly always disrupting an industry that already existed.
Be it traveling by horses being overtaken by cars, delivering newspapers overtaken by television, and even that is being overtaken by social media now. Trains to planes. From manually going to a store to rent movies to movie apps, etc.
So here we are in 2025 with various AI tools that make art, music, video, and coding more efficient than it ever has been prior to this year and is already disrupting those industries nearly simultaneously due to it improving so fast. The really crazy part about it is, It’s technology that I think somehow someone, or something, will find a way to improve even further. Yes I think there will even be a day when using LLMs, or manually using some software tool and typing in prompts to generate art will be rendered inefficient.
So as for the present, as of 2025, I view various AI tools as something to not be boycotted and/or completely disregarded on principle for the aforementioned reasons. I stuck with traditional 2D art when DAZ AVN popularity was spreading fast. However in the age of AI, I would at least like to test it out where I know my work is lacking, or where the pipelines are slow and inefficient. So in future posts I will have some results of this testing.
Right now, animation is one area I lose some time in, and I’m not the best at. I’ll give you a quick summary of my thoughts so far, for me, and for ttrop’s art currently (2D anime style), I’d rather still animate most adult scenes by hand.
But for renders of 3D such as DAZ, VaM and MMD, specifically with what they struggle to create natively in their respective programs, or where they are inefficient, and for realistic artificially generated (AI) images of characters, it seems like a serious consideration.
Also note ttrop and I are still working together, I talk to ttrop almost daily. However, we are both actively also working on sfw options as a safety net in case adult content get even more scrutinized and faces even more laws all in the name of child safety, a topic for another post, but the 2D adult art should be getting back on track soon. Admittedly this has caused the patreon to take a significant hit but I will rebuild it in ways that make joining or rejoining worth it.
Thank you for taking the time to read all this if you did.