Planet Earth Arts

NOT TOO LATE TO JOIN ONLINE STUDIES CLASSES AT KUBERT SCHOOL

Classes start today - online registration is a breeze!

Come join me and learn from the comfort of your own home!

Online Studies - The Kubert School Taught by industry professionals, the Joe Kubert School’s Online Studies Program offers the student a six-week intensive designed for them to learn through instruction and critique. The Online Studies program is a great way to hone your skills and knowledge as a cartoonist. This is not affiliated ...

CRITICAL TO MAKE CLEAR DIFFERENTIATIONS WHEN SPEAKING OF A NEW TECHNOLOGY LIKE AI

Chemistry as a science is pretty much universally hailed as being good for mankind. However there are still those who use it for self serving purposes. Like cutting costs in food production by using man made chemical compounds to trick people into likening food that for the most part has diminished nutritional value. It is easy to think of many far worse abuses of chemistry, I will leave that to you to envision.

So it is with the latest advance in computer coding dubbed “Atificial Intelligence” or “AI”. This is clearly a misnomer and leading many people to react to this tool as being something with a consciousness or sentience. Apple has had a feature in their processors that has been around long before the term AI became the rage. They called it machine learning. This is by far the better term for this class of specialized, single purpose, algorithms.

Many folks in the creative class are deeply concerned, if not in full fight or flight reaction, to the way AI has been implemented in applications that generate, images, music, prose, and now video. There is indeed just cause to react with concern and even outrage as these applications use data sets for learning that are not open source or free domain - they are able reference media that is from living artists and/or deceased artists but still protected by copyright laws.

In the meantime more and more positive stories of benevolent uses of machine learning applications are surfacing - just this morning was the latest. A story about “AI stethoscopes” giving doctors access to a host of diagnostic data that in the past would have require much longer times and separate diagnostic procedures to gather for their patient. Not only does this enable the clinician to get pertinent information faster in the care of cardiac patients but it also lessens the need for charging the patient for other tests.

Before today I heard from the relative of someone for whom AI imaging made their treatment for bladder cancer much more successful.

Beware the blanket condemnation of “AI”.

Beware the hype that “AI” is anything other than advanced computer programming. Is a “self healing zipper” intelligent?

The New Wave of AI in Healthcare | The New York Academy of Sciences The Windreich Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the New York Academy of Sciences hosted the ‘New Wave of AI in Healthcare’ symposium as a “call to action” — bringing together experts and leaders across the field to tac...

Hi, it's me! Your artist friend. Well, one of your artist friends, as I imagine you have a number of artists in your life. And if you know these people well enough, you'll have watched their careers grow from humble art school beginnings to whatever awesome stuff they're doing in the present. Those careers are now under real threat of being replaced, and I'm here to tell you why.

Artwork-generating apps operate on a vast library filled with thousands upon thousands of art pieces that have been ripped from the internet. You can enter a few prompts, and the app will churn out a fully finished piece that took all of an afternoon to make. Yes, they often look really fake and are full of mistakes (eg: the hands), but these apps are getting smarter and more intuitive every day. Eventually, you won't be able to tell the difference between the above illustration and something that came out of one of these apps. And there are even app users who are now branding themselves as artists, and taking commissions from clients. Selling illustrations cobbled together from stolen art.

These days, I'm seeing endless AI images on my feed, and they're often followed by likes, shares and ooh-ing and ahh-ing in the comments. And a lot of these app users/fans don't understand that the art they're seeing was made possible by countless artists whose work was taken from them without consent, without credit and without pay. We have to compete against the algorithms of social media as it is. AI apps have made our fight exponentially harder.

I made this illustration over the course of the last two weeks, in between my shifts as a professional designer. It shows tired eyes, greying hair and the ever-present wrist braces that alleviate work-related pain. It's full of flaws, but they're MY flaws, not glitches caused by artificial generation. It took hours to make from scratch, and from my own creative mind. And if someone asked me to make one for them, you can bet your b***y I'd charge a good chunk of change for it. Artists charge for this stuff because it's how we survive. And it's worth the money. It's worth it because a real, living, breathing person created something like this from the depths of their soul. From years of painstaking education. From late hours and sore hands. And it's a glorious original piece that you can cherish forever (or you can like, re-gift it if you hate it, whatever. As long as we get paid.)

I've been told by my lovely friends (who I'm lucky to have) that AI will never replace me. Sadly, that just isn't the case, as my services have indeed been replaced by AI apps on more than one occasion. I have lost clients because of this. If you can't afford to pay someone to make artwork for you, save your money until you can. If you're not going to hire me to draw for you, that's totally cool. But PLEASE hire another artist. Don't replace me with any of these plagiarizing apps. It doesn't just hurt me. It hurts all artists.

Or hey, learn a few tricks yourself. Making art is really challenging, but it's also fulfilling, and dare I say (GASP) fun.

TOM RICHMOND CARTOONING WORKSHOP REVUES

Any of you fine folk have any firsthand experience attending ome of these that you might share here or in pricste chat? Wondering if it is a good expenditure of over $500🤔

SO WHEN IS THE NEW YEAR?

Could you imagine watching the ball in Times Square drop around March?

You might have been, had much of the Western world not adopted the modern calendar that begins each year on Jan. 1.
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The oldest recorded new year festivities date back to 2000 B.C. in ancient Mesopotamia, where Iraq is now. Called akitu, the festival, which could last for up to 12 days, started on the day of the first new moon after the spring equinox—the day when sunlight and darkness are equally long. It usually fell around March. For Babylonians at the time, the festival signaled the crowning of a new king or a reaffirmation of loyalty to the current king.

Various calendars tend to tie their own new year celebrations with other significant events—whether religious, astronomical, or agricultural. Mesopotamia’s akitu also coincided with the harvest of barley.

Chinese New Year 2024 – Year of the Dragon Discover the traditions and taboos, dishes and drinks that are part of China's most important holiday, the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival.

HOW DO WE ALL GET WHAT WE NEED (NOT WANT) IN A WORLD OF LIMITED RESOURCES?

First we must realize that what we need is not limited - it is infinite - at least to our limited perspective. What we need is not expensive - it is free - that is if you don't count the cost of what is our only meaningful currency, and only true possession, our time.

This started as my attempt to help Manifest Drawing Center and their steadfast and earnest founders Jason Franz and Brigid O'Kane. They are in the exciting but precarious position of a capital campaign to fund and support the expansion of latest love child (please see the great success stories for Manifest with the gallery, their publications, their online ventures, and the original iterations of the drawing center).

First I want to explicitly state - this is a cause, a project, and a passion I share with all those who are actively spending their resources to provide a world class facility for visual artists to learn and practice in. I am invested and committed. Do I have $8 million dollars, sadly no. But just as the little drummer boy presented his "gift" so shall I. My gift is my intellect, my passion, and sharing my joy from drawing in person, live, among people and while sharing giving those around me the sense of the love I feel and possibly project while doing what I love most - short of life and those of my loved ones. This tiny action can start a spark - maybe they will realize they love to draw, maybe not. Maybe just the buzz of energy would fill them with the curiosity to question their own existence? What is it that I would do even if I didn't get paid to do it and would seek to fill my free time with? Some might label it a calling or a purpose?

Support the arts, join the arts, celebrate the arts, share the arts, protect the arts and those who go where many fear to tread. IF not for you then for your CHILDREN.

The human experience

What would you add or change? Please edit image with your input or draw your own from scratch.