Randomly decided to pick up another one of Nihei's works, saw that Abara was a short one, having 11 chapters with 2 short bonus chapters, so thought 'why not?'. Anyway, I was aware of Nihei's art and influence even before I read BLAME! but god fucking DAMN the art in this one absolutely FUCKS. So, I wanna showcase some of my favorite panels and art from Abara here.

Just from the cover you already know it's gonna be some phenomenal stuff. BLAME! had some real cool covers designs but even though there are fewer examples here I personally like these ones better than the ones in BLAME!.

Sick ass design, you can clearly see the resemblance with the chainsaw devil in Chainsaw man.

Aside from the top notch creature designs and absolutely chaotic action, Niheis work in landscapes and scale are also phenomenal.

Shit looks like some sick ass album cover.

Combination of scale and sick creature design, the manga just kept on giving.

Cover for the bonus story at the end of Abara, called Digimortal. Cover is beyond sick.

Nihei decided to take batman, give him some abstract scythe-like weapon and put him in a cyber-dark fantasy setting, shit just seeps coolness.

I'd highly encourage anyone to read Abara, as well as essentially any of Niheis works if you like what you see here as much as me.

This isn't going to be some big thinkpiece or anything, might at some point write a more properly structured and longer text on the topic but for now i'll just write some shit here that i've already talked about in private with friends and such, and a specific aspect that I got reminded of from getting this video in my recommended page.

The thing with 'good AI art' is that the AI model itself is only mimickign intelligence based on an algorithm, it is known that it cannot innovate on its own and it is also known that getting fed output from other models actually worsens it's own performance, a type of AI inbreeding. That being said, even with the technology now, it is possible to either use to to heavily assist, or outright make something of actual value (in whichever way you decide to interpret that word). The output or its quality are irrelevant to this conversation however, in terms of authorship there are 2 main issues, that being of 'who' is the actual artist as well as the 'impoverishing' of the creative process, depending on how you approach this topic, these can be heavily intertwined.

Here we'll make the assumption that the AI is being used to handle 90% or over in the process of making something, and not it being used as a tool to assist some unnamed part of the process. (since I do believe it is technically possible to use AI as a useful tool despite the fact that it generally inspires laziness in people.) Anyhow, the issue is that if the model made the art, and your role was only to give the idea in the form of a prompt, that's not really your work, not only does delegating the work to the AI absolutely rip away all your flexibility in the process, but it also ruins the whole process itself.

Ideas are cool, they can be the root of something, but anyone who has tried to make ideas into reality for any period of time knows that they are essentially worthless. Essentially everyone has ideas, essentially everyone has 'cool'/'good'/'amazing' ideas depending on who you ask, but the process of making those ideas into a reality shapes so much of the final product, not to mention the fact that the context surrounding a piece can also be of importance. Ideas are mostly vague, unstructured and unspecific, most times when you try and actually make something you realize how little actual merit the idea on its own holds. The idea can be a seed that needs to grow into what is to be the final product, with the artist/s as the tenders to it.

When you remove yourself from the equation, you can label what you get as art, the label itself is very unimportant, but that art isn't yours, it's questionable if its even the AI's given the context on which it learns, but that's irrelevant, point being you are depriving yourself from the actual making of the art, from being an artist.

Bottom line being, use it as a tool, don't let it replace you and dull you. Make cool shit, or lame shit, who cares.

I've thought for a while that it would be kinda cool to have a centralised place to just dump all my projects, WIPs and just random thoughts, kinda similar to old internet blogs. Problem is, even if I do make a site, I don't really wanna pay upkeep for hosting and such, but I also don't wanna be under some subdomains like wordpress, github seemed better but I feel this type of website doesn't really fit that vibe. Anyhow, I found indie-net hosting platforms, I thought the concept was cool and remembered that I could use it for the exact purpose I talked about, while also being free and being under a domain name I didn't really mind being under for free. So, here we are. Anyway, if you managed to get here I will assume you know how to navigate the site, hope you can find something you think is cool.