Ai tool - Leonardo Ai

Decided to give Ai tools a shot. Hear me out.
After months of denouncing ai generated art.. I am not giving up the fight. Just realigning realistically as someone who has to teach the next generation of artists how to deal with this new paradigm. So this will definitely be a work in progress.

I don't support copyright infringement, so I have been looking into ai tools that let you train your own model. This means an ai model that is not trained on questionable sources like the dataset used by stable diffusion ..

That said I haven't trained this model with my own data yet, am using the default texturing model that is in Alpha.. hopefully eventually it will be trainable. At which point I will proceed to train it to texture paint in my style. These experiments are an exploration of the possibilities of me working with ai the way I would collaborate with a human texture artist. Am not sure this is something i will include in my professional practice. Likely not. However with out exploring it myself I dont think I should take a stand for/against it.

So here are the results.

I used LeonardoAi's texture generator 

It works with a 3d model you provide(with UVs alreadycreated), and generates texture maps -albedo, normals, displacement, roughness and HDRP

The two models I tested are some sculpts I did during sculptjanuary 2023 and 2020 .. these sculpts are typical for this kind of use case scenario: 

I created a sculpt, but dont have the time or patience to retopologise and then uv. So, I do a quick and dirty decimate process to reduce the polycount and then do automatic uvs.. I didnt even assign seams.

Handed these models to Leonardo.ai along with prompts and this is what it did..

The Nine Tail Fox I made in 2020
Heres the original sculpt

and heres the version textured by ai 
using the prompt - "japanese water color and ink painting of nine tail fox"

You can view the 3d models below

Sculpt January 2020 Jan 13 - Folklore by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

Texturing Experiment with AI - Nine Tail Fox by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

The other model I worked with was a sculpt of a fish from Sculptjanuary 2023 as seen below

007 Fish by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

Here are the ai generated texture art variants

Partly made with Artificial Intelligence tools by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

I find that as a tool for quickly exploring an idea before sinking hours of manual labor into it, and then going in on the final artwork manually or painting over.. is a workflow many will be adopting .. immediately.. theres no avoiding it. especially when you can train the model on your own style.

So why havnt I trained it with my own data yet? 
Short answer: There are risks to that.. that need to be considered.

Stay tuned.