HEAR ME OUT! I've been using Chat CPT for feedback

[Rai_Muffin]

I know the gut instinct is that Chat CPT and AI like it are coming for our jobs,
(and it is),
but I've been looking into ways I could use it to help improve my comic.

Right now I have a few threads I use for different functions;
- Costume prompts (Using personality and colour schemes)
- Script Feedback (Text document, so it can pick up on spelling)
- Page feedback (PNG, so it can go more in depth on certain panels)
- Manuscript feedback (PDF, for more last minute readability feedback)

The trick is to separate them to focus on different functions, or the program becomes confused.
At one point it was convinced that a villain was a comedic character and started creating it's own characters that were weird amalgams of existing chracters.
You also need to tailor the feedback; when asking for comic page feedback the initial response was very detailed, so I asked it to approach the comic like I'm on a deadline (otherwise knowing me I'd be fixating on every single panel), which it did by breaking feedback into must change, may change and optional, and kept it focused to just 2 for each.

There is a weird sense of bullshit I can't escape; it feels really complemenatary of my scripts and will say "wow, this is the best storyline finale you've ever done!", which is weird considering it was the FIRST finale it had reviewed (so technically correct, but still).
But it's able to pick up on themes tone in a way I didn't expect, and was even able to predict what some of my influences were.
It's not going to have the same nuance as a real person giving an honest opinion, but it genuinely has helped me stop second guessing a lot of things.

What do you guys think?
You tried using AI to give feedback?
Or am I just teaching Skynet to replace me?

If a second Raikiri series shows up and forces my characters into fused mutants, we'll know what's up.

[KevinReijnders]

Why the fuck would I use the hallucination machine to give me feedback on anything???

[Rai_Muffin]

I don't have a good answer to that.

Let me ask the computer and get back to you.

[wolflu66]

I can't speak for other professional fields.
But when it comes to illustration composition, color, and style, AI can't give you good professional advice. At least not yet.

[ShidoDraws]

You are training the AI is what those prompts are insinuating. It is called a Large Language Model for a reason. Any, "conversations" you have are not real conversations, and those hallucinations people talk about aren't just mistakes, it's design to stroke your ego and give you results algorithmically. And you know how much we hate algorithms, it's also design to keep you coming back and staying longer.

Personally, I wouldn't use it because of privacy reasons. The conversations you have with AI are not private, there's a feed people can view. And people can look up your conversations with the AI using the AI.

[oshirockingham]

Well, from my perspective, it's all about the reason why you are making your stories. For example, if you aim to get artificial readers, asking an artificial professional is not a bad idea. If you aim to please readers, make a vote or a Discord channel, and ask your readers for suggestions. If you desire to tell a story for personal growth and self-achievement, then you don't need any validation.
Cheers!

[moontokkym]

This is a troll, right?

For one, if you were serious about asking us if the feedback was correct, you'd provide the page you'd fed it to see if the little substance there is to look at in the text it spat at you was even vaguely headed in the right direction.

Secondly, there's stuff i can call bullshit on immediately, no need to see the panel:

• almost all of the "critiques" are Barnum statements, meaning that they feel precise but they're incredibly vague, but because they're generally complimentary or intriguing you're more likely to accept them as true or slightly adapt the meaning in your head so that you feel like it fits better. It's doing astrology. This is a horoscope for your comic and should be taken exactly as seriously. No one is immune to this manipulation technique but I would advise you to be careful if you believe this is taylored to you in any meaningful way beyond extreme surface level, because this is pretty blatant, human scammers do better generally, so you're vulnerable to it.

• "Yoshiko already has a personnality - less is more", what personality? Does this mean that you should stop developing the characters? What is the implied "fat to trim" here? Human critique partners will elaborate on how they feel and why and what gets them there, this is just stated as fact.

• "raise the chin 2-3px". I don't mean to be rude but from what I've seen of your work, it's not pixel art and it is by no means pixel-perfect but for a chin. Moving a chin 2-3px will change nothing about the general perception of your character's anatomy, seeing as you're entire character's face is likely on a surface area of hundreds of pixels, unless it's drawn so small on the page that fixing it is barely worth your time because it's a small background detail. This is what I mean when I say it feels precise but means nothing.

• "add a faint background (...) for emotional depth" what background? You can't just add any old thing and lol emotions come. What emotions are you even trying to convey? The chatbot doesn't know unless you tell it and if you do it'll only tell you to do things that have been done millions of times before because that's all it sees, meanwhile "adding emotional depth" takes going deep into your soul, making yourself feel what you want the reader to feel, closing your eyes and trying to work out what that feeling looks like and then adapting it to your work. Emotions are one of the worst things to ask Chatgpt about because it'll only spit out beautiful words by poets that are long gone so that you can see their humanity in it's soulless text. It's doing the equivalent of putting googly eyes on a rock and you've fallen for it so hard you don't just find it cute, you've decided it has enough emotional depth that it can have a say in how your hard work turns out.

If by some miracle this isn't a troll, please stop getting chatgpt involved in your creative process, for your own sake. It's far better for your work to be a little bit imperfect, even a little bit mediocre, than this. Not only will listening to it render your work soulless, over time we've seen that it reduces your own capacity to show you have a soul at all.

This goes for your general life too. The more decisions you get chatgpt to make for you, the less you're capable of making them yourself, and soon what you buy, what you eat, where you go, who you talk to, will all be dictated by complex predictive text. We know for a fact at this point that excessive use on chatgpt makes you less capable, and more vulnerable to manipulation. People find themselves scared to express their own thoughts without the chatbot because they're so insecure with their own writing that they constantly feel the need to filter their words through it, alienating them from their friends. It's not a good place to be, and you can avoid it by making your own decisions and talking to people, real people.

[skullforceagents]

I mean, it’s totally up to you. Personally, I’d rather have real people critique my work, but you do you.

[DokiDokiTsuna]

I gotta say, the weirdest thing about this post is that I don't even know what you want us to "hear you out" about. =/ I mean, the most complimentary thing you have to say is:

But it's able to pick up on themes tone in a way I didn't expect, and was even able to predict what some of my influences were.It's not going to have the same nuance as a real person giving an honest opinion, but it genuinely has helped me stop second guessing a lot of things.

How is it picking up on themes and tone? Is it making real inferences about the effectiveness of the emotions you're putting into your work, or is it just pointing things out like "this story beat is sad-- maybe you could make it more sad" i.e. the bare minimum?
Similarly, what is the usefulness of 'predicting influences'...? Like, so it can tell you're trying to draw like [insert artist]-- so what?? Is it actually giving you advice on how to improve your art in that direction, or is it once again just employing basic pattern recognition and waiting for you to be impressed...?

Like...did Chat "CPT" write this post, too? Cuz this feels a lot like its trademark vague complimentary style: trying to explain how good something is without actually knowing what 'good' means or what people are looking for in any particular 'good' thing.
No offense, but it sounds like you have no idea what good feedback even looks like...so yeah, no wonder this feels useful to you.

As someone who specializes in critique and spends a lot of time listening to other critics-- that is a laughable excuse for "feedback". It sounds like what you'd get from someone who doesn't even know what they want to say about your work, so they focus on insignificant details to fill space and avoid any meaningful conclusions. It's a lot easier to waffle about what might happen if you moved a few pixels up or down, than to actually explain why a character's pose looks incorrect or ineffective, and how to improve their body language with real artistic terminology.

Similarly, it's a lot easier to just say "this scene is a little too long" (by individual panels...as if any human reader is counting your scenes out panel by panel to decide how they feel about the pacing 9_9) or to say "less is more", than to actually explain WHY a scene is too long or WHY a character might be overstaying their welcome.

That question-- WHY-- is the cornerstone of any meaningful critique, because it gives you insight into people's opinions. It helps you determine how your actions are affecting the reactions of your audience, so that you can go back and make changes to get the reactions you're looking for. And not only does this "feedback" not take the audience's reactions into account (because it's likely incapable of the one thing even bad critics will attempt to do), it doesn't explain why any of its vapid suggestions would actually improve anything.
Even its compliments have no support behind them-- why is the finale "some of your strongest writing in the series"? Because it says so?? What are these "high stakes"; where is it seeing this "raw emotional growth"? With this kind of feedback, you won't even be able to determine what you're doing correctly, let alone incorrectly...

In conclusion, next time you get this feeling:

There is a weird sense of bullshit I can't escape

Maybe take it at face value, and consider getting your feedback from something other than a machine that feeds you bullshit. =_=
It's amazing the level of incompetence people will accept from an unnecessary piece of technology, that would never be accepted from a human being. Because I'm 99% sure that if a person was saying this stuff to you, you'd be writing this post to ask us where you could get some real feedback.

[Kelheor]

It would be interesting to see the panels it's commenting the art on, actually.
The big problem with AI (right now, at least) is it will shower you with compliments. Honestly most of them sound like they are talking to a 5 y.o., just doesn't give you a star for doing your best. It's treating you like a main character so you continue to use it.
Please don't forget that AI is not objective, it you write "but it's wrong" to its statements, it will write "oh yes, of course, you're right about that!" and will give you another answer (usually not supported by anything).
Also you need to be extremely specific about your entry. Recently I saw the example of AI grammar correction, in two different entries about whether one very short sentence needs a comma and it gave two different answers - yes for the first entry and no for the second, just because the entry was phrased differently
All and all I don't think that it's useful at all for this kind of feedback right now. It may help with spelling, but so can Grammarly or any other service from the days of yore.
Admittedly, it may be hard to find feedback for all the stages of your comic and every panel you have, but just getting gratification from AI is not really a great choice for artistic improvement.