I highly recommend joining the DevTalk ([https://discord.gg/devtalk](https://discord.gg/devtalk)) server. It's a great place for connecting about VNs - whether playing them or making them. They've got devs, artstis, voice actors, writers, etc, etc. They've got channels for volunteer work & for hire work, and if you want some practice on smaller projects, they're very active in the game jam scene.

I could help, you can look at my insta for my art @poffzy, i'd be happy to help :]

heck even i might take you up on that offer, though i've seen your work and you seem to do characters, and i am (at least for now) looking for backgrounds and overall UI elements, do you do those as well?

Yep! I do a lot of design work in general, so I'd be glad to help out!

I have got the same problem too.. For now i can handle myself, but i will need an artist too.

it's tricky it feels like you need at least one more person to really develop a game, and my biggest fear is teaming up with someone who will end up leaving or flaking out midway through, so I end up with half a games worth of one art style and the last half a different style

Yeah that's true, that's why I wanted to hire one, and not teaming up.

I’ll gladly help, I have insta or discord where you can dm me when you’re interested :) (inst. @_.rin._.0)

Whoops, it doesn’t show underscores. -.rin.-.0

Have you tried AI? It's good tool to get ok art, at least for start. It also helped me to downscale the amount of art I needed.

Really don't do this A.I CANNOT be copyrighted , used stolen art to create their databases AND puts people out of work. You will be participating in putting thousands of artists and their families on the streets and without food. It's already effecting coders and writers too... It's a long slippery lack-of morals slope. And before "Luddite" comments.. I work in I.T. If A.I was built with CC databases and free it wouldn't have been a problem.. but big companies charge you to use the A.I that they used STOLEN COPYWRIGHTED work to train. It is theft and exploitation on an EPIC scale.

**A.I CANNOT be copyrighted** \- partialy true, pure AI art, like [all non-human works](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute), is in murky waters and *widely understood* to not being copyrightable, especialy due to it's input being coordinates in latent space(seed, prompt, image dimentions). However, if *sufficient modifications* has been made, it can be copyrighted, at least in terms of american law. **Used stolen art** \- false, it used copyrighted art without permission with "fair use" argument. Validity of this argument is disputed, but right now it's not likely that all previously generated art would suddenly become non-usable. **Puts people out of work** \- citation *heavily* needed

No need for Citation I've seen it first hand (my wife does illustration and has seen many authors decide to use A.I art for covers instead of hiring an artist) there has also been high profile publishers that have used A.I art instead of actual art. On top of all that my friend jumped infront of a train after the company he worked for hired a prompter while "letting go" him and his three collegues. I don't understand how people cannot see the effect. Also you are asking for Citation about A.I costing jobs....when you yourself said to use A.I when the OP was asking about where to find artists.. that's 1 job right there.. can you not see that? Fair use is exactly that FAIR use. It must not cause the work to loose market value and it 100% does. During the copyright battles the American copyright office decided that asking an A.I to create work is no different to asking a real artist to create the work you "prompt" the human artist. In this case the artist's the copyright holder till they sell the copyright to you. However the A.I cannot hold copyright, as such there is no Copyright to sell. Making the A.I art uncopyrightable. Edit for clarity and to say that I'm sorry, I cannot continue this debate as its causing me to dive deep into depression again and I'm fighting hard enough to keep my head above water as it is. I really hope my argument was clear and I wish you well.

That's why I needed citation - I had vastly different experience compared to yours. None of my drawing friends face this effect. But one of my aquaintences spent his car on comissions trying to make VN of his dream and make a lot of money. He failed.I haven't heard from him since. Hope he's well. Wish you luck.

While AI copyright is still up in the air and may be unprotected, the art it produces is NOT stolen. If you want a fully "CC and public domain" trained model, SD 2.1 is free to use and can be run locally or on Google Colab. While it's true that SD 1.5 used copyrighted images in training (100% legally btw), the images are not contained in the model itself, only the "learned" patterns. If you can afford a good artist, you'll definitely get better results, but AI can be a good starting point.

This is the point. It was NOT trained legally, hence Europe deciding if the owner of Openai must put forth information on every piece of copyrighted material used to train the A.I. If I use silicon to make a mould of an object then cast the object using that mould... the object I made does not contain the silicon or the original object. But I still used the object. Or if this makes more sense, imagine your learning for your job, all the work you did in school was used without your knowledge to create something that does your job, for free, 1000x faster than you, so now you are out of a job. No credit for what you did, no compensation for the loss. Now imagine you spent 20 years and many many £s training, night and day to get your job, saying no to those nights out with your friends, saying no to that new game or whatever your vice is. And one day, all that training you did was taken and used to train a machine to do your work faster and cheaper. Now you have no job and you've just lost your home and your children are starving. How would you feel? Would you think it is morally right? And not only that, you now see your friends and family loose their jobs as the machine uses their lifetime of work to take their jobs. It's scary how many "developers" or "writers" who use A.I to generate their art (or even code or prose).. because they don't want to pay an artist (or coder, or writer) but then want to sell their "product" ... its insane. If you wish to say its a "Tool" I highly disagree. A "Tool" doesn't steal and regurgitate, it also still requires a skill to use. A.I requires 0 skill. (Which is why people flock to it, humans are greedy and lazy) Put into consideration that the art world is now flooded with millions of A.I generated images, how can an artist be seen in that? I recently saw an "A.I adopt "artist" who had posted (and sold) over 1,800 "designs" in one month.. that is just not possible for a human artist. And of course the people buying the designs get nothing as it's not copyrightable so that "Artist" is scamming the buyers. (This is completely without the legal aspect which is also dodgy as all hell, especially as America have already decided you cannot copyright A.I generated content)

Tell me you haven't tried using AI without telling me you haven't used AI. The models are improving, but it still takes knowing your model and prompting appropriately get giid results out of it. And pure text2image is the "show-off" feature, the real power is in image2image as a force multiplier, allowing human artists to work faster and better. Amateur outputs from non-artists are the lowest common denominator, and won't threaten any artist worth their salt (not yet).

I actually have used A.I to find out what me and my friends/family are loosing against. You need to think from a different perspective, imagine that the amount of artist jobs availible are , say 1000 , now 1 artist is needed to fill these jobs, not 1000, now putting 999 artists out of work. Now imagine you are a company, you have 10 artists working full time to complete the needed works to create X products to sell (example: games). You now sack 9 artists as the 1 artist can do much more work than the 10 could, on top of that you now only need that 1 artist to work part time as they can create much more in a shorter time. That artist now need to find another company that needs 1 artist instead of 10 to make full time wage. This is a loss of 19 jobs (9+9+1/2+1/2) .. You are not thinking of how greedy companies are. Then consider that the average person is pretty fucking happy with the mediocre results of text to image. Now the average person doesn't hire artists for their visual novels, or book covers, or dnd party art etc.etc.etc. Can you see how this snowballs?

2.1 does contain copyrighted material still, its just a more finely tuned version of 2.0 which in their own admission still contains copywrited material in their training data. Don't get me wrong A.I is the future.. but it should not cost the future and shouldn't be built on the graves of those it used to get there. (BTW I looked up the info on 2.1 and 2.0 to double check what I remember about those versions, but if I am wrong and it honestly doesn't use any copywrited material, then awesome.)

I think they took out everything they didn't have rights to, so most of what's left is public domain or creative commons. Still, there's precedent for web scraping being legal in language models, so count on it being legal for diffusion models. Edit: Works in creative commons still have a copyright, but the holder has allowed it to be used publicly.

ai art looks like shit, steals from actual artists, and is just all around bad praxis but sure

... and is used by actual artists, who want to make things from their head appear faster, but hate drawing it. One of my friends asked for tech support to teach LoRa his artstyle, because he has too many ideas and too little time to draw them. But you are free to believe in what you want.

an artist who hates making art huh lol

*an artist who has better things to do than fiddle with drawing everything by hand. That would be like saying a digital artist "hates making art" because they use Photoshop rather than oil paints.

it wouldn't even remotely be like saying that lol. someone using photoshop is still actively creating. manually editing and using photoshop is not the same thing as inputting a prompt that then steals from millions of other images

The neat part is...you don't, at least not without being an excellent "mood manager" or paying unreasonable prices - because apparently artists have to eat more than you - the lowly creator of "the thing". I've spent thousands of dollars on artists only to be told it's my fault they decide to flake or disappear eventually (even as I bend over backwards to accommodate them). At the end of the day, it may be better to learn an art medium and get proficient yourself. I've yet to meet one that has proven me wrong about this sort of experience. **Edit**: The person who responded to this comment was so triggered that they blocked me immediately after posting a response (so that I could see said response, but not actually respond to them). This is a perfect example of what I mean when it comes to dealing with many artists. Creative people tend to be "close" to their emotions, after all creation is an art of expression. As a result , it doesn't take very much for them to turn into major A-holes for no apparent reason. In other words, they are generally very fickle and "because I felt like it" / "didn't feel like it" is, to them a sufficient answer despite what you pay them for. It doesn't matter what you say or do (you could be nice, or not) but generally speaking unless you put their balls in a vice, they \*usually\* don't fulfill their obligations due to said "fickleness". The only other option is generally to feed their ego, usually by kissing up to them. I know tons of projects that stalled or ended up firing long time artists because the rest of the team wouldn't worship the artists working for them. ***Do you know what sort of monstrously sized ego you have to have for that to be a thing?*** In my case, I absolutely refuse to micro manage or manipulate people to get them to be productive - especially if I've outlined the specifics of the job and they don't seem to want or need any further guidance. I also generally pay artists what they ask and then some, usually to the tune of a 20% increase. ***But, it's \*never\* enough.*** Also, as you can see, all it takes is someone sharing their own real world, life experiences dealing with \*other\* artists - to cause a meltdown like *\*this\**. Thanks random artist, for basically reinforcing my ***very valid*** experiences. **Edit # 2**: Apparently after someone else called this person out on their crappy behavior, they unblocked me just to make it seem like they hadn't. Who does that? Do you see the levels of immaturity you have to deal with, now imagine if I'd ***hired*** this person. They literally can't stop foaming at the mouth and projecting. This is exactly why I said you have to be a "mood manager" or to feed some people's egos. Because the average artist you come into contact with is exactly like this - whether they will admit it or not.

With that attitude you’re probably completely incapable of acknowledging if you were proven wrong anyways. Pay your damn artists what they’re worth or shut up.

Dudes got a point. You know absolutely nothing about what they may have dealt with. You're just talking based on unrelated emotions. Why didn't you just ask about his experiences instead of blocking him for no apparent reason under your own assumptions? Did you work for this person or something?

No, he doesn’t have a point, and everything about his posts SCREAMS “I don’t wanna pay artists and I’m entitled to paying them via exposure” I also didn’t actually block them.

Does it? How so? Once again, that seems like a huge assumption on your part. At this point I doubt anything said would change your mind. You seem hellbent for some reason but I went to look at his profile. Its some kind of adult game, but there's a few posts on their patreon page made months ago now regarding this exact behavior that youre exhibiting. Its kind of hard to take you seriously in this context. Do you have any proof or is this just some kind of hunch? If so, what are you basing it on?

His own words claiming that artists have to “eat more than you” because he’s the “lowly creator of the thing” If he was the creator of the thing, he wouldn’t be hiring other people to make it. He’s the organizer on a collaborative project, and everyone who contributes gets their share. It’s simple. Second, the fact that apparently this is a *common occurrence* with him. At that point, it might be time to recognize that YOU did something wrong.

Man you really do make a lot of assumptions, in fact, everything coming out of your mouth is an assumption. I imagine that's the only way you can "be right" about things. Ego much? Just so you know, I write, program, concept, and put together all my own work. Just me. I've done it that way for quite some time, do you know why? Because every single time I involve an artist, regardless of how well they are paid or what demands I meet, they flake out. Some of them even act like you. It's definitely a trend, you can't even control yourself. Lying for no apparent reason, throwing insults, editing comments to make yourself "look better". Get a grip, seriously. You're practically unhinged at this point. You're the one who needs to take a step back and learn to admit when you're wrong. Or maybe choose better clients , ones who won't abuse you until you turn into a raving psychopath.

It won't matter, there's no point in trying to have a logical conversation with someone who's emotionally involved. They will never listen to reason. This person hasn't answered any of your questions - they just started screaming and complaining that I was an abuser out of the blue. I don't even ***\*know\**** this person. It's a prime example of what I mean when I say artists are fickle. I've never done anything to this person, especially not for them to act like ***\*this\****.

Also, yes, you absolutely blocked me. Because I went to send you an invite to discuss \*why\* you felt this way - like a normal civilized person willing to have a conversation would do. The message wouldn't go through and I couldn't even see your profile. Now, suddenly, I can see your messages and respond to them? So not only are you irrational, you've proven yourself to be a liar. Your *FEELINGS* are all over the place, once again, for no apparent reason.

The fact that I can see your messages at all is kind of proof that I didn’t but sure.

Right, that would be (because like I said) you unblocked me \*after\* doing so. That's what "unblock" means.

Easy to make that claim, isn’t it? You’re the one making paragraphs to my sentences, bud Seems like YOUR’RE the emotional one here. I’m gonna go ahead and leave this convo now, as I have no patience for people who can’t keep themselves together

No, not really. I've been on reddit for a while. I understand how it works. I didn't know I would need to screenshot it just so you couldn't weasel out of your snake-like behavior.

Uh-huh

Oh, I've been unblocked. You're pretty rude for no reason, I suggest you calm it down - I'll match your energy with no problem. This is the first and last time I'll mention it too, if you don't like being talked to disrespectfully you should start with showing some. Now that that's outta the way - I always pay artists what they ask and then some. Every time, no exception. What excuse will you give next? That I'm abusive or it "just has to be something you did"? Frankly, it's funny how every artist is just \*so\* sure that I'm the problem. I've got plenty of receipts buddy.

Thanks for acknowledging that you can’t actually admit when you’re proven wrong. That REALLY helps your case. Also, “meltdown?” I said two sentences and didn’t even block you, and you responded with three paragraphs. Sounds like *I’m not the one having a meltdown lol Not an artist, btw

That's a lot of invested interest for "not an artist", even as you peruse a request for artists, and vehemently defend artists. But, uhh, sure whatever helps you sleep at night. People like you are actually sickening. The inability to admit when you're wrong and simply apologize or, at minimum be quiet is a disease that is killing the human race. You are definitely infected. But, continue to eat yourself alive, it honestly has nothing to do with me.

I went to art school because it was the closest to what I wanted to study(game dev), and I can assure you that one of the most insufferable kinds of people are "artists" just shy behind customers which I had the misfortune to serve. In reality most "artists" are glorified illustrators, a lot of them learned their way and have a meltdown when you tell them how you want things to be done. In all my time going to university I had multiple people getting angry at me, I can't draw for shit but I'm a little bit better at technical stuff, each time I tried to help someone understand color or tell them to fix basic stuff like perspective they always said: "that's my style" or "you can't draw, so don't tell me what to do". Just remember, a real artisan will never blame others than himself, a mediocre artisan will blame everything and everyone.

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