 So, real quick, for those of you who are wondering about Substance Tutorials, yes, they are on their way. That's gonna come after we complete this Dolly series. This just takes priority because every artist on the planet should really be learning about this tool right now. So, before we continue forward, I just wanted to clear up some of the confusion about AI. A lot of people seem to think it's some sort of stealing, photo bashing, mixing and mashing, color scheme, repaint software, and that simply isn't what it is. Today I'll be showing you an AI software known as crayon. Unlike Dolly, it's available to everyone right now, even if you live outside the United States. It costs no money to use, and it's not quite as sophisticated as Dolly, but I think it proves my point even more. All software like this does, it goes online and it studies millions of pictures and it notices patterns. Every time the word orange shows up, you get pixel clusters that look similar to this. And then when you ask it for an orange, it reflects on all the other oranges that it's seen before and creates a new orange from its past experiences. It doesn't steal anything from anyone. There's no difference between doing this, than me going to a zoo, looking at a million giraffes, and then drawing my own giraffe based on what I've noticed. The key is it's generating something new, an image that previously did not exist before. And I believe that a lot of new art generation software does exactly that. And I can prove it. But in order to prove it, I first have to teach you about Armored Core. And no, this is not a joke, I am completely serious. The Armored Core series is the mech sister of the Dark Souls series. It's a cult classic mech game that virtually no one knows about, and nobody has ever played. And because it's made by From Software, it's hard. Really f***ing hard. So even within the people who have played it, almost nobody has ever beaten it. This is the first screen you see in Armored Core. And as you can see, they offer two difficulty settings. Normal and hard. Because f***ing easy mode, I guess. Anyway, the point is this game is so rare and so unpopular and so difficult that pretty much nobody plays it seriously. Except for me. You see, I am an expert at Armored Core. There are 15 total games in this series. Each game has hundreds of different parts, hundreds of different weapons, and if you show any weapon from any Armored Core game on the PlayStation 2 series to me, I can tell you what game it's from, what it does, how heavy it is, how far it shoots, how much damage it does, who made it, how fast it fires, everything. I have played this game so much that I am literally undefeated. I have never ever lost a match to another human in my life. I am so confident in my Armored Core skills, I am willing to bet $1,000 that I will beat you in any one-on-one arena match on any PlayStation 2 Armored Core game. That is how confident I am about my knowledge and skills of this game. I am the biggest, proudest, most hardcore Armored Core fan you will probably ever meet in your life. I love it so much that I designed the weapons for all of my games based off the Armored Core system. Even the main character from my last game is essentially a small, walk-in female Armored Core. So I know my shit when it comes to this. If you show this image to any normal person, they'll probably just tell you it's a robot. But to the initiated trained eye, this isn't just a robot, that's a third-generation nine-ball AC. This head is the YH-12 Mayfly, manufactured by Mirage. It costs 99,000 credits and weighs 199 units. This gun is the WR93RL, it's a rifle manufactured by Crest Industries, holds 80 rounds of ammunition, has a range of 450 and weighs 688 units. These legs are called the LH80S2, previously known as the SNSK. Third-generation costs 45,000 credits and weighs 2,300 units, and has a maximum carrying capacity of 5,200 units. Unlike Gundams, which can look like whatever they want, the head, arms, torso, legs, guns, cannons, boosters, every single part of an Armored Core is strictly defined and follows very strict rules and does not deviate from the original design. This is so ingrained that when you look at Armored Core fan art, even the fans virtually never make up their own parts. If you look at a random Armored Core fan art, everyone who's played the game knows that this isn't just random armor. Those are the LH84L2 legs. These are the A9-2XS arms. That gun is the MWG Karasawa, and those things on her shoulders are crow stealth extensions. These are the XA2FF legs, Karasawa MK2 laser rifle, moonlight laser blade, GN-44 grenade launcher, and the EMU multi-missile launcher. My point is, within this tiny community of Armored Core, even the fan art for the game is extremely strict and stays exactly true to the designs, parts, and weapons that are exclusively available to the game. So if you ever want to know if the machine learning art tool you are using is stealing or creating, allow me to introduce the Armored Core test. You see, because this game is so niche and unpopular, we know almost guaranteed that the people who designed the AI probably never played the game. So they probably never told the engineers, oh, don't forget to grab all 17 images of Armored Core from the internet. The only images you're going to find of this game are probably going to be screenshots directly from the game or the model kits. So the test is simple. If we type Armored Core into the search engine, if it's truly stealing images from other people as its main source of creating stuff, then all the designs that pop up should be made of real parts from the game. But if the designs that come out are random made-up shapes that make no sense, that are not from the game, then we know for a fact that it's creating new ideas and not copying them. So let's see, what are we going to get? I don't know, is it going to steal things or is it going to generate new things? All right, so let's take a look at what we got. Now at first glance, it definitely looks like an Armored Core. It even kind of feels like an Armored Core, but as an Armored Core expert, I can confidently tell you that these are not real parts. I have a pretty good idea where it was probably getting these ideas. If I had to guess, I would say it was taking inspiration from three main designs. They were probably 4th generation AC Eliah, AC Windy Fashion, and AC Otzdarva. These are clearly where it drew most of its inspiration from and some of the parts look pretty similar. But if you actually look real close, none of these parts are real. None of these arms, none of the legs, none of the torso. You could not build any of these ACs in the game. These are all original, custom, impossible designs that you cannot make in the game. And even more impressive, the way I know for a fact that it is using some level of creativity at least is because it created some illegal designs. Remember, Armored Core has very specific rules for parts and weapons. And one of those rules is shoulder extension weapons always come in pairs. You cannot have missile extensions on one arm and then shield extensions on the other. As soon as you do that, you disqualify yourself as an Armored Core. If you search the internet for Armored Core, you will probably never see an official game shot of an AC with two different extensions. Yet, here we have them. And of course, that makes sense. There's no reason the AI would know that Armored Cores cannot have two different shoulder extensions at the same time. So when it played with some ideas, it was like, yeah, sure, why not? It looks cool. But the point is it definitely did not steal this idea from Armored Core. It's looking at millions of images online, noticing patterns between similar images and creating completely new images based on the patterns that you ask it for. And personally, if that's not creativity, then I don't know what is. And let's be honest here, just because you got inspired by looking at someone else's work and implemented pieces of it in your own, do we really want to consider that stealing? If you really go down that path, then the idea of Donkey Kong was stolen from King Kong. Yoshi Mitsu's original design was clearly stolen from the Aliens in Independence Day. But come on. We all know how ridiculous that sounds because each character is clearly different despite having obvious inspirations relating to each other. At some point, somebody put a cannon on top of a car and was like, hey, I made a tank. And at some point, someone put a guided system on a rocket and was like, hey, I made a missile. And at some point someone said, look, I dyed Hatsune Miku's hair black, gave her a mid-drift and an arm cannon and created a totally original character called Black Rock Shooter. And literally at some point, Miyamoto was like, oh, it's not Green Mario. It's Luigi. Also, if you're going to go down that path, you know, where does it stop? Let's say that you were able to trace something that Dolly created back to someone else's real image. Even if you could do that with 100% certainty, I guarantee you that we could all find something on that image that we can trace to someone else's image before that. Maybe they copied a pose. Maybe they copied a hairstyle. Maybe they copied a color scheme. Maybe they copied the way they draw the eyes or the way they draw the nose or they copied the way they draw miniskirts from some other anime. The train never stops. This has always been how art works. New ideas are always just old ideas mixed together. And that's what most AI generators do. They look at a bunch of images, noticing patterns between similar images to make something else. And listen, hey, if you disagree, that's totally fine. You are still welcome here on the channel. I just wanted to be very transparent about my position. So remember the armored core test. If you type in armored core and it just pumps out real parts, then you know it's just copying images and spitting them out. But if it makes up its own parts, you know it's imagining and creating new ideas. That is how you know if an AI is stealing or creating. And if you're really worried about this whole stealing thing, there's a really simple solution. If the machine spits out an image and you like it and you want to make sure that it doesn't belong to somebody already, just run it through the reverse image search. If nothing looks exactly like it, then you have a completely new and original image. So don't feel guilty using tools like this. 20 years from now, you will be considered weird for not using this. So in the future, if you see guys arguing about this topic and other places like Twitter or Instagram or whatever, just share this video with them. At the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with agreeing to disagree and respecting each other's opinion. Anyway, as always, hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.