MollyFootman posted at 4:31 PM Tue, 30 December 2025 - #4502692

Aside from the issue of whether or not AI is ethical, I don't enjoy using it.  I experiment with it from time to time and I guess the results are OK.  The problem is that it doesn't feel to me like I'm the artist when I tell a generative AI application to improve my pictures.  I feel like I am commissioning someone (something?) else to improve my picture for me.  It's a personal thing, I guess, but I don't find that very satisfying. =\

Molly

I can relate to that, but to me that was also a motivation to get back to it over and over again and explore ways to make it work for me.

A bit of a personal story: I think I was 6 or 7 years old when I saw a movie on TV with a woman in a beautiful baroque dress that somehow struck a chord. I remember I wanted to replicate that image on paper and was utterly frustrated my hands weren’t able to do that. In my teens I saw Hammer Horror’s  ‘Dracula has risen from the grave’, with Veronica Carlson and Christopher Lee. Since then I've been hooked on this genre, but secretly always wanted Dracula to win and go just a little further than sensors would allow.

Over the years I learned how to draw, but found it too frustrating/time consuming. So discovering Poser 4 in 2000 was something like a ‘Godsend’. Setting up a scene and choose every angle and detail possible before committing to the final render was a revelation. Over the last 25 years I thoroughly learned how to use all successive versions of Poser (and Photoshop) improving my art and gaining an audience for my ‘art niche’.

But I feel the leaps Poser made with new versions going from Poser 4 to 13 became an agonizing slow crawl and with poser 14 a step back. So looking for ways forward I explored DAZ and several other software, but they all felt like throwing all I’ve created and learned in the bin, for only a minor improvement in capabilities.

When AI arrived and I saw what it can do, the 7 year old me woke up again. This technology finally can truly help me bring the pictures I have in my head to life. And almost 50 years later I now have gained some knowledge to actually make it work. Still it takes a lot of effort to work around all AI’s limitations and quirks to make something that’s in my head. But with the help of Poser a fair amount of creativity and work arounds I’m on my way to getting there in ways the 7 year old me couldn’t have imagined in all the world possible!

I love what Poser has brought me over the last 25 years. I’m rooting for the makers of this software to create something worth buying. But to be honest: if Poser 14 is all they can bring to the table, Poser 13 will be the last version I’ve bought.

Whether you like it or not, the genie is out of the bottle and AI is here to stay. Yes there need to be guardrails, and it floods the world with trash I hate.  But it also a powerful, scary, hopeful, intriguing, … tool, capable of things we couldn’t have fathomed a few years ago. And it won’t go away.

So this is also a heart felt call to everybody at Poser reading this. I don’t care if it’s AI or something else, but add capabilities to your product that truly help artists advance in recreating the pictures in their heads. Start with the users and why they truly use your software and go from there.

Cheers!

Richard

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Unprocessed Poser render for AI workflow:

Closing in on the image that's in my head ...

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