Using AI in CNC

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Often we hear about AI being a great tool in management of much data. But do you realize that ChatCPT, CoPilot,Gemini or Grok, all have the ability and skills to develop line art, make more dese lines on light drawings, clean up vectors and more. You just need to explain to the AI what characteristic’s are desired. Such as - “Make line art of two cowboys sitting by a fire with a cactus in the foreground, make suitable to carve with CNC router” .

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If changes are needed just tell AI what needs to be changed. when satisfactory, export to your CNC program . AI will do color as well as line graphics and full picture with colors or videos. The capacity is a bit scarey. Enjoy Tom

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c.f.,

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There has been some good discussion of this here before…

Having had a career in IT I could write 100,000 words off the cuff and bore everyone to tears recounting the history of modern tech hype cycles of which AI is just the latest. The internet, e-commerce, social networking, crytpo, cloud, blockchain. The pattern is there’s always an initial amazing transformative promise that gets turned on its head quickly when business and money get involved. But this isn’t the place :grinning:

In the realm of using AI for CNC…its a topic worth starting with the ad absurdum straw man argument. If everybody asks AI to create what they need, would anything truly new ever be created again?

What’s being called generative AI today is just a very sophisticated search looking at something a human previously did and adapting it, at a shockingly high rate of speed accomplished at a staggering power and water (cooling) environmental cost. Its kind of Rube Goldberg-ish in a way.

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Reminds me of a Star Trek TNG episode where Captain Picard was marooned with an alien captain whose language consisted entirely of literary allusions from his people’s past. I always wondered who actually wrote the literature and how the society degenerated from that stage (also what their technical manuals looked like…).

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“Shaka, when the walls fell”…that’s a classic episode. No shortage of sci-fi about societies compromised by their own progress.

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With the exception of the approximately one in a hundred million humans who actually creates something new this is exactly what the rest of us do, except slowly and in an even more error prone way. Actual novelty is a rare and wonderful thing and I really doubt that those who are capable of it will be dissuaded by AI.

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I think I follow what you mean but that works out to a really small number of people across the planet so I guess it depends how you define new. The world of CNC is an interesting case because its creative without being purely an art. We don’t fully understand what the fallout from generative AI will be - legal cases to date have been all over the place. Plenty of people in creative fields are being cautious if not outright opposing.

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We’ve been here before, but we pretend we haven’t. Every time a new tool shows up, people swear it’s the end of authenticity, the end of “real” creativity, the end of whatever comfortable world they think they’re defending. Electric guitars were once dismissed as cheating—too loud, too easy, too artificial. Computers were mocked as toys. Cell phones were frivolous gadgets. The internet was chaos nobody asked for. Yet all of them eventually became not only accepted, but essential to how we create, work, and communicate. The same cycle is repeating with AI, right on schedule.

What makes the backlash so hypocritical is how selectively people enforce their purity tests. A sculptor can use power tools. A woodworker can use CNC machines. A photographer can retouch digitally. A painter can use projectors. None of that “invalidates” the work. We’ve already accepted that tools evolve and that artists have always used whatever gave them new reach, speed, or possibilities. But introduce AI into the process—especially in design or concept stages—and suddenly the moral alarms go off. It’s not that AI violates some ancient artistic principle. It’s that it feels too new, too powerful, too unfamiliar to slot neatly into old hierarchies.

The irony is that art has never been about the sanctity of tools. It’s about intent, taste, choices, the human sense of meaning. A machine—whether it’s a sander, a 3D printer, or a neural network—doesn’t decide what matters. It doesn’t replace the artist’s eye, judgment, or voice. It just accelerates certain parts of the process, removes certain barriers, and expands what’s possible. People don’t like admitting that, because it forces them to let go of romantic myths about suffering for one’s craft or gatekeeping who counts as a “real” artist.

In reality, resistance to AI in art has nothing to do with art losing its soul. It’s the same tired reflex we’ve had toward every technological shift: fear of change dressed up as moral concern. Give it time. The tools we panic about today will become the tools no one thinks twice about tomorrow. And the artists who embrace them now will be the ones everyone later claims were “visionary” all along.

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That’s cool, but for some reason AI still can’t create the proper toolpaths for that rendering, or - what I’m most interested in - create the toolpaths for the designs I create myself.

Yet.

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While your argument has a certain amount of appeal I disagree with its premise. I think you conflate art with artist and confuse art with craft.

I’ve spent a chunk of my life producing works that resemble art, some recent endeavors have been posted in this forum. I’ve done inlay for guitars and jewelry boxes, built models for SFX cinematography, designed motion control camera shots to film those models,created and animated CGI characters, wrote and did the “artwork” for several educational iOS apps and more. But I’ve had friends who put a pencil to paper and I am simply amazed. In contrast, my “art” is done more with an eraser than the pencil as I strive to get the proportions pleasing. I really took to CNC because, for one reason, I could create my “art” on the computer where erasure marks don’t show. I was told once, years ago, that I was a craftsman and another friend was an artist. While it someone numbed me at the time it was absolutely true.

If I asked a person to produce the two cowboys illustration and they whipped it out in five minutes I could consider it a form of art and would certainly consider that person an artist. But I’m not about to call Tom an artist for a sentence of input to an LLM which has feasted on the works of others.

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A wonderful book which looks at this is David Pye’s classic The Nature and Art of Workmanship:

The biggest problem of course with LLMs is the issue of provenance of training data and copyright issues.

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Well, in the old days, painters would train by literally copying the works of others. It is called “Master Copy Studies,” and artists such as Picasso, Degas, and Van Wyck did it.

So, is it different when a computer does it than when a human does it?

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Yes, because the original artists made their work available, knowing that their fellow artists would look at them and use them for inspiration — the vast majority of the work used for LLM training was done so without negotiating any sort of usage rights — which is fine for those works which are out of copyright, but a big issue for people who put work out for promotional purposes, but then have it used for LLM training, which then allows said LLMs to output similar work without any sort of compensation.

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Did not expect to state a argument here- just trying to help other with artistic venues and needs. I doubt if AI generated graphic are under license; if so your membership fee should involve this as the privilege, I say use it. Its simple quick and often cute. Line art will not destroy the graphic artist, but AI may dumb down all eventually as humans are creatures of habit and all seek the most stupendous way of getting out of work!

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Next level:
ChatGPT: Can you create a prompt for Coloring Book Hero to create an image of two cowboys sitting in the desert, sitting by a fire with a cactus in the foreground? The file is intended for use with my CNC machine. I’d like it to have bold lines, no shading, and a line-art style.

ChatGPT said:

Here you go — a clean, CNC-ready Coloring Book Hero prompt crafted to deliver bold lines, strong silhouettes, and a classic Western vibe. It leans into individual grit, rugged frontier spirit, and that self-reliant cowboy archetype that fits perfectly with a desert scene.

:white_check_mark: Coloring Book Hero Prompt — “Two Cowboys at the Campfire in the Desert”

PROMPT:
Black-and-white coloring-book style illustration of two cowboys sitting by a campfire in the desert at night. The style should use bold, thick outlines, no shading, and a clean line-art silhouette ideal for CNC carving. One cowboy should be sitting on a log, the other on an overturned saddle or rock. Both should have iconic wide-brim hats, boots, and relaxed postures.
In the foreground, include a tall saguaro cactus with simplified, thick-lined shapes.
In the middle ground, show the campfire with simple flames and a few rocks around it.
In the background, include minimalistic desert elements—distant mesas, a crescent moon, and a couple sparse stars—using only thick outlines.
The entire scene should have high contrast, strong silhouettes, and no thin details, making it perfect for CNC toolpaths (SVG, DXF, CRV). Avoid shading, hatching, or texture. Bold outlines only.

If you’d like, I can also generate a second version with:

  • a more vintage Western poster feel
  • more detail / less detail
  • the cowboys facing forward or facing away
  • the campfire centered or pushed to a corner

Just tell me how you want to tweak it.

Here’s the output from Coloring book hero:

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I don’t like it. Let’s try to make some changes:
Chat GPT: Can you add 30% more detail, make the lines thinner, and remove the black background?

Presto chango, now I am happy!

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Thanks. I just bought it but in the mean time I found a digital version for my “paperless archives” here: PDF Reader | The Nature and Art of Workmanship

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This probably isn’t the place for this discussion, but I personally don’t understand how a human training off of other artist’s works is different than an AI training off of other artist’s work.

“In the style of” is specifically not included in Copyright protection under US law:

It remains a complex area, and I suspect some cases will head up to the Supreme Court someday.

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Interesting read! Thanks for the post.

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My logo was designed with AI, AI added some background people behind my image for my website, AI made some illustration I use as motive for cutting boards. It is a useful tool. Like CNC also is a tool. some say, it is not real woodwork. So the one that combined several teeth in one tool and called it “saw” already destroyed the real spirit of woodworking by mechanization of cutting wood.

My impression, I just use ChatGPT and Perplexity is, that ChatGPT is not good in correcting / improving / changing an image it aready presented, it is excellent writing resumes and stories, and that Perplexity is better to be used as a search engine, than writing letters or producing pictures.

I did no find any AI engine somewhere that was able to make a CAD file form anything.

Just y 5ct.

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