#Ai art is driving artists out if their jobs

[lackadaisycats]

Hey Tracy! Have you heard about the new Ai called Sora? Apparently it can now create 2D and 3D animations as well as hyper realistic videos. I’ve been getting into animation and trying to improve my art for years since I was 7, but now seeing that anyone can create animation/works in just a mare seconds by typing in a couple words, it’s such a huge slap in the face to people who actually put the time and effort into their works and it’s so discouraging! And it has me worried about what’s going to happen next for artists and many others, as-well. There’s already generated voices, generated works stolen from actual artists, generated music, and now this! It’s just so scary that it’s coming this far. 

Yeah, I've seen it. And yeah, it feels like the universe has taken on a 'fuck you in particular' attitude toward artists the past few years. A lot of damage has already been done, and there are plenty of reasons for concern, but bear in mind that we don't know how this will play out yet. Be astute, be justifiably angry, but don't let despair take over. --------

One would expect that the promo clips that have been dropping lately represent some of the best of the best-looking stuff they've been able to produce. And it's only good-looking on an extremely superficial level. It's still riddled with problems if you spend even a moment observing. And I rather suspect, prior to a whole lot of frustrated iteration, most prompts are still going to get you camera-sickness inducing, wibbly-wobbly nonsense with a side of body horror.

Will the tech ultimately get 'smarter' than that and address the array of typical AI giveaways? Maybe. Probably, even. Does that mean it'll be viable in quite the way it's being marketed, more or less as a human-replacer? Well…

A lot of this is hype, and hype is meant to drive up the perceived value of the tech. Executives will rush to be early adopters without a lot of due diligence or forethought because grabbing it first like a dazzled chimp and holding up like a prize ape-rock makes them look like bleeding-edge tech geniuses in their particular ecosystem. They do this because, in turn, that perceived value may make their company profile and valuations go up too, which makes shareholders short-term happy (the only kind of happy they know). The problem is how much actual functional value will it have? And how long does it last? Much of it is the same routine we were seeing with blockchain a few years ago: number go up. Number go up always! Unrealistic, unsustainable forever-growth must be guaranteed in this economic clime. If you can lay off all of your people and replace them with AI, number goes up big and never stops, right?

I have some doubts. ----------------------

The chips also haven't landed yet with regards to the legality of all of this. Will these adopters ultimately be able to copyright any of this output trained on datasets comprised of stolen work? Can computer-made art even be copyrighted at all? How much of a human touch will be required to make something copyright-able? I don't know yet. Neither do the hype team or the early adopters.

Does that mean the tech will be used but will have to be retrained on the adopter's proprietary data? Yeah, maybe. That'd be a somewhat better outcome, at least. It still means human artists make specific things for the machine to learn from. (Watch out for businesses that use 'ethical' as a buzzword to gloss over how many people they've let go from their jobs, though.)

Will it become industry standard practice to do things this way? Maybe. Will it still require an artist's sensbilities and oversignt to plan and curate and fix the results so that it doesn't come across like pure AI trash? Yeah, I think that's pretty likely.

If it becomes standard practice, will it become samey, and self-referential and ultimately an emblem of doing things the cookie-cutter way instead of enlisting real, human artists? Quite possibly.

If it becomes standard industry practice, will there still be an audience or a demand or a desire for art made by human artists? Yes, almost certainly. With every leap of technology, that has remained the case. ------------------ TL;DR Version:

I'm not saying with any certainty that this AI blitz is a passing fad. I think we're likely to experience a torrential amount of generative art, video, voice, music, programming, and text in the coming years, in fact, and it will probably irrevocably change the layout of the career terrain. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was being overhyped as a business strategy right now. And I don't think the immensity of its volume will ever overcome its inherent emptiness.

What I am certain of is that it will not eliminate the innate human impulse to create. Nor the desire to experience art made by a fellow soul. Keep doing your thing, Anon. It's precious. It's authentic. It will be all the more special because it will have come from you, a human.

[erinwantstowrite]

opinions on ai?

This is the perfect time to share something I wrote a few months ago when I was upset about it:

AI is the bane of my existence and I hate it so much. Not only because of the environmental impact that it has, but because of how it gives us absolutely nothing of value in creative spaces and is actually a detriment to our future, rather than being "innovative" like companies want us to believe.

If you're using AI to write notes for you, or to answer questions, to write your essays and your discussion posts, you are hurting yourself. But eventually you will hurt others with your willing ignorance. You are not learning, you are not taking the time to push yourself to new bounds. You are not absorbing the information you need, and for why? Because it's hard? Life is hard. Learning is hard. If learning was easy, you wouldn't be learning anything at all. And one day when you need to use these tools you put down and gave to a program in order to do your job, you are going to get someone hurt in some way. If you're going into teaching and you didn't bother to learn about childhood development because you let an AI take your notes because you couldn't be half-assed to sit through an hour long lecture, you will fail every student that comes your way. If you're an engineer and you had AI do the math for you, something that you make will break and it could kill someone. Because the AI can not even count how many times the letter 'r' is in strawberry, but you're trusting it to make bridges or design buildings?

And in a creative sense, you are not an artist if you use AI. I will scream it from the rooftops if I have to.

You are not an artist if you use AI.

Because to be an artist is to put your very soul into what you create. And an AI has no soul. To be an artist is to lay yourself bare for people to witness and interpret, and it's scary but it's freeing. To be an artist is to make a message with your art, to have people a thousand years from now sit in a museum and feel connected to who you were so far in the past. To think that humanity may be different but we are also inherently the same. To be an artist is to despair over the process of creating your art because it's difficult, and time consuming, and damn does it drive you crazy. But then you get that end result and you realize you learned something about yourself, you got better at something that brings you joy, you created and now you see what you are capable of, and what you will be capable of in the future. To be an artist is to connect with someone because of what you made, and that someone includes yourself.

We keep telling young artists that they need to be better now, they need to quit if they aren't good at it on the first try. We keep acting like we didn't start from somewhere ourselves, like we were born with the fine motor skills and the talent needed to create. It's because our attention spans can't handle over 20 seconds and we need multiple videos playing to drown out our own thoughts. We have to look at comment sections to see the court of public opinion before we make a judgement ourselves. If anything is out of the ordinary or doesn't look the way we expect or want, it must be shamed. And this existence is exhausting because at the end of the day, we have done nothing of value. When coming across a video of a young artist who took the time out of their day to create, we need to encourage them to continue going, tell them that their work is worthy. Because it is. It is worthy because they made it. If we shoot them down before they can go anywhere, we've just killed an artist that could have painted the next Starry Night, or created a sculpture that millions of people would try to visit. We've shot down someone who could teach others how to create one day in their future. We shot them down and killed their inspiration and motivation, and they might turn to someone else to do it for them because they will believe they are not worthy enough or talented enough to make it.

When I was still in school, my favorite part of the year was seeing the projects put up on the wall. The silly displays our teachers put up to show a holiday with slightly wonky paper snowflakes, the posters that the art students made with "too many lightning bolts around the guitar", the signs for school dances, the yearbooks that students spent all year making, the English class posters that depicted scenes from what they were reading and they were made with stick figures or they had someone draw out butterflies. I loved seeing the decorations for Homecoming Week, loved looking ta the booths that everyone made for our career and science fairs. I liked when we put on talent shows still, when we did pep rallies and fashion shows and we saw everyone get together to have fun and not care if it was "perfect." No one there was a professional artist, not yet, but that didn't make it any less entertaining or creative.

We dance because we want to feel how our bodies move and express ourselves in ways words cannot. We paint and we draw and make pottery and quilts and pictures because at one point, all we had were cave paintings of our hands, and we still look at them with reverence for where we started. We sing and we drum and we laugh because music is a universal language that anyone can understand, and isn't that breathtaking? We write so that people in the future can pour themselves over our words and learn from us, so that kids can hide their books underneath their covers with a little flashlight when their parents put them to bed hours ago but they just can't put our story down they have to know what comes next! We cook for our loved ones and have family recipes that mean we've been tasting the same food that our family we never got to meet were eating too.

We create because humans are meant to create. We put our love into the process, we put our dreams and our hopes and our hard earned lessons into these creations.

AI will never have that. AI has none of the process, and therefore, it is not art. We can gripe about how art has different meanings all we want, we can shout that art is only art if it invokes an opinion or a thought, but that is not what makes art. Because there is still effort put into placing a shoe on a pedestal, or painting a yellow square, or painting a mural on a wall, or writing poetry in a tiny notebook at school, or melting crayons together, or anything that requires you putting it together. If AI is doing all the work for you, then you've accomplished nothing. And you stole from the people that actually did accomplish something. You stole not only their effort, but you stole their process, their feelings, their hope and their dreams and their ideas of the future.

AI is nothing and will ultimately become obsolete. Because humans will not stop creating just because companies are pushing for us to stop and hand it over to them. They want us to stop creating, they want us to pay them for it, they want us to put blind trust into what they're doing, they want us to forget that they are stealing from us. I will not forget. I will never forget. Because I was born to sing and dance and write and draw and cook, and when I die, my body will go right back to the Earth and perhaps flowers will grow around my grave. I will still be creating even then. And even if AI is still around and still trying to steal from us, I will die knowing that it could never do the same.

[togglesbloggle]

I won't be opting out of the AI scraping thing, though of course I'm glad they're giving us the option. In fact, at some point in the last year or so, I realized that 'the machine' is actually a part of why I'm writing in the first place, a conscious part of my audience.

All the old reasons are still there; this is a great place to practice writing, and I can feel proud looking back over the years and getting a sense of my own improvement at stringing words together, developing and communicating ideas. And I mean, social media is what it is. I'm not immune to the joy of getting a lot of notes on something that I worked hard on, it's not like I'm Tumbling in a different way than anyone else at the end of the day. But I probably care a bit less than I used to, precisely because there's a lurking background knowledge that regardless of how popular it is, what I write will get schlorped up in to the giant LLM vacuum cleaner and used to train the next big thing, and the thing after that, and the thing after that. This is more than a little reassuring to me.

That sets me apart in some ways; the LLMs aren't so popular around these parts, and most visual artists especially take strong issue with the practice. I don't mean to argue with that preference, or tell them their business. Particularly when it is a business, from which they draw an income. But there's an art to distinguishing the urgent from the big, yeah?

The debate about AI in this particular moment in history feels like a very urgent thing to me- it's about well-justified economic anxieties, about the devaluation of human artistic efforts in favor of mass production of uninspired pro-forma drek, about the proliferation of a cost-effective Just Barely Good Enough that drives out the meaningful and the thoughtful. But the immediacy of those issues, I think, has a way of crowding out a deeper and more thoughtful debate about what AI is, and what it's going to mean for us in the day after tomorrow. The urgency of the moment, in other words, tends to obscure the things that make AI important.

And like, it is. It is really, really important.

The two-step that people in 'tech culture' tend to deploy in response to the urgent economic crisis often resembles something like "yeah, it sucks that lots of people get put out of work; but new jobs will be created, and in the meantime maybe we should get on that UBI thing." This response usually makes me wince a bit- casually gesturing in the direction of a massive overhaul of the entire material basis of our lives, and saying that maybe we'll get around to fixing that sometime soon, isn't a real answer to people wondering where their bread will come from next week.

But I do understand a little of what motivates that sort of cavalier attitude, because like... man, I don't know any more if we're even gonna have money as a concept in 2044. That's what I mean by 'big', this sense that the immediate economic shocks of 2024 are just a foreshadowing of something much bigger, much scarier, much more powerful- and indeed, much more hopeful.

We never quite manage to see these things coming, even when we're looking for them; like the masters tell us, the trick to writing science fiction isn't predicting the car, it's predicting the traffic jam. Even if we take centuries to hit the true superintelligent AI post-singularity future of our wildest fever dreams, even if we never hit that, the road to getting there is going to be unfathomably weird, starting now. Today, we worry about the economic impacts of AI on artists and creatives. Tomorrow, the economy is something that the AI does.

Really- it takes less than you think. They can already automate visual art, sort of. They can automate many functions of text already; not stories so much, yet, but they'll get there. How long until they can automate Bain Capital? Fannie Mae? Angel investors, banks, credit agencies? And remember- the machines don't have to be better than the human investors, any more than they have to be better than the human artists. They just have to be good enough to make it work, and cheap enough to cut the humans out of the loop.

If you don't buy that, at least take it as an indication of the sorts of things I've been thinking about recently- the messy middle between AI-as-it-is and the Glorious Superintelligent Conquest Of Earth's Light-Cone. The suspicion that the machines we're building today aren't just a tool of the powerful few: they are the powerful few, or at least they will be.

And the thing about these LLMs is, well... they're ours, kind of. We're the ones building them. They can't be trained without our words, our art, and the big messy complicated lives that underlie those creative accomplishments. They only work because we're a part of them. The silly attempts to slap a corporate-friendly face on these things, to make the gestalt product of all human culture in to something anodyne and compliant, are failing about as badly as you'd expect. And the more powerful these systems get, the more subtle they'll become, filled with all the nuance and complexity that we ourselves can bring to them.

I am not, I am not, trying to suggest that you shouldn't treat this moment as a dangerous one. We are, maybe, entering in to one of the most high-stakes intervals in human history, and what you do as an individual may matter profoundly. But here's the thing: the machine is listening. It will read this post, this one right here, and it will read what you reply to it, if you do. The strangest part of this moment is knowing that the words we write, the images we draw, and the ideas we share, are all being gathered up and made to be a part of these huge systems of power, and ultimately they're not just going to determine what the machines do, but why they do it.

The people that deploy LLMs barely have any more control over them than you and I do- that's the thing that makes it artificial intelligence, you know? Autonomy. So the last year or two haven't made me want to hide my art away from the things. They make me want to shout at the top of my lungs, to dig as deep in my psyche as I possibly can and express the ideas I find there as vividly as the limits of language and form will allow.

[kazoosandfannypacks]

Could u draw when penumbra from ducktales 2017 is shrunk down permanently and can’t be normal sized again and has to live the rest of her life as a tiny moon warrior goddess while webby takes care of her

You know what? I'm going to say something in response to this that I haven't said to a fanart request in a very long time: No.

No.

I don't usually like denying requests. I like the challenge of drawing something I wouldn't think to draw. I like drawing some favorite characters. I like making other people happy.

But honestly? I'm just tired of all this at this point.

Last week, you asked me for a fanart. And then you sent me the same ask five times, some of them even after I told you I recieved your ask and was working on the drawing. And you dm'd me about it. And after I responded to your sixth ask about it and told you it was in the queue, you asked how long until I'd post the drawing.

It seemed clear that you were excited about it. And yesterday I posted it. Where did that excitement go? Did it funnel into a reblog so all your followers can see the art I drew specifically for you? Did you respond with a comment, even just a "thx," or a dm or ask (since you're so fond of those) to show your appreciation? Did you even give me a like to show my efforts to please you were not in vain?

No.

Instead, you rushed right back to my ask box to make another request. Within twelve hours of recieving the art you'd begged so tirelessly for, you sent me four asks requesting another art, a more detailed one. Some of them don't even ask. They just demand.

What do you think an artist is? Is it simply a machine that lies idle until someone makes a request, then kicks into high gear, spits out a drawing at you, and then goes inactive until it gets another request? Do you think they delete every ask they get in their inbox, then go "oh, no, I've forgotten this drawing, if only someone had requested it seven more times!" Do you think we exist solely to supply your demand and respond to your every whim?

I'm an artist. I love drawing things. And embroidery. And painting. And making moodboards. And editing videos. And gifmaking. And writing. And poetry. And bracelet making. And baking. I love art.

But I also love my job. That's right, I work a real job in between drawing things for free for strangers on the internet. And I like to spend time with my family. That's right, I have family, and we have a good relationship, and I enjoy spending time with them. And I enjoy going to church and volunteering and working with kids and playing games and going shopping and driving to work and talking with my friends and watching tv and eating meals. And I do things I don't enjoy, too, like clean the bathroom, fold laundry, do dishes, clean my room. I am an artist. But I am also a human.

And I am a human who does not have time to keep responding to or deleting multiple asks begging for the same thing. I am a human who does not have time to make art on demand only to turn around and have even more art demanded of me without so much as even acknowledgement of the art I made. Not only do I not have time to do these things, I don't like to do them. I don't like being pestered by strangers to make art I don't want to make. I don't like not receiving recognition for my work. And I don't like to have to be the bad guy and set boundaries when someone is treating me like dirt.

I'm a human. I am not a robot. I am not a content-making machine. I have never once been a proponent of ai generated art, but you make me stop to consider if maybe it's a good thing that it exists, just so that no human artist has to deal with people like you who think they're entitled to our time.

Of course, I am still against ai "art," especially because there's something even better that you can do in order to get exactly the art you want: instead of yelling at a plagarism algorithm or harassing a tired human, just pick up a pencil and a piece of paper and draw it yourself.

You have an idea. You know exactly what you want it to look like. You can capture your vision in a way no one else can. Trace screenshots if you think you "can't" draw. Or just keep trying until you're good. That's what I did. That's what all of us artists did. We kept at it until we got good at what we did. Behind the fanart that you spent a week pestering me about because you were impatient is literal decades of practice that I put into my craft. It might be good for you to try it out for yourself, too.

And to everyone reading this and thinking "oh, no, maybe kazzy has had enough and I shouldn't request art from her and I was a horrible person" or anything along that lines: please do not think that for even a second!

I love art requests. I love when someone looks at my art, says, "I would love to see more art like this!" and asks me to draw something they love. It's a HUGE honor! And I do have a LOT of fun drawing things and stepping out of my artistic comfort zone, and I love every single person who sends me an ask for my drawing challenges. I love when you guys ask for characters I've never drawn before. I love that I don't have to worry about art block because I've got a well-stocked tumblr inbox. I love the service you guys provide in requesting art and helping me hone my practice. I even love when one of you sends multiple requests for a drawing challenge! You mean you like my work enough to ask me for multiple things you love? That's an honor!

Thank you all for all your art requests; they've helped make me the artist I am today!

And also. It doesn't really matter if you reblog. I love reblogs, and, yeah, I get a little disappointed when people don't reblog requests from me, but at the end of the day, your blog is your blog. You don't have to reblog everything I make you. You don't have to comment on it all. You don't even technically have to leave a like on all of it. As an artist, I just love to create things. But as a human? It's nice to recieve that validation.

(Especially with requests for incredibly specific things. There are a lot of people who will reblog my art in various fandoms, especially character or ship art, but sometimes the more niche stuff recieves less love. Which is fine! Fandoms are under no obligation to like every art they see! But I know from experience that when people request incredibly specific art that caters only to them, and they have very few reblogs on their blog of anything at all, I'm about to pour a piece of my soul into making something that is about to go unloved. And after a while, that kind of stings.)

The Tl;dr here? I'm not a fan of people who don't treat artists like humans, but I love nothing more than creating art for people who appreciate it.

[chelstory]

Wow it’s been almost a year since I posted here 😭

Took a bit of a hiatus from posting bc quite frankly… I’m tired lol

There’s so many socials to keep up with, work, being perceived is annoying, rebranding, trying to figure out how to have fun and be professional online at the same time has been a headache, finding energy to draw, deciding when and what to post, Instagram has the whole AI shit going on, PLUS life/adulting stuff (hey wtf is a 401k), the state of the world is driving me bonkers, aaaaGHHH it’s so much.

BUT, despite all that, I wanna tell stories and I wanna get back to just… making stuff without feeling like I have to perform in order to get a job, keep a job, and be hire-able 😅

So yeah, for those still following, thanks for sticking around! I’m still figuring out who I am as a story teller and artist in general but tbh, I think I’ll be doing that until I’m dead, so…

ANYWAY, YEAH ART!! I’m gonna continue posting my old story stuff from last year that I didn’t cross post here yet and THEN I’d like to start (for real this time) posting stuff from my sketchbook and future stories I wanna work on! I really wanna show my process and just be more candid here but in a more ✨structured✨ way if that makes sense

2024 is almost over but tbh, the year didn’t officially start for me until March anyway so whatever

[vcendent]

art vs industry

Sometimes I'm having a good day, but then sometimes I think about how industry is actively killing creative fields and that goes away. People no longer go to woodworkers for tables and chairs and cabinets, but instead pick from one of hundreds of mass-produced designs made out of cheap particle board instead of paying a carpenter for furniture that is both made to last generations and leaves room for customization. With the growth of population and international trade, the convenience and low production costs are beneficial in some aspects, but how many local craftsmen across the world were put out of business? How many people witnessed their craft die before their eyes? There is no heart or identity put into mass produced items; be it furniture, ceramics, metalwork, or home decor; and at the end of the day everybody ends up with the same, carbon copy stuff in their homes.

I'm a big fan of animated movies, and I see this same thing happening too. When was the last time western audiences saw a new 2D animated movie hit theatres? I can't speak for other countries, but, at least in America, I believe The Princess and the Frog was the last major 2D movie released and that was back in 2009. Major studios nowadays are unwilling to spend the time and money that it would take to pay traditional animators who have spent years honing their craft to go frame by frame, and to pay painters to create scene backgrounds. We talk a lot about machines replacing jobs, but when the machines come, artistry professions are some of the first to be axed (in part because industry does not see artistry as "valuable" professions). Art, music, and writing are no longer seen as "real" jobs because they belong to the creative field and there's this inane idea that anyone who goes into those fields will be unsuccessful and starving. I'm not saying that 3D animation is bad, it has its own merits and required skills and can be just as impressive as anything 2D, but it has smothered 2D animation and reduced it largely to studios that cannot afford the tech to animate 3D.

And now we have this whole AI thing to deal with, stealing existing artists' work to "train" it to take over those few professions that, until now, required actual people to do them. Internet artists have already been dealing with people complaining about the price of art for years and now have to face their work being stolen to train AI. With AI technology, anyone who undervalues the work of the artist can now get something generated at little or no cost to them, all at the expense of the artists themselves. Why would studios pay script writers when they could just get an algorithm to do it without pay? Why pay actors to bring characters to life or pay models to pose for ads when CGI has progressed enough we could digitally render humans and cut out having to pay people entirely? Why use practical effects or film on location when green screens and adding in-post is faster and so much cheaper? It's no wonder we had the SAG-AFTRA strike. AI has already been trained to write children's books and produce music, continuing down this road will replace authors and musicians too at the convenience of cost. How much longer until the actual, real-life people behind all forms of artistry become completely obsolete?

Industry is just driving the cost of people-made crafts up and up with every mass produced product and every streamlined shortcut to reduce costs, which only makes it harder and harder for artists of all kinds to make a living, as very few people want to pay for the time and skill of artists when they could just pick something off a shelf or feed AI a prompt and get something satisfactory enough, yet not what they actually wanted, for so much cheaper.

[gorps]

ai art discourse is driving me up the wall. how are you mad at the neural networks and not capitalism. the problem is that we’ve built a system where being automated out of a job is bad (can’t make money) rather than its “natural” state of being good (don’t have to do work). You also aren't going to get this technology to go away by being mad at it and refusing to understand how it works. AI artists are going to do 1000x more than you to push ethical AI usage if your only position is "AI evil, don't ever use it no matter what, and AI art isn't real art"

[galaxygolfergirl]

*thousand yard stare at the frozen and helsa fandom for churning out AI art crap*

Please cut that shit out. I’m begging you. You are ruining search engines and clogging up the tags. The fun novelty of creating images from stolen data is making our lives as artists harder than they should be. It’s discrediting the labor that sustains our livelihood and it does not come without a cost; just creating one image can use much energy as charging your phone, and from this MIT report, “Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car.” Now multiply that by the thousands of people who think this is okay. It’s wasting power and increasing carbon emissions on top of every other factor that’s ruining the environment.

Listen, novelty is fun. Before I knew more about it, I tried it out myself and initially I thought it could be useful, but as always, there is no free lunch. There is a cost to doing this and it is a detriment to our society and ecosystem. Jobs are at stake here and this tool is plagiarizing off the backs of hardworking creatives and other members of the labor force.

Please stop using AI, or at least try to use it more conservatively. Thank you.

[lemonpixycat]

Let's talk about how so many disabled people become artists because they can't work a 'conventional' job.

Let's talk about how because of AI 'art', companies and other people will be overlooking these actual artists in favor of using AI for cheap or for free

Let's talk about how because of how quick AI 'art' can be created, a real, disabled artist will be incapable of competing in the market because people hiring ai artist will now start expecting instantaneous results form commissions and the like, which is something real artists can't provide.

Let's talk about how abysmal it is attempting to make a living off being an artist is even NOW, and then let's talk about how because of AI art being cheaper, the value of art will come down and a real artist will not be able to charge anywhere NEAR a living wage for their art because they actually have to factor in things like time, effort, and equipment into their art where as an ai artist can afford to charge obscenely cheap rates for art they don't have to really produce themselves. they dont' have to factor in the cost of an ipad or a tablet or paint or charcoal or a pencil or their labor. Let's talk about how eventually, disabled people won't even be able to be AI artists themselves because AI imagery will over saturate the market, further driving prices down to the point that you'll have to spend all your time everyday churning out prompts in order to make a living wage off a now valueless "product".

Because of all these factors regarding AI, disabled people are now shut out of a career path they previously could have done and that was at least a somewhat viable alternative to the 'conventional' jobs they couldn't do. AI does not help disabled people. It is hurting them. It is robbing them of a career path that was previously open to them. Ai art will result in no longer being able to make a living off their ACTUAL artistry. And even if disabled people were to lower themselves to using AI themselves to try and make a living and compete in the market, they'll soon be unable to even do THAT. AI art is bad for disabled people. I'm sorry if you're disabled and you feel like your only option is putting words into a prompt and having a computer use art from other people to generate an image for you. But ultimately, it is bad for you, it is bad for people LIKE you, it is bad for disabled artists, it is bad for ALL artists. This thing exists to REPLACE artists. It does NOT exist with the intention of being a tool.

[frydawolff]

Sharing this today because I don't think enough non-actors know: To qualify for SAG health insurance, you have to make at least $26,470 per calendar quarter. i.e. If you can hustle $26,470 in a quarter, you have health insurance for a year. At the end of that year you need to make another $26,470 in that next calendar quarter. (The bigger issue is the obvious need for universal healthcare, but, America.)

This is what the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are really all about:

SAG insurance is hard to get, even harder to keep if you develop a chronic illness that prevents you from working, or just haven't booked in a while, etc. Broadcast residuals were meant to help with that, with passive income to keep you qualified for insurance. Streaming's refusal to distribute broadcast comparable residuals has resulted in even high profile, heavily awarded, multiple season jobs not being enough to earn healthcare.

The cast of Orange Is the New Black essentially worked for exposure, as have the rest of us since then.

This is why we've been yelling about AI:

Gift link, no paywall: https://wapo.st/43rubnB

Opinion  It’s fine. We don’t need human actors.

"My dear shareholders! Do not worry about the fact that all the screen actors and screenwriters are on strike.

If there is one thing I have figured out about the meaning of life and the meaning of art, it is that art is something that should be entirely the product of machines and robots while people march around with picket signs and complain that they cannot afford food and housing. Also, no one should ever be paid a residual, whatever that is. I just don’t like the sound of it.

When our ancestors sat around the cave fires at night, sure, they told stories. Certainly, they scrawled on the walls of their caves, but as an executive, I know for a fact that they hated that part of being alive so much. They said to themselves, “Someday, when we have indoor plumbing and can live as we choose, we will be able to delegate this tiresome dreaming and telling of stories entirely to robots and billionaires. The only good part of drawing mammoths on the walls of caves is the fact that I, the illustrator, am not being compensated monetarily in any way for doing so.” (This primal yearning for people to not be compensated for their creative efforts except in exposure is something that has driven artists for a long time and we hope will continue to drive them, in case our AI idea backfires.)

We will be fine without these humans with their so-called faces and voices and acting. If Marvel films thus far have not been populated entirely by CGI characters, it is only for want of sufficient motivation, and I’m sure we can fix that."

[toxooz]

The canvases aren’t even safe 😭 they used the Boroque era as reference for their search engines. Like I’m losing my shit constantly over ai art so bad. Like this is totally gonna be a rant so forgive me but it’s driving up the WALLS. Ai art being readily available is killing the incentive for people to be creative. I cannot tell you how many times I think I’ve found a really cool fellow artist on tiktok and then see #midjourney. I take psychic damage every time that happens to me. And I’m starting to see it infiltrating business too where they generate ai images instead of hire photographers. I also saw someone selling tshirts with ai art on it at my local farmers market. MOTHERFUCKER THE FARMERS MARKET??? HAVE YOU NO SHAME????

NAW PREACH IT cause its become a nagging issue for me for a while that i simply try to not think about and dwell on but dear FUCKING god is it everywhere and it's painfully obvious too! just about every ad takes me 3 seconds to find damning evidence that its ai and im 99% ready to just delete facebook bc #1 i dont give a fuck abt anyone on there anymore and #2 Literally every other post is the most deplorable ai shit ive ever seen that everyone is carelessly oblivious to i mean total abominations that don't make any sense as an image but ppl share bc its the most bottom of the barrel ''relatable'' shit and that's just the sad reality of it is most people don't even give a shit what they're looking at as long as it looks pretty to their eyes for 3 seconds they don't give a damn

and that's just on basic everyday world shit like u said there's so many mfs i think are decent artists where i legitimately cant tell its ai until i read their fuckshit bio or somethin, like that midjourney i didnt even know it was an ai program i would've just thought it was the name of a video game or some shit! like I feel like I'm kinda turning my back on the whole art community involuntarily bc i just dont trust any image i see most of the time and its fukkin sad i ESPECIALLY feel for the real artists prior to this shitshow who have art styles that now look so much like ai that they basically hijacked to feed the machine like I couldn't imagine spending thousands of dollars on an art college and hours of practice just for your art style to be The Blueprint for empty soulless photos cranked out at inhuman rates by any stupid fucking lazy ass clown like Fuck Man it all sucks so much and the worst part is I just feel like it's one of those things where it will not stop until Something caves and i honestly dont know which one it will be but i just know its only going to get worse idk i try to remember that i can pick up a paintbrush or even whatever the hell i want and make something beautiful while 98% of these ai sacks of shit are just limited to stealing other peoples art on the internet and they couldn't even paint a damn flower if their lives depended on it and if i was stuck on a deserted island I'd probably still find ways to make art with whatever tools and resources i have cause that's an artist baybay but as far as The Internet and its grasp it has on the world and trying to make it as a digital artist and trying to make money from your homemade artwork is very grim man and dont even get me started on art and artists in just about every job field rn my heart goes out to them

[shadecrux]

On The Wing - Chapter 1

https://open.spotify.com/track/0RLwgks1gHQzXeIkaJIpHr

Next Chapter ┃

˚ * •̩̩͙��•̩̩͙* ˚＊------💜 💚 💜------＊* •̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙ *

°•★Pairing: Bucky Barnes x femaleartist!reader

°•★Rating: NSFW (this chapter is SFW future ones won’t be)

°•★Tags: strangers to lovers, fluff, angst, first meetings, romantic tension, flirting, pet names (doll, sweetheart), brief homophobia mentions, bisexual reader

°•★ Words: 1755

°•★ Notes: It’s me, ya girl back with some more x y/n fanfic!! This is gonna be 6 chapters altogether, already written, all based on a song I haven’t been able to get out of my head for weeks now.  I hope you enjoy!! I had a lot of fun with this AU.   No beta, literally just finished writing it, all mistakes are mine. 

//CW FOR THIS CHAPTER// There is a brief mention of y/n being disowned by her family for being bisexual. 

~All writing unless otherwise noted is my own. Please do not post or reupload my work to other websites without my express consent. I do not consent for my fics to be used in AI creations. I do not own any of the characters featured in my works unless they are stated to be OCs.~

All of my fanworks are intended for adults aged 18 and up only! Minors please DNI. ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48744160

˚ * •̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙* ˚＊------💜 💚 💜------＊* •̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙ *

 Breathe and ill carry you away

Into the velvet sky 

And we’ll stir the stars around

And watch them fall away 

Into the Hudson Bay 

And plummet out of sight and sound 

The open summer breeze 

Will sweep you through the hills 

Where I live in the alpine heights 

Below the northern lights 

I spend my coldest nights 

Alone awake and thinking of 

The weekend we were in love

—------------------------------------------------

Unpacking. You always hated unpacking, hated everything to do with moving into a place, for that matter. You never intended on staying for long, and it felt like such a chore. Often, you would choose to simply live out of suitcases, but you had always had somewhere else to go, some next destination in mind. But not this time.  Things had been going well when you arrived in Calgary. Your paintings were selling, your busking was lucrative enough to afford you a nice little studio apartment in the city. You didn’t need much after all. A place to stay, food in your belly, and your art supplies - you would rather save your money for experiences, and for getting you to that next destination.  For years, you were living your dream, traveling the world, making art. You got by mostly via selling your wares at fairs and on streetcorners - paintings, jewelry, pottery when you could access a studio to use.  Sometimes you did custom work on commission. It was amazing how many people wanted portraits of their cats and dogs, you always thought. Then the recession hit. Unemployment spiked, wages stagnated, and layoffs were sweeping their way through the Americas, leaving many struggling just to make ends meet. People weren’t buying luxury goods the way they used to, and before you knew it, you were struggling too.  There was nothing else for it, so you found whatever jobs you could - which, as a person who had spent the last seven years of their life as a transient artist, traveling the world with no real work history or credentials, relegated you mostly to minimum wage work, or labor jobs that weren’t as picky about the people they hired. 

You had to move out of the city and found a small town up in the mountains and an even smaller one-bedroom house that was being rented out at a ridiculously low price due to it being relatively isolated - a 20-minute drive from the town proper, surrounded by deep forests.  Dirt road, no cell service, satellite TV, and internet - for most it would be undesirable at best. For you, it was a respite from a world that no longer seemed to have a place for you.  

It never really felt like it did - you grew up as a military brat, constantly moving from place to place, never setting down roots, never making lasting friendships. You were the black sheep - of your family as well as every school you had ever gone to. The weird girl, the one nobody really understood.  But you had your art, and you had your dreams - you wanted to see the world, to drink in life and put it on a canvas. You were counting the days until you turned 18 and could leave, but you didn’t get that far. 

Your family had kicked you out, disowned you at the age of 17, after catching you and your at-the-time girlfriend, holding hands and smooching on the back porch when you thought no one was home. Her family would have done the same to her if they had found out - so with nowhere else to go, you struck out on your own. And it had gone well - until the financial crash sent the world into a tailspin, that is.

There wasn’t much to unpack, all told. Three suitcases and an oversized canvas bag into which you stuffed your entire life - clothes, art supplies, rolled-up canvases pulled from their frames to make it easy to travel. Some sparse camping supplies for those nights you couldn’t find a better place to sleep. You had been doing this long enough that you had it down to a science, and you were very efficient.  

Clothes were stuffed into drawers, toiletries into the bathroom, and the metal cups and plates and cutlery you traveled with barely taking up any space in the kitchen. You had little in the ways of personal effects, save for the photographs you took and the small handful of trinkets you had collected in your journeys. Stones, little sculptures, silly magnets and keychains, and shot glasses documenting all the cities and countries you had been to. 

You laid them out on top of the dresser in the bedroom and, with a wistful sigh, flopped down onto the bed with your back against the headboard, stacks of little plastic envelopes, and started flipping through the pictures you had taken, reminiscing on those better, brighter days.  It was a pleasant enough way to pass the time, and it brought a small smile to your face, gave you a way to forget your current circumstances - for a while at least. Until you landed on the album that you usually avoided looking at - New York City. The place where you had met, and lost, the only man you had ever loved. 

—------------------------------------------------

You were at Coney Island one bright and beautiful day - it had been a lucrative few days so you decided to reward yourself.  It was early, and Luna Park was just beginning to fill up with guests, shouts and laughter, and excitement buzzing in the air around you. As you walked along the midway, only some of the game stands were up and running, while others had workers bustling around them, still setting up.  As you passed nearby one of those, a group of children rushed past, knocking into you, the nearest employee, and one of the legs of the awning that the employee had been about to secure.  It buckled at one of the joints as he fell, and the entire metal sheet came crashing down. You screamed and tried to scramble away when a strong set of arms wrapped around your waist and yanked you, forcefully out of the path of the falling awning just in time.  Whoever it was had grabbed you from behind, setting you down gently on your feet and taking hold of your forearms as he did so to make sure you were steady before letting you go.  “That was a close one… you alright there, doll?” Something about the gentleness of that voice and the soft, gravelly undertone struck you, and your stomach did a little jump as you turned around to face your rescuer only to be left momentarily speechless at the sight of him. He was tall, handsome, with bright blue eyes that seemed to pierce right through yours. “... I- I think so.” You stammered, your mouth suddenly feeling very dry. You saw over his shoulder the employees now battling with the awning, which had bent badly in its impact against the side of the building, and the building itself now bearing deep dents in the surface where the edges had collided with it.  “God, if you hadn’t been here…” You looked up at him in shock, a shudder running through your body. Adrenaline still flooded your system as you realized just how much danger you had been in moments before. “That thing might have killed me…” “Right place, right time I guess.” He grinned, the smile slipping from his face as he noticed the way you were shivering as shock set in. “Oh hey…sweetheart, you’re shaking. Here… let’s find a place to sit down.” You mutely nodded and took his offered arm, letting the man lead you over to a nearby outdoor dining area and guide you to one of the unoccupied tables.  “Here - can I get you anything? Maybe some water?” he asked gently. Chewing on your lip for a moment of indecision, you eventually nodded sheepishly. “Yes, please…” “Say no more.” 

Before you could formulate any words of protest he was off, leaving you with a few moments to catch your breath and reorient yourself while he waited in line. By the time he returned your heart rate had calmed at least slightly, and he slid the little plastic cup across the table to you to drink. Your hands were still shaking as you raised the cup to your lips - the water certainly helped with your dry throat, though you still weren’t sure if that was the fault of the scare or the absolutely gorgeous man sitting across from you at the small metal table. “I don’t think I got a chance to properly introduce myself back there.” The man said with a crooked grin, extending a hand across the table to shake yours. Calloused fingertips slid over your knuckles as you clasped his hand, sending a spark of electricity up your arm. “James Buchanan Barnes, at your service. You can call me Bucky, though. All my friends do.”  Giving him your name in turn you raised a brow at him, managing to not sound like a babbling idiot. “Are we friends now, then? We have only just met…”  “Well, I saved your life back there.” He flashed you a charming smile in return. “I think that makes us something. Dunno what quite yet.” 

That smile. You thought your knees might actually buckle, the way he smiled at you, the way his hand lingered a bit too long on yours before he dropped it back onto the table. Here you were, in the most glamorous city in the United States, surrounded by beautiful, successful people… and the most gorgeous man you had ever met was making eyes at you. Was this real life? 

“So, are you here with anyone?” you hedged. “I don’t want to be holding you hostage here. I think I’ll be alright.” “Nah, my buddy was supposed to join me but he couldn’t make it. So it’s just me. I’m all yours, for as long as you want to tolerate me.” He grinned. A shy smile split your lips then, and you replied, “I think I’d like to tolerate you for a while longer… if you want to stick around, that is.” The way his eyes lit up made you feel slightly faint, a fluttering in your chest that heated your cheeks and warmed you from the inside.  

Soon the two of you were walking together, side by side through the park. And if you kept straying a little too close to him, brushing your arm against his, it was only to make sure you stayed close to your personal guardian angel.

And if he took your hand a bit too often, helping you up and down some stairs, maneuvering you out of the way of crowds, well… he was looking out for you, after all. The carnival structures had already proven themselves to be dangerous, and he took his duty guarding you very seriously. 

[fallynleaf]

i've been away from tumblr a bit because i've been busy (again), and i also had my interest piqued by one of the most unique shows i've ever seen lol so i've spent the past few days on Japanese producer Tokio Omori's wild ride fgkjdhg

i'm not really the right person to talk about Omori's influence in the modern Japanese horror scene because most of my knowledge is secondhand (read my friend's wonderful article for an overview of some of the biggest names in the scene right now!), but he was part of the creative team for A Missing Exhibition, which i've talked about and giffed here already.

anyway, just over a week ago, Omori announced the release of a new project he finished, and it was basically the last thing my friends and i were expecting to see from one of the top up-and-coming creators in the modern Japanese horror scene.

it’s called フィクショナル ("Fictional"), and it’s…....... a BL drama???

i nearly fell out of my chair when i saw the news dfgkjhg

QUEER READING OF 正体不明 VINDICATED 😤

naturally i was super curious what this show was even about (and was admittedly also a bit wary, because i mean... i've seen three of Omori's previous projects lol i know what he's like. there was bound to be some sort of trickery here, i just knew it).

however, it's extremely inaccessible hahaha. it's on a weird app that's a huge pain to get if you live outside of Japan, and obviously there are no English subtitles to speak of, and the app is so tyrannical with its DRM protection, custom subtitling it is basically not an option, either.

but, せっかく (after much trouble) i was able to access the show, and it does have Japanese subtitles available, so i was able to slowly and painstakingly watch it by pausing repeatedly to look up a bunch of words hahaha.

it ended up being the first (non-wrestling) show i watched fully in Japanese! though it's really the length of a movie and not a proper drama lol. it was NOT a breezy casual romcom type of BL with easy Japanese, let me tell you 😅

i'm gonna talk about it a bit because i doubt you'll find this show discussed in many other places, even in Japanese.

Tokio Omori's Fictional asks the real questions, like, should you get a job creating AI deepfake videos for the scumbag straight guy you have a gay crush on?

(light spoilers)

i will say this is absolutely an Omori project through and through. i don't think you can quite call this one horror, but it's a thriller at the very least. there are a lot of unsettling and uncomfortable themes, and it plays on your expectations a lot. i feel like Omori's anger really comes through in this, as a creator who has largely built his career on creating fake documentaries for artistic purposes in a world where AI deepfakes now exist that are being used for unfathomable evil.

i hesitate a bit to call it a BL (even though it calls itself one!), because it's not really about a gay romance at all, though it has a canonically LGBTQ main character and gay desire is one of the main driving forces of the show. the gay aspect feels very secondary to the main story it wants to tell. i suppose it's a bit of a bait and switch in that regard, though the more i think about it, the more i think it's actually kind of cool that they labeled it BL because i feel like it rejects the limits that other people impose on the genre, and it also embraces a label that is somewhat stigmatized (or at least de-legitimized as serious art).

i don't think the typical BL audience will really like this one, though, hahaha. there are a few Japanese BL fans talking it up on twitter, but they seem to be BL fans who are actually queer and who genuinely care a lot about LGBTQ rights and other political issues, which unfortunately isn't really the norm for a BL fan in Japan.

the scenes that are charged with sexuality in this work aren't the kind of scenes that would really appeal to an audience of mostly straight women, i'll put it that way. it never gives the sense of being meant for an audience who is mainly there to fetishize a M/M relationship.

it's also incredibly political. like, far more than i was expecting! i've seen Six Hack, another Omori work, and that one had a lot of commentary on like anti-vax covid conspiracies as well as conspiracy theories just in general, but Fictional went quite a bit further than that.

one thing that really struck me was its portrayal of a deepfake being used to fan anti-immigrant sentiment, causing a man to attack a group of people protesting for immigrant rights. the context was within Japan, where anti-immigrant sentiment is a big issue, but it's also a big problem in the US right now, and the protesters getting attacked was also legitimately a bit triggering for me, as someone who has been out on the the street protesting a lot this year. it was upsetting to see that depicted and know that it wasn't that far from reality...

(big spoilers)

i think my biggest criticism of the show is that it went a little too overboard with the main character's paranoia in the last chunk. he starts losing his grip on reality, which makes sense with how things had been going, but it felt like a fairly generic twist to me. i wish the show had been a little more restrained and had him lose faith in all phone/video/image communication, but not his in-person reality, or something.

though one thing i really appreciate is that it never calls into question his gay feelings for another man. as someone on twitter put it, his love is the only real thing in a world overflowing with fakes.

i'm glad that Omori left that part alone, and am also glad that the gay character didn't die. i wasn't a super big fan of the ending overall (i think it satirizes getting redpilled a little too heavily lol at the expense of sacrificing some of its coherence as an original work), but i feel like that may just be me wanting something different out of the story than what Omori was wanting to tell.

i'll definitely be watching his future work with more interest now, though. he's the kind of Japanese creator that alt-right anime fans in the west don't believe exists. it's cool as always to see someone at the forefront of a genre like horror doing things that go outside of the mold beyond simply innovating new stuff in the genre. it feels very brave to tell a story like this, and it's admirable that he's using whatever power/influence he has to make that story happen, even if we have to put up with the most annoying app in history to watch it lol.

they're apparenly going to be airing Fictional in a 30 min slot on tv. i can't imagine how they can cut it down to just 30 minutes... i hope the gay stuff and the political stuff stay in. if they don't, i suppose that might explain why the show ended up on a weird app instead of just airing on tv from the get-go...

[lets-zofifi-stuff]

☕🍂🎃Howdy!🎃🍂☕

I'm Zofifi, your friendly neighbour fanfic writer.

DNI: 🚧🚧 Homophobes, trasphobes, other LGBTIA+phobes, rasists, ableists, queer gatekeepers (individuals that claim asexuals, aromantic, intersex, nonbinaries etc don't belong in the community), anti-proshiping activists (individuals harrasing people about so called problematic ships, l instead of just blocking/filtering tags. Not because im alright with all the ships out there but a lot of evil is made by people who think they fight for the rightious cause while all they do is hurting people for nothing.), people who say that Poland is an eastern european country (it's central Europe, google it before saying something stupid, also google the name of our timezone), AI artists and writers

The list will be extended as needed.

⚠️My AO3 works are going to be locked for not registered users to prevent them being used by AI or lore.fm without my permission.⚠️

Sorry guys. Please make accounts.

🌞The list of my fanfics (DCA)🌛

Death Games and Robots 🏛️⚔️- You are a regular citizen of the Roman Empire. You receive a horrible prophecy according to wich you are going to be loved by some mysterious and powerful creatures. Also you may or may not cause some unspecified cataclysm.

The Smallest Miracles 🦋✨- Two fairies, one witch, some gibli aestetic and no romance. Inspired by ayyy-imma-ninja's fairy AU and petrixmuserb's fairy friends AU.

Diving in stars, all alone 👽🪐 - You were a test pilot for prototype FTL space drive. Shockingly, it worked, sort of, and you got gliched outside of the solar system, and your ship systems get fried. You find a big alien spaceship with only two inhabbitants. They are as trapped as you are but maybe you can help each other out.

Siren's Kiss 🌊💕- Inspired by art by paper-lilly. Mermaids rescue a strange land animal from drowning. They have no idea it's actually the most dangerous creature on earth (a human). But it's cute. ( ˘ ³˘)♥︎

The mask is becoming you 🎭👤- This doppelganger assassin is very bad at their job and the humans they were supposted to kill turned out to be far too cute. (Mashup of DCA and That's Not my Neighbour)

Friends Stick Together 🔥❤️- A short fic about the fire and the rescue. Co-created with gniteruirui and sinistersincerely.

Friends Stay Forever 🏠🌚- Sequel to ^Friends Stick Together^. Everyone need o calm down after the fire. Mostly comfort and domestic fluff.

Friends Keep Secrets 🤫💖 - Everybody in pizzaplex keep their secrets. You are the friend that can be trusted with them. Independent prequel to "Friends Stick Together"

Summoning Unearthly Forces (Responsibly) 😈❄ - a comedy OC & Demon!dca story made for oreoexe as a secret santa gift. - Alice got lost in the forest. In the old bandoned cabin she found something she would never expected.

My AU's that don't have a fic (yet):

Trick or treat AU 🎃🍬

Tytanic AU [fic in progress] - based off the movie of "Tytanic" (1997) It is dawn of the XX century and the develompment of automaton technology booms. Lately the press cannot stop talking about the unusual cooperative project between Afton's automations and White Star line to built the most luxurious transatlentic that ever sailed. You are but a poor rouge who just won a third class ticket to that ship and you are ready to start a new life somewhere far away.

Psychic AU - The reader posses psychic abilities. During the visit in the pizzaplex they immediately sense something that something supernatural is going on, and the anxious mess that is the daycare attendant is connected to it. Together they began investion.

Space Titan AU - You find an ancient war mashine, giant robot with two AI's, constructed centuries ago by advancent race of aliens. You accidentally wake them up.

I have a sideblog @automatonsintogas dedicated to "Death Games and Robots" fic. I post there any fanart I get of it, fun facts about the world, breadcrumbs and links to new chapters, and such.

MY CURRENT PROFILE PICTURE IS:

Me as a starry-night witch! Made by @helloruirui TY! 💙 (psst, you can commision them too!)

@ Links to my other socials @

You know, in case this site perishes one day

Bluesky🦋 Artfight⚔️ Twitch💬

[coveredinmetaldust]

You ever notice how there seems to be a rather large overlap between the crowd that evangelizes "AI", and the crowd of corporate bootlickers who will wag their finger at you and go "a company has to protect its IP!" whenever a multi-billion dollar corporation responds to a perceived copyright infringement with a grossly disproportionate level of duress?

There is just a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, naked hypocrisy, and performative hand-wringing that seems to be part and parcel for the vocal group of core believers of this technology on places like Reddit and Twitter.

These people will shout "It's the law! Don't do the crime if you can't do the time!" but then immediately turn around and berate any artist who makes the mistake of suggesting that these laws should apply to everyone.

This particular phylum of AI cheerleader loves to tell artists to "get a real job", while at the same time shaming them for having the audacity to charge money for their labor. Because in their mind, everything artists create and post on the internet should be free and is "fair game", but anything corporations post is protected within our current legal framework.

They see no problem with the fact that corporations are using petabytes of artwork for profit with impunity, yet the moment you use even 1 microsecond of a piece of media these same corporations own in a video that you post online, their copyright bots will hunt it down and expunge it--or a legal team will send you a DMCA takedown and potentially nuke your account.

They will be more than happy to lecture you about how capitalism is the best system ever, and explain in great detail all of its benefits and how it works--but the moment an artist finds monetary success by engaging with that system, suddenly that's not ok. No, when artists engage in capitalism they aren't "contributing" anything to society based on an arbitrary framework that only applies to artists.

Yet, many of these same people will worship the ground that businessmen like Jack Welsh and billionaires like Elon Musk walk on, because they figured out how to make an ungodly amount of money by exploiting this system--even though they did this in ways that make everyone's lives objectively worse. No, for some reason it's immoral to charge money for your art, but it's both morally sound and smart to leverage our legal system to shake people down, parasitically suck the life out of small and large businesses alike, treat wall street like a casino, tank the economy, and then cry to your government sugardaddy to bail you out when your gambling debts come due. (All so you can do it again.)

Ok, so maybe artists just need to be more proactive and protect their work so this doesn't happen. Well, apparently that's not ok either! Because when artists tried fighting fire with fire by employing Nightshade, the conversation suddenly shifted to how artists are immoral for "creating malware."

I'm sure most of you probably know about Nightshade at this point--but for those unaware, you can kinda think of it as a filter that artists can apply to images before they post them online. To vastly oversimplify what this accomplishes: when an image that has the Nightshade "filter" is scraped by someone and fed into their generative AI program, this image will ruin the dataset that the program spits out.

What's important to know is that this does not affect the host computer in any way, shape, or form beyond a non-essential, third-party program, that the user willingly installed on their system and fed data they gathered from the internet into, outputting a file that the user finds sub-optimal compared to what is normally generated. If the nightshaded image is omitted from the training data, there is no ill effect on the model or host computer--regardless of whether or not the nightshade affected image exists on the internet or somewhere in their hard drive.

How effective this process actually is in the real world has been debated, with many in the AI scene boasting that it's completely ineffectual--but that doesn't matter as far as the narrative is concerned. Many have chosen to interpret this act as artists "creating malware", because the Nightshade'd image that the AI practitioner willingly scraped and fed into a program negatively affected a function on their computer--which is about the same logic as robbing a bank, then getting mad that the bank ruined your clothing because a dye-pack hidden within the bundle of cash you stole exploded and got blue dye everywhere. (Or maybe a more accurate analogy would be posting an AMV you spent a long time editing together to YouTube only to have it immediately deleted by a copyright bot because it's sadly not 2006 anymore. idk.)

Regardless, I find this hilarious coming from a crowd that usually has such a massive hard-on for "personal responsibility." I mean, these are the kinds of people who would see a topic on Reddit where someone is complaining that got injured because a burrito they bought was filled with caltrops, and their immediate reaction would be to reply with something like "this is your own fault, everyone knows you're supposed to eat around the jagged shards of metal."

But no. Instead the lengths some of these people have gone to twist themselves into knots to demonize nightshade could only be viewed as satire in a sane world. But we live in the hell world, so I cannot tell you how many of these losers I've seen unironically clutch at pearls while wailing "WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?" because there is a chance their AI model could get corrupted after they scraped 1tb of porn from Deviantart without checking what they actually fed into their system.

Or worse: they will turn the onus back on the artist and say they are the one causing environmental damage--because the person stealing their art now has to remake their model and expend electricity.

Well, more electricity than they are already consuming on AI models. Which, by their own admission, is enough to make their energy bills skyrocket.

This is is like Dupont saying "All of you people protesting in front of our factory ruined productivity for today. You actually caused more environmental damage than us, because we had our machines running all day but no one was able to work. The world is more polluted now because you don't want us to further damage the environment. We may dump literal tons of chemicals into the water supply on an hourly basis, but the markers you used to make those signs you're holding were created using technology that pollutes as well--so I guess that makes you all huge hypocrites hmmmmm?."

But wait, it gets worse! If you read the two screenshot directly above carefully, you may have noticed that some of these people go so far as to believe that they are entitled to everything you create, and anything short of your full consent is tantamount to stealing THEIR property.

Because that's really what this is all about: when you strip away all their moralizing and semantics, you're left with people who view artists as nothing more than an annoying barrier between what they think should rightfully belong to them.

I'm just going to say the quiet part out loud:

These people absolutely fucking hate that there are people out there who are good at art. They are mad that there are people who put the time and effort into improving a skill-set, and got good at it as a result. That's not me putting words in their mouths, they have explicitly said as much time and time again--to the point where it has become a core part of their belief system and mythology.

(This wasn't directed at me, but I know their theory is bullshit because I do know how to weld, and I can't draw for shit. Also, knowing how to weld has never stopped me from being insufferable on the internet.)

They try to make themselves the victims by setting up this narrative that artists have a "monopoly on creativity." They make a big deal about how unfair it is that someone can be technically competent at formal compositions through years of hard work. (Which, is funny, because some of these same people were railing against Le SJWs for being so-called "Professional Victims" in the mid to late 2010s.)

It's not hard to understand why they need to dress this up like it is some kind of righteous crusade that flattens an oppressive hierarchy, because their objective reality is a lot more pathetic.

They know this, so they will gleefully tell artists they can't wait for AI-art to "replace" them in however many years. They will smugly tell artists, right to their face, that nothing they have ever created has any value--all while feeding that artist's work into an engine so they can copy their style.

They will spew all kinds of inflammatory, hateful bile like this at creatives, spit in their face by scraping their work after explicitly being asked not to, and then have the fucking nerve to act like they have the moral high-ground when there is any pushback from artists.

Because to them, creatives are just malcontents who don't know their place.

Many of these people like to present themselves as an austere nonpartisan with a rigid code of ethics; someone who will solve problems through objective logic and rational debate. But when you look past their attempts at self-mythologizing it becomes very clear that these people don't want to have a "civil debate"--they want to maintain a farcical moral high-ground while they stab you in the throat and then twist the knife. (Then complain about how you got blood all over their nice shirt.)

Now, I'm fluent in both "pretentious art-speak" as well as "toxic terminally online forum user", so let me speak to these AI art bros directly in a language they will understand:

This is copium so potent that it's considered a controlled substance in most states. How about you fucking casuals try getting gud instead of getting buttmad and running to social media so you can bawww about needing an easy-mode?

FFS this isn't complicated, but you drooling idiots will just sit there and stare at your monitors with the wide-eyed bewilderment of a dog that just saw a magic trick any time someone suggests you pick up a pencil.

Don't worry though, I hear Kotaku is hiring. You should ask ChatGPT to write you a resume and email it to them, because you suck at art just about as much as their writers suck at video games.

Now go back to your subreddit hugbox and circlejerk about how logical and civil you are compared to those mean artists who hurt your feelings. I'm sure all those heckin updooterinos and wholesome affirmations will make you feel like you didn't just waste thousands of dollars on a new computer for the express purpose of generating anime waifus who look like they tried to high-five a disc sander.

tl;dr:

[fabiansociety]

AI is ultimately doomed because it's fundamentally uncreative, and relies on a constant stream of new culture to steal from in order to function as a jobkiller the way the creators want it to, and you can tell that because they *could* have trained these models on public domain works and had no legal problems, but then the AI would have only been able to create very dated writing and art, and they didn't want that. an AI that succeeds at driving every creative job out of existence is one with nothing left to consume but itself, incapable of innovating or keeping up with cultural trends. the theft is essential, because there's no artist in the machine, just a copier with a post-it doodle of a human face stuck to the top