New Year, New Eve

Hey besties (⁠ ⁠ꈍ⁠ᴗ⁠ꈍ⁠)

This is a certified Yapping post, so for those that do not give af about the finer details, here’s the TL;DR:

Starting in February I shall resume posting my art publicly outside of Patreon, 1-month after initial Patreon release (except for some full renders). I won't be posting to Deviantart or Twitter/X for the foreseeable future. Also I caught the ol’ stomach flu shortly after Christmas so this month will be starting off a bit slow until I get my momentum back, ty love u xoxo.

Right, so I haven't been posting or showing any signs of life on any of my socials for many months now. The reason is because being on social media as a digital artist had gotten way too hostile for me to muscle through. This isn't to say I personally was being swamped with drama and hate. In actuality, I always received far more positive feedback than negative, even during the turbulent times that we're in now. My ape brain just has this nifty little trick of latching onto and obsessing over the few negative comments I do receive, and that paired with the ever-increasing occurrence of other well-established artists being harassed over the (extremely alleged) use of AI made me gradually step further and further away from social media until I just stopped engaging entirely. 

I’ve scarcely shared my thoughts on gen-AI before when it first made its buzz around the general art community, but I never really got into the nitty gritty of where exactly I “stand” amidst it all. So I’ll lay a big heaping pile of it out in this post here.

It's not a secret that I've dabbled in generative AI before. My usage of AI has ranged from using certain aspects of generated images as a point of inspiration or reference, to completely drawing over top a generated image and making it my own. The few illustrations I've done that have involved gen-AI in some shape or form I’ve made sure to disclose in their respective descriptions along with displaying the raw generated image that served as the starting point for the finished illustration. I'm well-aware that generative AI is a controversial topic right now - for good reason. Everyone's got their own feelings and opinions on it, everyone’s got their limit on how much AI involvement is too much AI involvement, and the very last thing I want is for the people that support my work to feel like I'm trying to hide something from them. Even though I’ve included AI into my process on only a few illustrations thus far, I think it’s important to be transparent regardless. If anyone following me feels that my approach to utilizing AI goes beyond what they're comfortable with, I respect their right to make an informed decision about whether to continue supporting me.

I don't like that gen-AI exists. I don't like the grossly unethical ways in which it’s being trained and utilized. I'd happily Thanos-snap it out of existence if I could, but I can't. No one can. So if we're going to be co-existing with or even trying to compete with generative AI tech and the ocean of insubstantial crap it produces for the foreseeable future, I'd much rather that tech be integrated into a larger, human-prioritized creative process of the actual creatives it's leeching off of than to be left solely in the hands of ghouls that aren't concerned about humanity or artistic expression.

What gets to me is how a lot of the full renders I've done that AI didn't take any part in are accused by a few individuals in the public eye of being AI generated images. The moment anyone gets hit with an AI art accusation, they're assumed guilty and have a responsibility to prove themselves to the contrary. They need to make a public statement, to reveal their sketches and WIPs, to show videos of themselves actually drawing. And if they do, the goalpost moves. Their word means nothing. Sketches and WIPs can be faked. Videos can also be faked. You can post the literal work files to your illustrations only for the dispute to shift from, “This art is AI generated. You're a fraud.” to, “Your art is so uncanny and bad that it's easily mistakable for AI. Do better.” It's exhausting just witnessing this chain of events play out over and over again with the artists around me, let alone having to deal with it myself. But the longer I and many other artists have spent having to deal with false accusations, the more I realize that it really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's not actually AI. Claiming something to be AI generated is the hip new way to convey that something looks uninspired, generic, and soulless. Reframing the accusations in this way gives me a lot more to work with when trying to figure out what I could be doing differently.

I've gotten a lot of criticisms of my art over the decade+ I've been a digital artist, but I can't recall any of those criticisms being that my art looks uninspired, generic, or soulless. The sentiment has only been cropping up after gen-AI became a thing. That plus the fact that I've yet to catch any AI accusations on my more simplistic work such as my cell-shaded illustrations leads me to believe that the problem is less me just being “bad at art” and more the unfortunate reality that art styles such as my full renders have essentially been co-opted as the crowning symbol of generative AI. It feels like a piece of my artistic identity has been robbed, in a way. Now that every gen-AI model is capable of spitting out images in the same ballpark as my own work with little to no fine-tuning on the end user’s part, the actual human-made art that AI has largely been trained on is perceived as lame, low-effort trash in kind. 

It's awful that artists now have to put up with not only their art being scraped and tossed into datasets en masse, but also a vengeful subsection of art enthusiasts that swear they can always tell what is and isn't AI. But I also need to be mindful of the fact that life is often cruel and unfair, and no amount of whining or begging or showing proof to the contrary is going to get rid of the association and the subsequent disdain supplanted into peoples’ minds. I think ultimately it'd be a lot more productive for my mental health to come to terms with the hard truth that the landscape for digital artists is changing massively, and I need to adapt if I want to continue existing within it. Some people have the fortitude to just tune out the noise and continue business as usual - I do not. I’ve struggled a whole lot with my self-worth as an artist before AI witch hunts became commonplace; It's not sustainable for my own mental well-being to be subjected to false accusations on a regular basis, to be in a constant state of “dispelling rumors” and playing defense. Something's gotta give.

Going forward, I'll be abandoning Twitter and Deviantart entirely. The direction that both platforms have decided to go in has made even visiting them a miserable experience for me, so I gotta drop ‘em. For archiving purposes, I won't be deleting any of the art I've already posted on those platforms. You'll still find me actively posting my art on Fur Affinity, Inkbunny, Bluesky, and Pillowfort. I'm not sure yet which site I'll be using as my primary for socially engaging with my audience. I guess we’ll see.

When the calendar strikes February, I'll resume posting (most of) my finished art outside of Patreon. I've come to the decision that for the foreseeable future, my fully rendered illustrations will be left up for me to decide case-by-case if I post them publicly or not. If I feel that a render I've done has a high chance of stirring up AI accusations and I don't have the mental fortitude to put up with it at that moment, I simply won't post it publicly at all. None of these decisions will be set in stone; I may change my mind on some at a later date, but just know that any Patreon post that holds the “Volatile Exclusive” tag will be kept locked here on Patreon for an indefinite amount of time. In the coming days I'll be going through old posts and updating tags accordingly.

And in the future when coming up with sketches that I intend to turn into rendered pieces, I’ll be trying to sketch out some more complex scenes - add some elements that AI notoriously struggles to replicate. Anyone that’s followed me for longer than a day knows that I enjoy rendering pin-ups. Solo character, frontal pose, one-point perspective… AI art generators churn these exact sorts of images out by the thousands, every day. It would do me some good to start pivoting away from the easy breezy simplicity of pin-ups and instead DARING 2 be DIFFERENT.

Thank you to both my patrons and those who just like to look at my art outside of patronage. I hate how hyper fixated I've gotten on the negative over recent years and the extent to which I've closed myself off from my community because of it, but the engagement you guys give to my art - whether it be a few bucks thrown my way, a nice comment or just a like on my posts - really does help to remind me that it's not all doom and gloom. I'm trying my best to find some slivers of joy in a timeline that quite frankly sucks ass for creatives, and I'm sure all of you reading this are trying your best, too. I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year's. Take care of yourselves ❤️