cara #
whoever in the art circle most likely already know the existence of this post. how i feel about this? well... nothing special really.
i have to be honest: it would have been better for my mental health if i don't give any attention to attention-seekers. the unfortuate reality is that angering someone (or maybe a group of people) is the easiest way to gather attention. tiktok already shown us how extremely desperate people can be just to get a little bit of "validation".
my honest response to whoever scraped all of my artworks is just "and?". like, what are the gonna do with this? what do they gain from scraping them?
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they gonna train image generators from those? there is a limit before those models become mass copyright violation machine. not trained long enough and those can only produce slops.
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finetuning? what do they gain from finetuning? a chance to harassing me? well i can just keep ignoring them, what can they do?
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to show them that they are more superior? try asking them to do some small adjustments on newly generated images. there is a reason why low level developers are still employed, otherwise we would be writing python and javascript for the linux kernel by now.
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to take my job? i am a professional rice farmer. good luck.
but if i have to be honest, i have been treating drawing as little hobby that i do when i am bored after long session of programming. professionals in the industry might have different take than mine, but i am not a professional artist, which is why i don't really care when people scraped my artworks. in fact, i like to license them under creative commons attribution-sharealike, not to give those ai-bros a chance to scrape my artworks, but to give people permissions to mess around my works and turn it into something wonderful.
there is a reason why i've been using licenss like mit, apache and gplv3 for my projects. these licenses give user the freedom to run the software for any purposes, share the software for anyone to use and alter the software in however they want. with cc-by-sa licenses, i am doing the same thing but for artworks (because software licenses cannot be used for artworks). i don't like ai-bros training their models on my artworks, but i also don't want to put insane amount of restrictions to the point where someone would be scared of extending my artworks.
ultimately, i've decided that the latter one is more important. i have decided that we should be giving people a chance to "uncook" themselves.
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by licensing artworks under cc-by-sa, i am effectively allowing people to use my works. this way, we can reduce the number of generated slops on the internet. like, if generating slops is more expensive than just using cc-by-sa artworks, isn't it better to use cc-by-sa artworks instead?
giving people the permissions to use the works ahead of time is better than waiting for them to ask for permissions. if you know the psychology of average introverts, you should know that they are (sort of) afraid of asking around. in this case, cc-by-sa is the perfect license for them to build their world on top of mine.
i know ai-bros and corporations are going to use my artworks in their training dataset, but i would just treat that as little unwanted side-effect. they can't profit if people are uncooked.
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i have been actively "luring" ai-bros into giving drawing a try. the chance is definitely low, but i want them to understand why people still love drawing in the first place. if it is about making a lot of money then im sorry, there are much better jobs out there. if it is about having fun then i will try to show them that the process of drawing is way more fun than just pointless prompting.
me explaining my "techniques" in some of my bsky posts is also me attempting to give people some insights on how to achieve my art style. i am extremely happy when someone actually read those explainations, applying those "techniques" and enjoying the process. like yeah, trying to copy my style is one thing, but i think enjoying the process is more important. it's just that... no one ever acknowledged those little explainations... aw :(
now they could just do the bruteforce approach, but in the world where our average attention spans keep dropping every day, bruteforcing is how they got tired real fast. there is a way to raise the average attention spans again, but it must starts with the goal that's quite within their reach first.
my approach to these ai-bros, as you can see, is on the, let's say, more on "inviting" side, so much so that someone wanting to label me as "ai-bro", but i'd like to see them as victims of corporations. and with my attempts at "uncooking" them, i hope they understand the true value of arts and why artists exists in the first place. you can say that i am playing a game of tug of war: from one side, i am pulling the people towards me, and from other side, the corporations are pulling people towards them.
art as a hobby was never about results. it was about the process that created the images the artist had always imagined. one can try prompting a model, but that's no fun comparing to the techniques on using the digital airbrushes or blending brushes. i draw in some specific ways because i have fun doing it, and that encourage me to keep drawing. you don't get that from prompting. people treat arts as products; i treat arts as recreational and entertainment activities.
oh and also, did you know that glaze and nightshade are actually based on the same technology powering stable diffusion? shocking! and it consumes just as much energy as generating a single image too (might be even worse, since the team behind glaze and nightshade refuses to let people optimize the models so they can run on low power devices). which is why i don't use glaze and nightshade in the first place. glaze has been defeated through the usage of blur filter before, so not only we wasted energy, we also wasted our time. ouch. that blur exploit has since been patched, but nothing stopping companies from hiding their bypass tech, so who knows, maybe they figured out another way?