I think everyone on tumblr should be allowed their unnecessary, extremely inconsequential discourse topic of choice, but i will never be over people on here making whole masterposts on the etiquette of reblogging fanart

Valid criticisms of AI, or at least the way it's used:

- Just like any tech that can automate work in the professional sector, AI can have alarming implications for workers, especially in the current economy, including independent workers in gig economies for whom we may have an even harder time demanding a support system

- The amount of incredibly personal content in training databases really solidifies how dire the situation is with datamining on the internet today and buying products built with this kind of extensive, unmitigated datamining is pretty questionable

- There are many, very easy ways to be a complete fucking asshole with AI, from forgery to spite fine-tunes to maliciously flooding commission markets where one outright shows disdain for the community outside of how much money they're willing to spend, and the corporate developers seem to be content to encourage that crowd

- Social media culture is already toxically obsessed with instant gratification and things that look polished and professional, and AI has the potential to play into that

Not valid criticisms of AI:

- "The training data is copyrighted" - any copyright framework that bars usage as transformative as AI training from qualifying as fair use would do FAR more harm to small-time artists than it would prevent; do you want to get sued for drawing a similar pose to a Disney poster because they suspect you may have referenced from it? Do you want to go back to the Anne Rice days with fanart and fanfiction? Because that's what tightening up restrictions against transformative work to that extent will open up.

- "It's literally just sampling, copy-pasting chunks of pieces that already exist in the training set" - it's literally not. This is just straight up misinformation.

- "It's not Real Art, it's uncreative, there's no such thing as a creative use for it" - way too subjective to keep presenting as a fact, what little of it is objective is demonstrably false (see the number of people using it as a meditation on data and history, and many disabled people using it to preserve their ability to create), and if you claim that something needs to meet a minimum standard of creativity to be Real Art then I can name a LOT of manual illustrations that don't qualify either

- "No one actually NEEDS it as an accessibility tool, look at this famous artist who painted with their feet and this one who painted with their mouth and this one who forced themself through miserable pain every day, if art isn't worth suffering that much to you then you don't DESERVE it and what do you mean there are people who can't even move THAT much" - holy inspiration porn, Batman!

- "Well then if you really well and truly CAN'T draw on your own at ALL, just commission people!" - ah, yes, because what disabled people famously always have in surplus is money, and what we famously love more than anything in the world is having to rely on other people for every aspect of our own self-expression

- "It's going to REPLACE REAL ART, all the physical media companies and art tablet makers are going to GO OUT OF BUSINESS because NO ONE WANTS THEIR PRODUCTS ANYMORE, NO one cares about ANYTHING in art but the end result except ME and the other REAL artists, AI is going to DESTROY SOCIETY, even KIDS are NEVER going to want to draw for REAL anymore, the ENTIRE CONCEPT is DYSTOPIAN and we need to BURN THE TECH TO THE GROUND TO SAVE SOCIETY, my ingroup and I are the ONLY people not too stupid and sheeplike to fall for this VIOLENT DESTRUCTION OF ALL THAT MAKES US HUMAN that will DEFINITELY succeed in destroying art FOREVER" - ....yeah sorry if I don't sound like I'm taking you seriously when at this point you're just buying into blatant trad RETVRN bullshit to validate your discomfort and it's horrifying, STOP THAT

What Is This?

Basically, it's a space to put my AI art character/item/place designs on with a bit of (non-AI-written) microfiction, all under a CC0 license for anyone to make fanwork of.

If you make said fanart, put it under the tag of #prometheusclay, and I'll reblog it! Simple as that.

Basically, the giak iscreating AI art blorbos and stories behind them and boosting those who draw those blorbos. That's the long and short of it...

Well, but the long-and-long of it is past the break tho, gimmee a moment...

Dispelling Some Misconceptions on AI Art

Before I get to the reason for this blog existing, I may as well clear up a few misconceptions about AI art.

-It is not an automatic collage machine, it does not hold any of the images it scans but rather learns "rules" from them on how to "find" an image within white noise, guided by a prompt, like an artist scribbling with their eyes closed on the page and trying to then make a picture out of the lines there.

-The databases used do not actively scan to "steal" art, they more or less try to find everything on the internet and just winnow out the worst results. We're talking on the level of "Books about television being categorized as televisions" or "logic trees being categorized as trees" here.

It's hilariously indiscriminate is what I'm trying to say here, and the pool is huge, we're talking in the hundreds of millions, it's more akin to a search engine like Google than deliberately scanning for art to "steal."

Hell, from what I've heard they weren't even trying to go for artistry, they were going for photorealism, this caught them off guard!

-It does not constantly scan the internet for "new" art, the program is "fixed" with how it's been trained. The dataset is what it is, set in stone the moment it's trained, putting images in your gallery to "jam up the gears" of it won't work.

-The nature of the huge sizes required for databases and the differing copyright laws between nations make the idea of a model training on just PD/CC material extremely difficult if not impossible

-While some AI art programs are behind paywalls/leashed to corporate overlords, there are others like Stablediffusion that are completely open source and free to use if you can access as system to run 'em!

-Just writing a prompt to get an image is not the only way in which AI art can be used, there are other means of getting it to work such as img-2-img (Where it uses an existing picture as the "base" alongside the prompt), outpainting (Where it paints "out" from an existing image to expand it), combining different parts from different iterations of an image, or all of those in succession even!

-"Raw" AI art is legally public domain (And should stay that way IMO for various reasons) and, while there's no direct legal precedent for it, using img-2-img on non-PD-images or ones you don't own is pretty much the same legally and morally as tracing from it.

So ask permission, or better yet, don't do that.

-A lot of AI artists are also traditional artists, who're trying to combine their skills with this new, interesting medium.

Actual Issues With AI Art

This is not to say that there aren't problems with AI art, which I'll list here too:

-The possibility of traditional concept artists being economically displaced by megacorps using this rapidly advancing field, enabled by the current bloated monopsony power of megacorps to set standards (Go read the book Chokepoint Capitalism for more on that)

-The possibility of this destroying the commission economy for small independent online traditional artists, already precarious due to years of internet gentrification and everyone else's lack of disposable income post-'08-crash, and with it the pipeline for new traditional artists.

-The data privacy issues inherent in the data scraping of the training process, because the issue is significantly more a data privacy issue than a copyright one.

-The fact that there are models trained on this public data that aren't Open Source and are stuck behind a paywall, such as Midjourney and DallE-2, which is infuriating and should be changed

-The legion of techbro assholes who actively cheer about the idea of traditional artists losing their jobs and not needing to pay traditional artists to make their images...

...BTW if you do this, I hate you and I don't want you around.

-The deeper philosophical fears of what it means for specific creative processes deeply important to creators to potentially be marginalized via automation in the name of efficiency

-The fact the field is advancing so rapidly we have no idea when it'll plateau enough for traditional artists to figure out their position in this landscape.

So, Why Are You Doing This?

Because, in my notice, one of the things AI art is really bad at is duplicating character designs and giving them narrative context (Given how most AI writing has been pretty bland at best so far).

That may change in the future, but for now, I think it's a thing traditional artists can do that AI can't, and I think it's a good thing to build community around, something radically open inspired by stuff like Fanpro or the SCP Foundation or The Fear Mythos or Jenny Everywhere if you're familiar with those.

Not just to provide free blorbos, but to boost small artists who're doing stuff with said blorbos, in a symbiotic relationship. Because I ultimately want traditional artists and AI artists (Those with ethics at least) to have a sense of solidarity.

We love art, we hate what the megacorps are doing to it, and I think we should stand together; because copyright law won't save us; the Hammer of Ludd won't save us; we will save us.

And, if you'd like to join us, I will point out, we have a Discord server and a code of ethics.

Here's a quandary I've suddenly found myself in: where do you stand on writers deleting their own works, fanfiction or otherwise? I've had this happen to me on more than one occasion - I go to look for an old favorite and find it's since been deleted from whatever site I read it on.

On the one hand, I'm inclined to think that, "Sure. The author wrote it, it's their call. I don't own the work - I certainly didn't pay for it. It's their decision, even if it's disappointing."

But at the same time I can't help but consider the alternative - if I believe in death of the author (and I do), that an author's work fundamentally isn't solely theirs once it's been published, posted, etc., then it also seems wrong to have a work deleted. Stories aren't the sole property of their creator, after all.

But then I circle back. D'you think there are different obligations between authors and readers and the works being made in fandom space? I know if I had bought a book and the author decided they wanted it back, I would feel pretty comfortable telling them no, given I'd paid for it and whatnot. But that's a different world from fanfic and fandom space generally.

So. You're insightful Clyde, I'm curious as to what you'll have to say here (and to all y'all thinking about it, don't flame me. I haven't decided where I stand here yet - haven't heard a good nail-in-the-coffin argument for or against yet).

Val are you a mind reader now? I’ve been thinking about this exact conundrum the last few days!

(And yeah, as a general disclaimer: no flaming. Not allowed. Any asks of the sort will be deleted on sight and with great satisfaction.)

Honestly, I’m not sure there is a “nail-in-the-coffin argument” for this, just because—as you lay out—there are really good points for keeping works around and really good points for allowing authors to have control over their work, especially when fanworks have no payment/legal obligations attached. In mainstream entertainment, your stories reflect a collaborative effort (publisher, editor, cover artists, etc.) so even if it were possible to delete the physical books out of everyone’s home and library (and we're ignoring the censorship angle for the moment), that’s no longer solely the author’s call, even if they have done the lion’s share of the creative work. Though fanworks can also, obviously, be collaborative, they’re usually not collaborative in the same way (more “This fic idea came about from discord conversations, a couple tumblr posts, and that one headcanon on reddit”) and they certainly don’t have the same monetary, legal, and professional strings attached. I wrote this fic as a hobby in my free time. Don’t I have the right to delete it like I also have the right to tear apart the blankets I knit?

Well yes… but also no? I personally view fanworks as akin to gifts—the academic term for our communities is literally “gift economy”—so if we view it like that, suddenly that discomfort with getting rid of works is more pronounced. If I not only knit a blanket, but then gift it to a friend, it would indeed feel outside of my rights to randomly knock on their door one day and go, “I actually decided I hate that? Please give it back so I can tear it to shreds, thanks :)” That’s so rude! And any real friend would try to talk me out of it, explaining both why they love the blanket and, even if it’s not technically the best in terms of craftsmanship, it holds significant emotional value to them. Save it for that reason alone, at least. Fanworks carry that same meaning—“I don’t care if it’s full of typos, super cliché, and using some outdated, uncomfortable tropes. This story meant so much to me as a teenager and I’ll always love it”—but the difference in medium and relationships means it’s easier to ignore all that. I’m not going up to someone’s house and asking face-to-face to destroy something I gave them (which is awkward as hell. That alone deters us), I’m just pressing a button on my computer. I’m not asking this of a personal friend that is involved in my IRL experiences, I’m (mostly) doing this to online peers I know little, if anything, about. It’s easy to distance ourselves from both the impact of our creative work and the act of getting rid of it while online. On the flip-side though, it’s also easier to demean that work and forget that the author is a real person who put a lot of effort into this creation. If someone didn’t like my knitted blanket I gave them as a gift, they’re unlikely to tell me that. They recognize that it’s impolite and that the act of creating something for them is more important than the construction’s craftsmanship. For fanworks though, with everyone spread around the world and using made up identities, people have fewer filters, happily tearing authors to shreds in the comments, sending anon hate, and the like. The fact that we’re both prefacing this conversation with, “Please don’t flame” emphasizes that. So if I wrote a fic with some iffy tropes, “cringy” dialogue, numerous typos, whatever and enough people decided to drag me for it… I don’t know whether I’d resist the urge to just delete the fic, hopefully ending those interactions. There’s a reason why we’re constantly reminding others to express when they enjoy someone else’s work: the ratio of praise to criticism in fandom (or simply praise to seeming indifference because there was no public reaction at all), is horribly skewed.

So I personally can’t blame anyone for deleting. I’d like to hope that more people realize the importance of keeping fanworks around, that everything you put out there is loved by someone… but I’m well aware that the reality is far more complicated. It’s hard to keep that in mind. It’s hard to keep something around that you personally no longer like. Harder still to keep up a work you might be harassed over, that someone IRL discovered, that you’re disgusted with because you didn’t know better back then… there are lots of reasons why people delete and I ultimately can’t fault them for that. I think the reasons why people delete stem more from problems in fandom culture at large—trolling, legal issues, lack of positive feedback, cancel culture, etc.—than anything the author has or has not personally done, and since such work is meant to be a part of an enjoyable hobby… I can’t rightly tell anyone to shoulder those problems, problems they can’t solve themselves, just for the sake of mine or others’ enjoyment. The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately is because I was discussing Attack on Titan and how much I dislike the source material now, resulting in a very uncomfortable relationship with the fics I wrote a few years back. I’ve personally decided to keep them up and that’s largely because some have received fantastic feedback and I’m aware of how it will hurt those still in the fandom if I take them down. So if a positive experience is the cornerstone of me keeping fics up, I can only assume that negative experiences would likewise been the cornerstone of taking them down. And if getting rid of that fic helps your mental health, or solves a bullying problem, or just makes you happier… that, to me, is always more important than the fic itself.

But, of course, it’s still devastating for everyone who loses the work, which is why my compromise-y answer is to embrace options like AO3’s phenomenal orphaning policy. That’s a fantastic middle ground between saving fanworks and allowing authors to distances themselves from them. I’ve also gotten a lot more proactive about saving the works I want to have around in the future. Regardless of whether we agree with deleting works or not, the reality is we do live in a world where it happens, so best to take action on our own to save what we want to keep around. Though I respect an author’s right to delete, I also respect the reader’s right to maintain access to the work, once published, in whatever way they can. That's probably my real answer here: authors have their rights, but readers have their rights too, so if you decide to publish in the first place, be aware that these rights might, at some point, clash. I download all my favorite fics to Calibre and, when I’m earning more money (lol) I hope to print and bind many for my personal library. I’m also willing to re-share fic if others are looking for them, in order to celebrate the author’s work even if they no longer want anything to do with it. Not fanfiction in this case, but one of my fondest memories was being really into Phantom of the Opera as a kid and wanting, oh so desperately, to read Susan Kay’s Phantom. Problem was, it was out of print at the time, not available at my library, and this was before the age of popping online and finding a used copy. For all intents and purposes, based on my personal situation, this was a case of a book just disappearing from the world. So when an old fandom mom on the message boards I frequented offered to type her copy up chapter by chapter and share it with me, you can only imagine how overjoyed I was. Idk what her own situation was that something like scanning wouldn’t work, but the point is she spent months helping a fandom kid she barely knew simply because a story had resonated with her and she wanted to share it. That shit is powerful!

So if someone wants to delete—if that’s something they need right now—I believe that is, ultimately, their decision… but please try your hardest to remember that the art you put out into the world is having an impact and people will absolutely miss it when it’s gone. Often to the point of doing everything they can to put it back out into the world even if you decide to take it out. Hold onto that feeling. The love you have for your favorite fic, fanart, meta, whatever it is? Someone else has that for your work too. I guarantee it.

So take things down as needed, but for the love of everything keep copies for yourself. You may very well want to give it back to the world someday.