I have tried my hand at art a few times. Never really got good at it. Keeping focus on that was just…not where I could find fun. I was always more into building the stories! And then once I got into consistent RP, well, that was kinda that. That was more fun!
Fortunately, there’s plenty of artists out who will draw things for you for money in furry, and I’ve obviously taken great advantage of this over time.
Now the art was always fun for me, but once I got over myself and started posting it online, that was fun too. To get an audience, to share at least portions of my stories. Keeps me motivated and makes me feel I’m not just screaming into the void. I actually am in the process of going back and re-scanning all the physical artwork to re-upload; I understand image presentation and file preservation far better now, and the upload limits on FA have increased greatly over the last 20 years.
But in the last few years, the rise of NFTs and then AI have been a problem. With NFTs, one of my commissioned pictures was turned into an NFT as part of a XCOM pack of NFTs on OpenSea. The creator said it was to draw attention and promote the series, but strangely, neither I, nor Shiro, the artist, was contacted for permission. I own the OCs, and Shiro owns the art. (I can’t speak if Firaxis was contacted but I’d wager they weren’t). I tried to get it removed and failed; Shiro had more luck getting it taken down once I reached him.
A few years later, AI came out and obviously that just ate the internet. After Glaze and Nightshade came out, I’ve started using those to try and protect the work, because I respect the artists who do art for me and don’t want their stuff to be stolen and pureed into slop. But that led to people complaining the work was “Low rezz” which may have been because the settings were too high; at the time I didn’t have an NVIDIA card and so using these programs took about 6 hours per piece on CPU, so I was often stuck with whatever came out. I’ve fine tuned my process, so the alterations are less noticeable, and I now have an NVIDIA card by fortunate coincidence, meaning it only takes a few minutes to run it.
However, I noticed recently that the Glazing process can alter the image in other ways. In particular, I noticed a particular image I got was different colors.
One of these is glazed. You can see how the colors aren’t quite the same! And this makes me question if I am going to continue. On one hand, I want this stuff to be protected from theft. On the other, in at least some cases, this may tangibly alter the colors of the reference materials, and that may have knock-on effects as I get more art; there’s already been problems with errors getting repeated. And at least some artists I work with upload the art themselves directly, and I wonder then if me Glazing it helps at all. Worst case it might allow them to reverse engineer?
A pox on AI.
-Arrow