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Notes -
A Furry Cancellation
Mary E. Lowd, aka Ryffnah, has been removed from the Furry Writer's Guild, dropped by her publishers, and bounced as a Guest of Honour from the Oregon convention Furlandia, one week before the convention started. Not one of the biggest furry writers, or as skilled as someone like Tempo Kun, Robert Baird, Rukis Croax, or Kyell Gold. She has had had some success in out-of-fandom pieces in Baen, and her Otters In Space series was more normie-friendly than even other SFW writers (and even some normie anthromorphic authors). That must take some effort: what did she do?
Lowd has been open and explicit about her use of AI image gen, likely driven both by her husband's work in the field of AI research, and more seriously by the economics of the matter. To be fair, the FWG policy was officially published in January of last year, and unofficialy well-established for some time before; FurPlanet doesn't really do policy, but their stance has been just as open and explicit for nearly as long. There's some smoke-
filledfree backroom management that Happens for furcons, and I expect Lowd will find more than one or two doors has closed, here.Businesses have policies reflecting their principles or interests or both, so it's not a huge surprise it came to this.
The interesting bit's that the next-to-last editions of her works had conventionally- or conventionally-digitally produced art, some by pretty well-known artists like BlackTeagan. Emphasis on had: as common in the book industry, the cover art belonged to her publisher; it may well fall off the planet outside of private collections. The current replacements aren't great, though it's not clear if that reflects the artistic limitations of Lowd's tools or her time crunch. She previous sold her newest books at convention tables with nice stickers marking the ones with AI art, and that's going to be a lot less common moving forward.
And she's not alone.
Of the exceptions I gave a year ago, e621 has officially shoved any AI-gen to the e6ai subsite, and while Weasyl hasn't yet updated its policies, it has updated its practices. Outside of AIgen-specific accounts on twitter or servers on Discord, it can be hard to find the stuff. If you're a furry, you can avoid seeing AI art without even trying!... er... labelled AI art. Forget the awkward questions about how increasingly wide varieties of games integrate it into their graphics pipeline, or the not-so-clear division from more advance 'brush' tech to some uses of AI-gen: the people coming up with the policies don't know how the tech works. They may never know anything other than Lowd's oh-god-I-gotta-get-a-new-publisher-whatever-works pieces, even to recognize it.
Which is one potential end to the story, and to many stories, and a quiet one. Yet at the same time, it's an utterly frustrating ending: all of the worst fears of economic impact on lower-tier artists or of unlabelled AI spam overwhelming sincere creation, all the lost opportunities for conventional artists to focus more of their time on the parts of art they love or dedicated AI-genners to explore types of media that just wouldn't be practical for conventional artwork, all come true... and no one cares.
Frequently I was met with incredulity here when I suggested that there were people (besides professional artists themselves) who cared about whether art was AI-generated or not. At least now we're starting to gather empirical evidence that yes, there are people who care.
Sorry I'm a bit confused here, are you saying that this has already come to pass or are you offering this as a hypothetical?
Because it hasn't really come to pass yet, at least not completely. People are still making money as professional artists and selling commissions online. AI has definitely impacted the market, but artists are still making money regardless. In fact the number of graphic design jobs on Upwork has increased since the release of DALL-E 2 and StableDiffusion.
We haven't really unlocked the full potential of current image gen models (in terms of market disruption) because there's still a decent amount of friction in the process. The average non-specialist isn't going to mess around with running a local model, training custom LoRAs, using ControlNet and inpainting... it's still involved enough that it's reasonable to outsource the process to someone else. There needs to be an absolute idiot proof freemagicartbutton.com website where you communicate in pure natural language (instead of prompt-ese) that anyone can use for requests of arbitrary complexity and get good results every time. Then we would truly know how many use cases AI art is really fit for. It might just be a "mere" engineering challenge to get us there using current models.
Edit: Uh, you might have been able to generate more discussion by waiting ~12 hours and posting this in the new week's thread?
I don't think it's already come to pass, or even that it'll be some clear demarcation between going to happen and has happened, but it seems the likely result of netrunnernobody's hypothetical, where :
We're clearly not there right now, but it's definitely plausible, and maybe the timeline is pessimistic on one end or the other. Yet to actually resolve the conflicts and culture wars, the fighters would have to accept everything they wished for at the cost of even mentioning quite a lot of what they really wanted.
I've seen that story bounce around a few times, but I'm not sure it's avoided the streetlamp effect. 'Jobs on Upwork' makes sense as a metric, but only because there's not much better visible data -- in addition to some number of these jobs revolving around, they're also long-been a saturated mix of a wide variety of roles, for which 'creating art' isn't all of it and might not even be a lot of it. More critically, even the more optimistic uses of AIgen would drop the price-per-job, either by reducing time investment or at least lifting some tedium, which could leave as many 'jobs' on the tables from Upwork's perspective, but far fewer artists able to live off them.
I don't think we're at the point where the average manager puts together something in Midjourney, then bills a rando freelancer a pittance to
launder the corp's usefine-tune the piece, but if we were, it'd still look pretty good from Upwork's metrics.Admittedly, I can't find better data, so I still have to recognize it.
Eh... outsourcing can remain, specialists can remain, and the market for artists can still fall apart. If a specialist exists that can output thirty times the speed that a conventional artist can, it might even pay better than the thirty people doing the same work previously combined... but it's going to mean thirty fewer artists in that field.
Yeah, that's fair. I'm not sure this is really worth a ton of discussion, though, and not just for the reasons I didn't quote netrunnernobody's full hypothetical in the starting post.
Then again, the other post I'm ruminating on now is "Against Hyper-Dunbar Thinking", so maybe I'm just over-privileging the 'scream into the void' side of internet discussion.
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