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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 think this is more of an oversocialized, cancel-culture-inflected anger at AI art for taking jobs away from (furry, in this case) artists and writers, and less a genuine aesthetic preference against AI art.
We should just display the last thread's comments in the new thread, that should just be a bit of code I think.
It's not a question of the amount of code. This is the exact type of feature that will quickly turn into a clusterfuck if you don't carefully think through how you want it to work.
Do you mean a technical clusterfuck or other kind of clusterfuck? If the former, you'd want to check that everything still worked first, but it'd probably be fine and if not fixing it is easy. If the latter ... how? That we have weekly threads at all instead of just toplevel posts is mostly a historical accident, and then i guess trying adapt to reddit's weaknesses.
A clusterfuck for the developer as they take a stab at implementing it, but as the feature is not well-defined they implement it in a way that does not quite do it for the users, and they gets swamped with follow up requests to adjust it. But a user experience clusterfuck, performance issues, or weird bugs are not out of the question.
Right now the forum has a pretty clear hierarchical structure. You have posts, and comments. Comments belong to posts, or to other comments. To render a thread, you get the body of the post + all the comments you can chain up to it. So to get what you want:
We need to define a relationship between posts, so the next week's thread knows where to get the previous thread's comments from. That's not really a biggie, but it means we're altering the database, and for me that automatically takes us beyond the "just a bit of code" territory.
Ok, we can link posts now. We should probably find a way to automate that for the Culture War thread, otherwise we'll have to wait for a mod to show up, and link the threads together (and to let them do that, we need to add that option to the mod interface which is also work).
Ok, the posts are linked, how are we displaying the comments? Are doing "get me the top X comments from the previous thread so this one isn't completely empty, and have them be pushed out by new comments once they arrive"? Don't like it, users will be confused they saw a comment in a thread, but it disappeared after a while. Ok, how about "append all comments from previous thread, no matter what"? A lot clearer, and easier to implement, though I'm going to bet you'll have at least some people thinking "wait, I'm sure I clicked the new thread, why am I seeing old comments here?". Alright... so we can add some border with a "starting here, you are viewing the previous thread's comment" sign.
Gee, I sure hope the comment submission form only needs the unique parent-ID, and does not rely on the post-ID, or that it will be easy to pass both IDs down to the page template without causing mixups.
Finally, are we really really sure this is how we want it to work? We are not going to get anyone asking "wow, this is cool, but what would really be cool, is if it worked in a way that is superficially similar to the end-user, but would rely on completely different assumptions from the data structure / logic side".
Lol. "Checking if everything still works" is it's own task, and best done by a completely different person.
On one hand it's not rocket science, but it's not something you'll put together in 15 minutes either.
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