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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.
Whenever I hear about the latest "scandal" about the use of generative AI in artwork, I'm reminded of how, in 1989, The Abyss was disqualified from the Best Visual Effects category in the Oscars because the effects were CG. We're going to look back in ten years and wonder what all the fuss was about.
Same reason Tron was snubbed in 82.
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