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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 the trouble is precisely because it's small-scale authors and publishing houses (next rung up from self-published/vanity presses). They're the ones most likely to use AI-generated cover art, and I've seen a ton of such art on Kindle books; immediately recognisable as AI art, and a bare step up from the really scrappy cover images they would otherwise use (as cheap and generic and stock as possible, and can't pay for proper graphic design).
The big houses will have their own art departments, or a list of on-commission artists they regularly use, so this won't impinge on them for a while yet. It's the small publishers and mid to low tier authors who are the clients of the small freelancer artists living from gig to gig, who are the ones most impacted by "that author who usually gets me to do a piece is now commissioning AI art instead" and are the ones making the most fuss.
And of course, when it's genre fiction, you get the purity spirals as with YA recently but even further back, remember RaceFail? The smaller the stakes, the more intense the in-fighting. A tiny (relatively) fandom like furrydom is ready to rip itself apart over a "literally who?" author and their cover art.
I’ve never understood that though. These people basically have a very expensive hobby and generally need to be told that. I would expect them of everyone else to be willing to economize especially on things that don’t matter much in the name of getting the actual writing out in public. Yet it’s exactly these people who seem the most upset by the prospect of AI covers and AI editing (I understand the pushback on AI story development and writing, as these are the point of being a writer, without which the “author” is reduced to prompter and unimportant to the work itself) when it would actually reduce their sunk costs. Having human cover art is in the hundreds of dollars range, and human editing is about $3000 for a novel-length work. AI reduces those costs to near zero which reduces the break even point for a self published book from $3500 to the cost of a maybe on the order of $300 or less for AI subscriptions. At $5 a book, we’re down from a break even of 700 books to a break even of 60 books.
For the most part, that's true for writers: even outside of the furry fandom, it's hard to beat minimum wage -- MorlockP has had three pretty successful works, and also a lot of commentary about how bad writing can pay. There's some furry writers that manage to make it as at least supplementing their income better than a minimum wage job would, but they tend to also be mixing art in (eg Rick Griffin, Rukis Croax) or riding the commission train hard (eg Amethyst Mare, Joshiah).
For artists, that's less true. There's a surprising number of people who can pull in low six figures through furry commission work, and while that's the top 1%ish of artists, that's in no small part because most artists don't want to make it a full-time job or a job at all, preferring to augment their more stable W2 income (eg Accelo) or just keep demand reasonable. The fandom is just heavily driven by artists -- while organizers and administrators are the 'kings' of their respective websites or conventions, an overwhelming majority of interest and more importantly cash moving around is driven by visual art (and comics, and games, etc containing visual art). And artists have been pushing to ban AI art in many contexts, with some success, seeing it as a direct threat to their income.
Why do hobbyist writers care what artists think, outside of cases where they're one and the same? FurPlanet's FuzzWolf commented at length a few years ago about the importance of a good cover artist, not just for quality or visibility, but because they will be able and willing to put your name out there. It's a marketing and networking expense, and even it won't necessarily break even for hobbyist writers (though FurPlanet does order and pay for commissions itself, not just in Lowd's case, and presumably isn't doing so out of the goodness of their hearts), the hobbyist writer can often get artwork that they'd want otherwise. Furry writers are often, if not always, furries themselves, after all.
In many cases, artwork that they couldn't get otherwise: many bigger furry publishers have good enough relationships with well-known artists that they can jump a commission queue or get in contact with artists that don't do open commissions at all. Lowd almost certainly couldn't have gotten that BlackTeagan piece on her own for Nexus Nine, for a few different reasons; Gre7g Luterman's deal with Rick Griffin for Haven Celestia cover art is little different, but almost certainly a benefit on Luterman's side. And for obvious reasons it's one that isn't available to any writer who even hints at using AIgen.
If it is a hobby, why throw away a good part of the enjoyment to save a couple hundred bucks, when you're spending weeks or months?
I’ll just answer for myself (not into the furry scene at all, but enjoy the process of writing). For me, I simply don’t have the excess funds to spend hundreds of dollars on a cover for a self-published book that won’t even break even. And I think that’s the rub. If I don’t have the ability to spend $300 for a cover on my book, on top of pro editing, then essentially I’m either starting a business that means that I need X sales. Most book on KDP sell less than 100 copies. As much as I want to support art, I don’t see the point of looking down on hobby writers for using AI art to cut down on expenses any more than I’d look down on a painter buying cheaper paper from Walmart. Or a musician for using electronic simulated instruments instead of hiring a band. Below a certain threshold of money, ability, and desire spending a lot of money on your hobby doesn’t make economic sense.
What I tend to dislike about a lot of writers communities is just how much they insist on essentially convincing hobbyists that they simply must spend lots of money on their novels, you simply must buy professional art and must build a web presence, and must pay $200 a word for professional editing. The vibe is “turn pro or bust”, and the way it’s sold is heavy on the bust unless you make a good income with your actual job. And I think for people who have a hobby but are mislead into thinking they have a career, this sort of thing can create financial problems for people who believe that they are the next big thing and spend money they can’t lose. And the other part is that most people are terrible judges of their own ability here. They more than likely believe they’re building a business, and that they will someday be able to quit their day job. And some of this is down to the same communities pushing the kind of “no FUD” culture in their spaces. You can’t tell someone that they’re not all that good. You can’t point out that they are breaking the rules of good form.
Time is essentially free. Webspace is cheap, and software to create pdf files is pretty cheap. If you are willing to put your expectations where the median writer ends up. Most people even if they’re traditional publishing aren’t going to make money. Most people buying covers aren’t really good enough to traditionally publish. And so, I think most people honestly shouldn’t be doing that unless they’re looking to sell enough to at least break even.
Yeah, that's fair. There's definitely an unreasonable push toward a dichotomy of toy-or-career everything, not just in the writing or arts sphere, but everywhere from electrical engineering to machinework to plastic fab to web design. I'm trying to get a post together talking about that in the context of FIRST, but it's a serious problem and undermines a lot of social behavior across a lot of fields.
I do think it's a broader issue than no-FUD; the internet has pushed a lot of fields to a point where it's reasonable to see the most impactful option is outreach, shut-up-and-multiply style, and even if some people do turn away from the Omelas that making that choice, the people inviting you in will be the ones who bite that bullet.
((That said, a lot of people who do write as a supplementary wages in the furry fandom, and in many fields like TTRPGs, don't go through traditional publishing; FurPlanet is more of a print-on-demand and storefront faciliator, along with doing some ISDN bullshit. But even though they're really operating at 50-150 counts, you'd have to do some digging to realize that.))
I think we’re largely in agreement. It’s a weird part of American hobby culture where you do anything and the expectations are to somehow monetize the product. Don’t make videos or keep a blog for fun, don’t just paint or write for your buddies, even gaming is now turning into “get good, and twitch-stream it and try to be in esports.” I think it’s weird that almost everything has to be optimized and monetized as though “just have fun” isn’t a valid reason to do something.
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