project-revise

[project-revise]

Regarding the future of this blog

tl,dr; I don't feel like I'm in a place where I'm actually ready to share the stuff I'm working on yet, and the state of my mental health is making posting art and ideas online more anxiety-provoking than it's worth for me.

Also, AI art scraping(since Tumblr is getting in on that now...) and everything associated with it is a headache I don't want to deal with until I have observed the way it affects the online art world going forward.

I don't want to leave my old works online until I'm ready to decide whether I want to play the game going forward now that the rules have been fundamentally changed.

(This is why we can't have nice things.)

So, my mental health hasn't been in a great place since last year. It's been getting harder and harder to create art at all, and for a few months now I simply haven't created much of anything at all.

Just having this blog exist and knowing that I haven't been posting to it has been a source of stress for me.

The fact that Tumblr is now working on stuff related to AI art scraping isn't helping at all. Fun fact: AI related bullshit is why I didn't leave my deviantART gallery up when I left the platform! I came here to avoid that, and now that it's here too, I'm even less enthused about trying to do much on Tumblr.

It's not the only reason I'm reluctant to maintain much of an online presence right now, but it is one of many. I don't want my janky WIPs hanging over my head years from now for whatever reason, I don't want to keep having a stake in an online setting in which data scraping and personal privacy violations are gleefully the norm, I don't want my mental health to continue suffering... I want to step back and reevaluate how things have changed since I first started using the internet nearly 17 years ago and then decide what to do going forward.

I don't plan to stop creating altogether. I still want to write and illustrate a story when I'm feeling better. I'm just not in a place where I can handle posting my art or ideas online right now; even if I were, I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that whatever Revise and its characters could be in the future, it's not currently in a place where I'm comfortable sharing it.

And for the sake of clarity: my primary issue with AI art technology is the lack of artists' consent to having their images used in third-party data sets. It's how the tool is being used by some people that frustrates me; it's the same frustration of experiencing art theft turned up to a scale of 11 and right now it's hard to tell exactly how things will change going forward.

Right now, that extra stress is the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's gotten to the point where I'd frankly rather not share my art in public online spaces at all.

If sharing thoughts on my project while it's still a heavy work in progress means that it could get stolen or that the image of the end result will be negatively impacted, then I'd rather keep it private until I'm actually ready to share it in a more complete form.

Am I being needlessly paranoid? Probably.

But the fact remains that posting art online stresses me out and after giving it some thought, I've come to the conclusion that for me, it's just not worth it. Not right now.

Thank you to those of you who have actually expressed interest in my work; it means a lot. But for now, I need to step back. Maybe in another time in another place, I'll be able to share my works again - for now, it's goodbye.