#I hate this whole subscription hellscape | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shinxistudio · 2 months

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Studio Thoughts 2024MAR01

I've been thinking a lot since first finding out about the MidJourney deal Tumblr is taking. I've been wanting to make this post for just as long. (This sounds ominous, but it's not.) (Cut for a giant wall of text. Massive rambling.)

I don't know what to do. I've made an infinite number of new accounts across all the different social media I can find. I had to make a sheet to keep track of all the different websites I've joined. The thought of trying to post and maintain 20 accounts minimum to cover myself depending on where people flee to is overwhelming. I'm already averse to updating the accounts I have now. It takes too damn long as it is. (I need to set up PostyBird for the love of god. It doesn't work on a lot of mainstream sites, though.)

I want to share my art, but I don't want that to mean that I'm giving up my rights to it so some fuck can shove it into his dataset to create images and act like they're superior to something made by a real human and the human experience. I've opted out of the 3rd-party sharing option that they gave us, but I know that doesn't mean anything without proof. If they were giving data over that they shouldn't have from private conversations and password-locked blogs, they're not going to give a shit if someone toggled a setting. The whole issue with these datasets is the lack of consent to begin with, so why would they stop Now. I don't even know why they plan to pay Tumblr for the data in the first place because how much of it has already been scraped before they decided to tie it up in a bow for them?

I hate that people just parrot "Nightshade and Glaze!!" as if they're not open-source software that the tech bros can reverse engineer with the available coding. (As well as being easy to remove/get around in the first place.) Not to mention the stupid amount of processing power to use them, if they even work on the type of art you're putting into it in the first place. Even if they worked for your art, they're not accessible to everyone. That's not fair to artists who don't have or can't afford the highest-end PC parts. And even if they Worked to prevent AI it would only be a matter of time before they Didn't, like the constant fight UBlock is having with blocking YouTube's new coding to prevent ad blockers.

I'm just tired. I'm tired of feeling that the modern internet hellscape is just not meant for artists because the algorithms expect you to post as much as possible in order to get seen. I'm tired of artists finding a place to settle only to feel the need to move again and again because they just want their work and themselves to be respected. I miss old DeviantART when it was still a giant hub and community for artists instead of the shell it is today. I still see a lot of people still posting when I check in every now and then.

I don't know what the answer is, because I know data scraping for generative models isn't going away. I can only hope that it cannibalizes itself into hot garbage by taking in generated images that weren't tagged as AI. I would love it if all the wild shit people post on here could make the dataset completely unusable.

At the moment it looks like the only thing I can do is continue to watermark my art heavily and post low-quality versions. I've never had a large enough following to worry about art theft, but I can't control an all-consuming bot scraping everything.

I've been toying with the idea of making my own website and it's seeming more and more appealing. I've seen that you can make your own Patreon-adjacent subscription setup and have a pay-to-access feature. I don't know if that could help prevent scraping or if there are methods to get around that, too. Can bots scrape Patreon itself?

I'll need to update my LinkTree with all the other hundreds of sites that I'm on I guess. I was hoping that this long-ass post would help me come to some sort of conclusion or peace. I think I just gave myself more work to do. I also feel bad that my only other text post here is so hopeful, only to be slapped down immediately in this one.

TLDR: I'm gonna keep posting but like, I'm Not Gonna Like It. MidJourney Sucks. Tech Bros Suck. Ya'll can eat my entire ass.

#shinxispeaks

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