#ai art is TAKING AWAY JOBS

[messiambrandybuck]

Because I keep seing it on my dash, here's a reminder:

It Does Not Matter if it including a special interest/hobby/media. AI Art is Not Art and We Do Not Support It. We Do Not Interact With It. We Ignore it and don't let it profit/continue.

#ai art is TAKING AWAY JOBS #ACTIVELY #Supporting it even in the *smallest* ways is still supporting it #we Cannot be allowing exceptions #aidan talks #aidan rants

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

#every time someones like ''AI will replace u" im like. u will have to fucking KILL ME #there is no replacement here bc i am not filling a position. i am just writing #and the writing is what i need to be doing #writeblr #this probably doesn't make sense bc its sooo frustrating i rarely speak it the way i want to #edited for the typo wrote it and then was late to a meeting lol #i love u people who mention my typos genuinely bc i don't always catch them!!!! :) it is doing me a genuine favor!!! #my friend says i should tell you ''thank you beta editors'' but i don't know what that means #i made her promise it isn't a wolf fanfiction thing. so if it IS a wolf thing she is DEAD to me (just kidding i love her) #hey PS PS PS ??? if ur reading this thinking what it's saying is ''i am financially capable of losing this'' ur reading it wrong #i write for free. i always have. i have worked 5-7 jobs at once to make ends meet. #i did not grow up with access or money. i did not grow up with connections or like some kind of excuse #i grew up and worked my fucking ASS OFF. and i STILL!!! wrote!!! on the side!!! because i didn't know how not to!!! #i do not write for money!!!! i write because i fuckken NEED TO #i could be in the fucking desert i could be in the fuckken tundra i could be in total darkness #and i would still be writing pretentious angsty poetry about it #im not in any way saying it's a good thing. i'm not in any way implying that they're NOT tryna kill us #i'm saying. you could take away our jobs and we could go hungry and we could suffer #and from that suffering (if i know us) we'd still fuckin make art. #i would LOVE to be able to make money doing this! i never have been able to. but i don't NEED to. i will find a way to make my life work #even if it means being miserable #but i will not give up this thing. for the whole world.

[exeggcute]

sorry to say it but the way certain netizens with humanities backgrounds talk about "STEM bros" is exactly as circlejerky as the way holier-than-thou engineers trash people with art history degrees but I don't think the former group realizes how much they are Not making astute social commentary with their potshots. which if you think about is not a good sign for us B.A. havers lol

#did a double take when a bunch of people said that tech guys only care about generative AI for art and writing. which is atrociously false #this is how I know you don't know a single tech guy because only recently did they all stop getting on their knees for github copilot. #and now only like half of them do. #even the CEO of NVIDIA keeps talking about automating away programmers' jobs... which obv he's saying to keep stock prices up but still!

[selamat-linting]

dear lord help, the anti ai art people are starting to target people who made realistic reference painting

#im trying to be nice so badly rn #because a lot of my friends are artist and yes ai art could take away their livelihood #and its bad esp since most of them rely on art because they survive on the job market #but somehow the most anti ai art advocates for stricter copyright laws #which could destory fanarts and fanfics while letting big media properties thrive #and they always talk about how ai art is bad and should be banned because its soulless and talentless #a completely worthless discourse that ends up hurting people #whose art gets stolen and copied the most by ai #you petty bourgeoisie luddites are deeply unseries #textpost #disc horse

[1980ssunflower]

oh god

#vent #i feel like im going to throw up my mom is just telling me to learn how to work w ai art programs since by the time im her age #ai art is going to completely take over all art jobs #and i need to learn that since thats all art is gonna be apparently #if the world really gets to that point id fucking kill myself why would i want to live in a world like that HOW COULD I LIVE IN A WORLD #LIKE THAT I FCANT BREATHE ITS TOO MUCH I CANT TAKE IT #I DONT WANT THIS I DONT WANT THIS I NEED THIS AI SHIT TO STOP I DONT KNOW HOW ILL LIVE IF ALL MY ART ENDS UP MEANING NOTHING #IF ALL THE YEARS IVE PUT INTO ALL MY HOBBIES MEANS FUCKING NOTHING BECAUSE AI TAKES OVER IT ALL #i cant live in a world like that i genuinely cant i wouldnt want to live if i couldnt... really be an artist anymore if ai really just #takes my job as an artist ive been working towards #drawing is the only thing i have... #and i cant be a musician cause i fucking hate the music industry right now #its already so hard for me trying to live in this present day but if things got even further in this bullshit i dont know how id live #sorry for talking so much i just feel scared and panicked #why would my mom say this shit to me i recently told her how scared i was at the idea of ai taking away my dream as an artist

[talizorah]

not gonna lie it’s hard to be like “yay artists standing up for themselves” when you see artists fighting against machine learning and artifical intelligence but you’re a translator who has been fighting (and losing) countless battles of artifical intelligence taking over your specific field of work while no one gives a shit

#like good for you for fighting back #but i wish this energy would've been there in 2016 #and also i wish there was some nuance to the arguments ppl bring #because i've been forced to see AI as something completely neutral by advancements in my profession #meanwhile it's ACTIVELY taking away jobs in translation but no one cared! because now shit is cheap and big companies can get away with it #with outsourcing and proofreading and not hiring translators anymore #meanwhile AI is getting fed with thousands of post-edited texts that will eventually decrease quality in automated translations #WHICH WILL DIRECTLY IMPACT THE LANGUAGE WE SPEAK #and no one cares!!!! #i am . crying. #its all going downhill! #and the same thing is gonna happen to art AND WE TOLD YOU THIS #BUT NONE OF YALL LISTENED #because no one gives a shit about translators!!!!!!!!! #WE PREDICTED THIS EIGHT YEARS AGO #because it happened to us and it WILL happen to you!!!! #anyway rant over i'm done!

[noctfury]

Adobe being evil about copyright law does not magically make the current state of ai art okay guys

#those models are still being trained on stolen work and are demonstratably being used to take jobs away from real people #and people that use ai are still coming into artists spaces and comptitions and claiming the machine's work is thier own #and these are still real and valid problems with ai art!!! #not to mention ai writing and voice generation and image manipulation and the problems that arise with those #beloved mutuals please you can talk about how adobe's attempt to copyright artstyles is bad actually without the pro ai angle

[scarefox]

Really wanna barf when I read how AI art bros admit that this will end the designer industry and artists way of creating of putting time and energy into a piece of work. But it will make it so much faster and cheaper and it’s still a “creative” process lead by humans. HUMANS WHO REPLACE AN ART PROCESS WITH PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. Those are literally two different sides of the brain!

They all pretend as if this is such a relieve for artists and creative people for not having to spend so much time and effort with an art piece anymore and it’s done within minutes. When the process is actually a part of an artists life and being what they are taking away!

Do you know this popular quote among artists??

It’s true for many. The thing about artists is, that a lot of artists produce art to vent, to heal, to find inner peace, to express themselves and their emotions. Art is connected to an artist soul, to their being, to their life to their illnesses and pain. A piece of artwork ALWAYS has a part of the artist in it. Replacing this with typing code words into a program is absolutely not the same and is insulting to call it art as if that was on the same level! And on top of that we still have the whole disrespect of art theft that happens with AI art which profits from artists original pieces! Without all those already existing drawings, paintings, textures etc. that were all produced with lots of time and work and learning and pain - those damn AIs would not be able to produce anything!

Unethical as fuck but nobody cares for us designers or artists. Such bother that we are human beings with feelings and needs, who can’t spew out artwork every minute 24/7 like a machine, so better replace us with actual machines...

Sure, nobody tells you to stop creating art the human way. But why bother anymore?? Nobody will care, nobody will appreciate the work and the risk of getting your art stolen is not worth it. It’s all extremely demotivating and depressing.

#sorry rant #not my pic #the fact that AI art is borderline ableist because it takes away jobs from many mentally ill people and profits from their previous work #anti ai art #some artists would rather (literally) die than letting AI crowds take their art #anti-ai art #artists #mental illness

[intyalote]

I really do try to extend some grace to artists with understandable concerns about their ability to make a living or even less understandable concerns about their creative process being violated when their art is scraped for ai or whatever but it’s HARD when most of the time you could replace a few words and it would sound like a 19th century portraitist ranting about how ai daguerreotype is soulless mimicry created by tech bros the devil

#and of course as a photography enthusiast i am going to find it very hard to sympathize with you when you are #one step away from ‘photography isn’t real art’ if not saying it outright #like i saw a post recently that said ‘tuning parameters isn’t a skill’ #okay so tuning apertures and exposures or trying to find a good composition isn’t a skill? #only physically moving your hand around takes skill? #you’ve just chucked out half the collection of every modern/contemporary art museum as ‘not art’ good job #ai nonsense

[pointlessprism]

Merry Eggmas

#ai generated #ai “art” is theft #i'm not defending it but I'm also not taking anyone's job away with this

[discoshhtick]

Only very close to crying thinking about how it seems like all the fucking websites are thinking of launching some type of system to feed all the images uploaded onto them to an AI learning system. It's so beyond fucked that this is what artists today have to fight against, just to be seen we risk getting our shit stolen by greedy capitalist machines

#and why the fuck is so much of ai focused on stealing #why cant they put it into actually useful shit? #like fucking medicine and idk solving the climate crisis? #but no lets take everything away that has humanity in it #lets create a world where machines are the only ones with the luxury to create #when creation and art is the very embodiment of humanity #Im so fucking mad and tired #doesnt help that art school application season starts in like a week #what Im supposed to fight for my life again for a chance to get to study animation? while this is all going down? #when these fucking machines get trained to steal from us to do our job for us for less money and way less soul? #I hate this woooorld brother #I had a text post tag but I forgot

[alddente]

Love going on Etsy and seeing all the shitty AI generated works taking store space away from talented artists. Really great stuff.

#/S #remember when we were hoping AI would automate all the shitty jobs we hate doing but it’s just taking away art jobs from people. yeah.

[kiwisandpearls]

I hate people that go, “Yeah! AI “art” isn’t good and AI “artists” suck!! Oh but I still use AI, just for fun” because like, no. No no no no. You do not get to criticize AI art and then admit you use yourself for whatever reason. You may not be as bad as AI “artists” or tech bros who defend AI art from any sort criticism but your certainly not helping anyone (much less artists) by being again ai art while also using ai art.

#Oh and also #this goes for people who use chat ai or anything similar #just ask people to rp w/ you #and if you can’t just make that self indulgent fic even if you never post it #because no matter how you try to spin it #using stuff like chat ai is just steeling from other fic writers #it doesn’t matter if just doing it “for fun” your still partaking in using a tool #That has taken jobs and opportunities away from actual artists #and until rules are put in place to stop ai art from taking those opportunities and jobs away from artists #And actually help artists by having ai art to used as a tool BY ARTISTS and not to replace them #Then frankly I’m not gonna be too fond of ai art nor anyone who actually uses it #and I say this all as both a fanfic writer and an artist #anti ai art

[ms-demeanor]

Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.

[were--ralph]

why exactly do you dislike generative art so much? i know its been misused by some folks, but like, why blame a tool because it gets used by shitty people? Why not just... blame the people who are shitty? I mean this in genuinely good faith, you seem like a pretty nice guy normally, but i guess it just makes me confused how... severe? your reactions are sometimes to it. There's a lot of nuance to conversation about it, and by folks a lot smarter than I (I suggest checking out the Are We Art Yet or "AWAY" group! They've got a lot on their page about the ethical use of Image generation software by individuals, and it really helped explain some things I was confused about). I know on my end, it made me think about why I personally was so reactive about Who was allowed to make art and How/Why. Again, all this in good faith, and I'm not asking you to like, Explain yourself or anything- If you just read this and decide to delete it instead of answering, all good! I just hope maybe you'll look into *why* some people advocate for generative software as strongly as they do, and listen to what they have to say about things -🦜

if Ai genuinely generated its own content I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it, however what Ai currently does is scrape other people's art, collect it, and then build something based off of others stolen works without crediting them. It's like. stealing other peoples art, mashing it together, then saying "this is mine i can not only profit of it but i can use it to cut costs in other industries.

this is more evident by people not "making" art but instead using prompts. Its like going to McDonalds and saying "Burger. Big, Juicy, etc, etc" then instead of a worker making the burger it uses an algorithm to build a burger based off of several restaurant's recepies.

example

the left is AI art, the right is one of the artists (Lindong) who it pulled the art style from. it's literally mass producing someone's artstyle by taking their art then using an algorithm to rebuild it in any context. this is even more apparent when you see ai art also tries to recreate artists watermarks and generally blends them together making it unintelligible.

Aside from that theres a lot of other ethical problems with it including generating pretty awful content, including but not limited to cp. It also uses a lot of processing power and apparently water? I haven't caught up on the newer developements i've been depressed about it tbh

Then aside from those, studios are leaning towards Ai generation to replace having to pay people. I've seen professional voice actors complain on twitter that they haven't gotten as much work since ai voice generation started, artists are being cut down and replaced by ai art then having the remaining artists fix any errors in the ai art.

Even beyond those things are the potential for misinformation. Here's an experiment: Which of these two are ai generated?

ready?

These two are both entirely ai generated. I have no idea if they're real people, but in a few months you could ai generate a Biden sex scandal, you could generate politics in whatever situation you want, you can generate popular streamers nude, whatever. and worse yet is ai generated video is already being developed and it doesn't look bad.

I posted on this already but as of right now it only needs one clear frame of a body and it can generate motion. yeah there are issues but it's been like two years since ai development started being taken seriously and we've gotten to this point already. within another two years it'll be close to perfected. There was even tests done with tiktokers and it works. it just fucking works.

There is genuinely not one upside to ai art. at all. it's theft, it's harming peoples lives, its harming the environment, its cutting jobs back and hurting the economy, it's invading peoples privacy, its making pedophilia accessible, and more. it's a plague and there's no vaccine for it. And all because people don't want to take a year to learn anatomy.

[mortalityplays]

You need more free art.

I quit my job yesterday. Well, actually I quit my job eight weeks ago, but they finally released me yesterday for good behaviour. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do - but I do it for the wrong reasons. Working for major charities, you learn very fast that 'I want to make the world a better place' is a phrase you use to ask people for money, not to give them things. I was an ass-backwards fit for that world.

You need more free art. I need more free art. Everyone has felt the shift in our media landscape over the last ten years, away from access and towards nickel-and-diming the human experience. That lack of access is making life and culture worse for all of us, across the board. Paywalled news sites leave us less informed, attacks on the Internet Archive leave us less capable of research. Algorithmic social feeds and streaming walled gardens trap us inside smaller and smaller demographic bubbles, where we are increasingly only likely to encounter ideas that have been curated for us by marketing departments. Hasty efforts to resist AI commodification have only led to more artists locking their work away and calling for even more onerous systems of copyright law. This is not good for us.

We all need more free art.

So what am I going to do about it?

This is a question I have been asking myself for years. It's easy to sit here feeilng frustrated and thinking 'boy I hope SOMEONE does SOMETHING'. It's harder to take action in a world where I still have rent to pay. But hard doesn't mean impossible. Sometimes hard just means time-consuming, frustrating and slow. And sometimes it's worth doing something time-consuming, frustrating and slow because...I want to make the world a better place.

I'm going to do this:

1. From April 1st, I am relaunching as a freelance writer and editor.

This is the one that will (hopefully) help to pay the bills. I am a very good and experienced editor. I've worked on hollywood movies, I'm a member of the Chartered Institute of Editors and Proofreaders, I have clients who have been coming to me exclusively for more than 10 years.

Alongside bigger contract jobs, I am going to refocus on offering my services to small-press creators at a reduced rate. That means you, graphic novelists. That means you, itch and amazon writers. I want to help you develop your work, the same way I help large organisations. You can learn more about what an editor even does and what kind of pricing you can expect here.

2. I'm also going to start giving shit away. Like, constantly.

Next week I'm going to launch a new free shop. If you're unfamiliar, a free shop, giveaway shop, swap shop, etc. is an anarchist tradition of setting up a storefront where anyone can take what they like for no cost. Offline, this often means second-hand clothes, tools, furniture, food etc. Online, I am going to be giving away digital art. Copyright-free, no strings attached. It will (eventually) feature everything from print-res posters to zines, poems, tattoo flash, t-shirt designs and anything else we come up with.

Yes, I said 'we' - while this is a curated collection, it will feature work from a variety of credited and anonymous artists and activists, all of whom have agreed to give their work away to the public domain. Some of it will be practical, some of it will be political, but a lot of it will be decorative or personal. This is, in part, a response to recent difficulty I had finding somewhere that would print a one-off joke poster for a friend that featured the word 'faggot'. Enough. No middlemen - no explaining ourselves. Just print our shit and enjoy it.

I'm very, very excited about this project. I'll have more to say about it closer to the launch, but you can expect it to go live on March 27th.

2.2 I forgot to mention the ACTUAL LAUNCH GIVEAWAY

To celebrate my launch, I am going to be giving away a ton of physical prints. When I went looking for my old stock to see if it was worth setting a new (paid) storefront up, I realised I had way more old work in storage than I thought. This will be announced in its own right on Monday, but this is why I've been hinting you should go follow my Patreon.

On April 1st, I will pick 8 random patrons (from across all tiers including non-paying followers!) and mail them a bundle of assorted prints and postcards. The prize pool includes A3 and A4 posters, packs of A6 postcards, and printed minicomics that I've previously sold for up to £12 each.

You don't have to be a paying subscriber to enter - this is strictly no-purchase necessary. It is purely and entirely a celebration of the concept of GIVING ART AWAY FOR FREE.

3. PORN, YOU PERVERTS

Because I still have to pay to stay alive, I am going to be subsidising all this free art with the introduction of Fuck You Fridays. Starting from March 29th, I will drop a new 18+ short story on the last Friday of every month, over on itch.io (yes I know my page is desolate right now, don't worry I'll get there).

The first edition, Go Fuck Yourself, is about, well - telling your boss where to stick it. Julia has had it with her millionaire man-child manager, and is just about ready to let him know what she really thinks. It's a short and steamy 5k words, with a gorgeous cover illustration by @taylor-titmouse, and you can pick it up for $3 starting from March 29th.

4. ANOTHER BIG SURPRISE

I'm keeping this one under wraps for now, but April 1st will also play host to one more (FREE) launch. If you've been following me for a long time, you might remember the other significance of this date (no not April Fool's day, though that is certainly thematically relevant to this entire effort). That's all I'll say right now. Watch this space.

tl;dr: I'm sick of paywalls and career ladders. I'm literally putting my money where my mouth is. More free art for everyone and I'm not kidding around!!!

#announcement #please reblog let's make this HAPPEN