So an artist said online that “skill is important” in an assertive tone, coincidentally on the same day as a really cool hashtag on up and coming artist trying to get more followers is happening, and it made you mad/confused. Behold yet another long ass thread:
1/ Note: skip to #7 if you dont care to catch up on art twitter stuff!
First a quick recap. A frustrated professional saw conversations from the day before on pricing and commissions and dropped serious truth saying SOME artists aren’t getting noticed because of skill.
2/ That’s not a mind blowing statement, for * some artist this is true. In fact, ALL of us have gone through that particular kind of introspection of where our skills were at any given time.
3/ However, this statement coincided with the start of a really good #NobodyArtistOb for those who wanted to grow their audiences. The hashtag had a lot of excellent up and coming talent, already working artists, and a lot of students who I’m excited to see their progress!
4/ The timing of each conversation created an odd flurry of misunderstandings, with good and bad faith discussions. On the artist’s part, she herself got crazy abuse which was completely unacceptable . I joined in, with a subtweet on the first post and got caught in the whirlwind
5/ However, seeing a lot of the conversations take place first hand, you get to dig past the anger and misunderstanding, and witness the real reason why this hits home for so many. A lack of opportunities and feeling helpless in an extraordinarily competitive industry.
6/Some folks just wanted to be angry. But others wanted answers to so many important questions. How do I gain followers? How do I get opportunities? All this skill talk, but how do I even know how to tell where I am?
7/ So I wish to dedicate a moment to try and answer some of these questions to the best if my ability, Note this isnt a definitive guide, or even an extensive one, just a basic starting point. Get ready for a lot of mf reading:
8/ Are followers important:
9/ How to gain a following:
10/ What does skill have anything to do with this?
11/ What if I’m already skilled enough? Or wait, am I? How can I tell?
13/ Thats it. Some of the information that was missed and lost from days of anger on twitter dot com. To be fair this is a hellsite and we all know it ;) . But good things and conversations can and do come out of it!
Just please know that most artists, however fancy they-
14/ may seem, went through similar struggles and have walked the path you are on. You’re so welcome to disagree with their advice and thats fine too, but know that disagreement does not need to be coupled with abusive language. Even if that seems to be the way of this hellsite 😩
15/ Anyway thats all for now. I won’t be too responsive here because I got a ton of work to do, but I sincerely hope this was helpful. And it not, thats cool, ignore it and find your own way! :p
1/ Hi @Oprah . This event will be the first time many people will get info on Generative Ai. However it is shaping up to be a misinformed marketing event staring vested interests (some who are under a litany of lawsuits) who ignore the harms GenAi inflicts on communities NOW 🧵
2/ With your power and reach there is an opportunity, even a responsibility, to show the world the real ways GenAi harms the public, harms creatives whose work these models solely depend on to function at capacity and so on. Harms seen from the inception of the tech to its output
3/ Let’s start with its inception. GenAi models rely on vast amounts of data (in the billions) This data is acquired by use of web crawlers who take whatever data it can find.
We won BIG as the judge allowed ALL of our claims on copyright infringement to proceed and we historically move on The Lanham Act (trade dress) claims! We can now proceed onto discovery!
The implications on this order is huge on so many fronts!
2/3 Not only do we proceed on our copyright claims, this order also means companies who utilize SD models for and/or LAION like datasets could now be liable for copyright infringement violations, amongst other violations.
The whole thing is worth a read. I love these parts!
3/3 Some motions got fully dismissed, like DMCA (which respectfully i dont agree with but it is what it is). But we are now potentially one of THE biggest copyright infringement and trade dress cases ever! Looking forward to the next stage of our fight! ✊ storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
1/ Apple “Intelligence” is here and 0 questions of “where does the data come from?” to be seen in press.
APPLE is trying to shove a huge privacy risk and tech that screams scraped off the internet without consent to the public. So here’s a list of potential data sources 🧵
2/ The thing is Apple has been hinting to what these models could be or where the data comes from for quite a bit.
For starters let’s take a look at one potential lead to where the data could come from.
3/ DataComp is a project from researchers of various universities, but also more urgently from researchers at Apple and LAION (yes. LAION) to build an even bigger version of LAION, using the same exact common crawl web scraping practices that LAION had.
1/6 Everything that makes the internet feel wonderful and open, where creatives shared their work freely, these wonderful works are now being stolen and extracted by tech execs in a rush to train genAI models that mimic those wonderful creators.
2/6 Honestly, I’m not convinced any ToS really can hold because of the uniqueness of this scenario in so many ways. For starters companies want to claim Section 230 protections so they’re not responsible for user content, but at the same time they want to own that user content?-
3/6 Secondly, how this tech uniquely consumes our creativity to function and its massive impact to creatives industries is unlike anything that has come before. I really don’t believe any contract would have realistically foreseen this particular one sided exploitation.
1/ I really hope what @Adobe claims is true and if it were it would be a good step in the right direction. However after some cursory digging I have serious questions. Lets dig in 🧵
2/ Right off the bat, have Adobe Stock contributors given their explicit full consent to be a part of this? Did they agree to opt in? Why is there no option for Adobe contributors to not opt out? This seems concerning to me.
3/ The Firefly FAQ mentions training data. So far the explanation is that the model is trained on Adobe Stock, openly licensed work and public domain content with expired copyright. What exactly does openly licensed work mean? There must be complete transparency here.
1/ This might be the most important oil painting I’ve made:
Musa Victoriosa
The first painting released to the world that utilizes Glaze, a protective tech against unethical AI/ML models, developed by the @UChicago team led by @ravenben. App out now 👇
2/ This painting is a love letter to the efforts of this incredible research team and to the amazing artist community. This transformational tech takes the first of many steps, to help us reclaim our agency on the web, by making our work not be so easily exploited. Detail shots:
3/ So how does Glaze work?
@ravenben describes:
“Glaze analyzes your art, and generates a modified version (with barely visible changes). This "cloaked" image disrupts AI mimicry process.” Quote tweet below.