felt-texture - Tumblr blog

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all that bc i wanted to post this lol

CHECK OUT MY STICKERRRR CLUBB PATREON DOT COM/FOXFERN OR KO-FI DOT COM/TEXTURE

i promise the image fidelity is better on the actual sticker KTHX ILY

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and another thing, support artists please! its getting harder and harder to make any kind of living, for everyone but i love art so i care about that more...commenting, sharing, tipping, going to your local art fairs and shows. it seriously makes a huge difference in someone's life, every time.

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i'm coming back i guess

well, i've gone thru the journey of being angry my artworks have been given away to AI bots, realizing that if you can search up a blog or piece on g**gle: it has already been scraped.

I've been posting art on the internet since like 1998 so i've accepted that once its on the internet, there's a pretty good chance its going to be stolen for something-or-other. if someone wants it bad enough they'll edit out your watermarks and use your art for their t-shirts or instagram post or youtube thumbnails. and thats even in the absence of bots!

anyway i'm literally drowning since twitter died, i am trying to build back up but that kinda thing takes time idfk. all this to say i'm gonna start posting here again, shaded and at a low DPI. so you can just know if you care to see my drawings at full size & quality there's always my patreon. T^T im sorry~

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Some positivity in these turbulent AI times

*This does not minimize the crisis at hand, but is aimed at easing any anxieties.

With every social media selling our data to AI companies now, there is very little way to avoid being scraped. The sad thing is many of us still NEED social media to advertise ourselves and get seen by clients. I can't help but feeling that we as artists are not at risk of losing our livelihoods, here is why:

Just because your data is available does not mean that AI companies will/want to use it. Your work may never end up being scraped at all.

The possibility of someone who uses AI art prompts can replace you (if your work is scraped) is very unlikely. Art Directors and clients HAVE to work with people, the person using AI art cannot back up what a machine made. Their final product for a client will never be substantial since AI prompts cannot be consistent with use and edits requested will be impossible.

AI creators will NEVER be able to make a move unless us artists make a move first. They will always be behind in the industry.

AI creators lack the fundamental skills of art and therefore cannot detect when something looks off in a composition. Many professional artists like me get hired repeatedly for a reason! WE as artists know what we're doing.

The art community is close-knit and can fund itself. Look at furry commissions, Patreon, art conventions, Hollywood. Real art will always be able to make money and find an audience because it's how we communicate as a species.

AI creators lack the passion and ambition to make a career out of AI prompts. Not that they couldn't start drawing at any time, but these tend to be the people who don't enjoy creating art to begin with.

There is no story or personal experience that can be shared about AI prompts so paying customers will lose interest quickly.

Art is needed to help advance society along, history says so. To do that, companies will need to hire artists (music, architecture, photography, design, etc). The best way for us artists to keep fighting for our voice to be heard right now is staying visible. Do not hide or give in! That is what they want. Continue posting online and/or in person and sharing your art with the world. It takes a community and we need you!

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Ppl: “Glaze and nightshade all your art!!”

Also ppl: * does not mention that you need to have a fucking NVIDIA GPU and running nightshade on one image takes at best 20 minutes*

Like the online version of glaze/nightshade requires an account. And last time i checked they arent accepting new accounts because of the high pressure.

Like i make my art on my ipad. My MacBook is from 2014. If i tried to download and run nightshade on my decade old macbook and go throufg 10+ years of artworks i might as well just set it on fire.

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just letting you know that that ask you rb'd about glaze being a scam seems to be false/dubious. I think they're just misinterpreting "not as useful as we had hoped" and interpreted it maliciously, based on the replies?

not positive but yeah!

Ah yeah, I see people fairly expressing that being “debunked” as in, not a scam; I wasn’t personally particularly aligned to whether or not its “dubious origins” are true or not… so sorry about that.

From what I’ve read, I was more focused upon the consensus that it doesn’t work, and therefore isn’t worth the effort. So having a positive takeaway on glaze outside of its “scam or not status”, as potentially saving us from ai learning doesn’t seem useful to pass around.

Correct me if there’s better information out there but this from an old Reddit post a year back is why I didn’t continue looking into it as it made sense to my layman’s brain:

“lets briefly go over the idea behind GLAZE

computer vision doesn't work the same way as in the brain. They way we do this in computer vision is that we hook a bunch of matrix multiplications together to transform the input into some kind of output (very simplified). One of the consequences of this approach is that small changes over the entire input image can lead to large changes to the output.

It's this effect that GLAZE aims to use as an attack vector / defense mechanism. More specifically, GLAZE sets some kind of budget on how much it is allowed to change the input, and within that budget it then tries to find a change such that the embeddings created by the VAE that sits in front of the diffusion model look like embeddings of an image that come from a different style.

Okay, but how do we know what to change to make it look like a different style? for that they take the original image and use the img2img capabilities of SD itself to transform that image into something of another style. then we can compare the embeddings of both versions and try and alter the original image such that it's embeddings start looking like that of the style transferred version.

So what's wrong with it?

In order for GLAZE to be successful the perturbation it finds (the funny looking swirly pattern) has to be reasonably resistant against transformations. What the authors of GLAZE have tested against is jpeg compression, and adding Gaussian noise, and they found that jpeg compression was largely ineffective and adding Gaussian noise would degrade the artwork quicker than it would degrade the transfer effect of GLAZE. But that's a very limited set of attacks you can test against. It is not scale invariant, something that people making lora's usually do. e.g. they don't train on the 4K version of the image, at most on something that's around 720x720 or something. As per authors admission it might also not be crop invariant. There also seem to be denoising approaches that sufficiently destroy the pattern (the 16 lines of code).

As you've already noticed, GLAZING something can results in rather noticeable swirly patterns. This pattern becomes especially visible when you look at works that consist of a lot of flat shading or smooth gradients. This is not just a problem for the artist/viewer, this is also a fundamental problem for glaze. How the original image is supposed to look like is rather obvious in these cases, so you can fairly aggressively denoise without much loss of quality (might even end up looking better without all the patterns).

Some additional problems that GLAZE might run into: it very specifically targets the original VAE that comes with SD. The authors claim that their approach transfers well enough between some of the different VAEs you can find out in the wild, and that at least they were unsuccessful in training a good VAE that could resist their attack. But their reporting on these findings isn't very rigorous and lacks quite a bit of detail.

will it get better with updates?

Some artists belief that this is essentially a cat and mouse game and that GLAZE will simply need updates to make it better. This is a very optimistic and uninformed opinion made by people that lack the knowledge to make such claims. Some of the shortcomings outlined above aren't due to implementation details, but are much more intimately related with the techniques/math used to achieve these results. Even if this indeed was a cat and mouse game, you'll run into the issue that the artist is always the one that has to make the first move, and the adversary can save past attempt of the artists now broken work.

GLAZE is an interesting academic paper, but it's not going to be a part of the solution artists are looking for.”

[source]

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Hey, just a heads up, but Glaze and Nightshade are scams. Unfortunately. I have a post somewhere with sources that I can dig up for you if you like, but they literally don’t do anything to protect you—they just fry your graphics cards longterm. I don’t want you to think glazed or shaded art keeps you safe, so I wanted to let you know. Sorry. I know I was really upset when I found out.

They’re basically just screwing artists over for investment money, banking on artists not knowing how the tech works. Glaze actually uses a type of Stable Diffusion (DiffusionBee, if you want to google it) to generate noise on your images—that’s why it needs the NVIDIA chip, because it’s running the same kind of code as AI art.

Sorry again. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. I just don’t want you thinking that this will help, and then you end up wasting time and money for absolutely nothing. Since we’ve been friends for like a decade or more, even if we lost touch for a while.

Omg thank you for telling me! I was starting to hear about it but I had heard so much good about it that i wasnt sure!

I really wish there was an easier way to stay away from AI....

Hope you are doing well and thank you again!!

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Tumblr is doing some stupid AI shit so go to blog settings > Visibility > Prevent third-party sharing.

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Your posts are in an AI model

and then Tumblr decided to sell them to AI models.

Now, don't get me wrong, tumblr selling out the users to AI companies is bad, yes, they shouldn't do that. It sucks.

but don't lets get this confused: your posts were already in there. Tumblr selling them is about tumblr making some money and about the AI models having more exhaustive post collections. It's not about your posts being in an AI model, vs not being in one. That battle has already been lost.

Can you find your post on google? Then it's almost certainly in an AI model already. Think about it: These AI sites showed up before all the sites were making deals to sell their users' content, right? How do you think they built them in the first place?

They scraped the posts. Just like google and bing and such do when they build their search indexes.

It's a fundamental part of how the open web works: you want your posts on tumblr to be visible to users, right? You want them to be readable?* Like, look how much stuff broke when twitter changed their whole read-while-not-logged-in policy, ruining a bunch of thread links/NSFW links. And if it's visible, it's scrapable. That's what the AI models were built on.

I've done website scraping before (not for AI models, of course. I was doing search engines and website archival), this is just how it works. You hire a few relatively smart CS graduates and tell them "build me a scraper that'll give us a bunch of tumblr posts" and they go off for a month or two and come back with a database of a few billion posts, and you stuff that into your AI model. That's how they got all the deviantart and flickr and twitter and pinterest and so on posts. They didn't pay for them: they just took them.

They only ever pay for this shit because either:

they fucked up in such a way that the site might be able to sue them for taking rather than paying

They can buy them cheaper than they can finish taking them. Maybe they'd need to pay the CS grads for an extra month? well, that might be more expensive than just throwing the site a couple hundred thousand bucks.

ANYWAY: my point is, don't treat this "oh no tumblr is selling our posts to AI" like it's a big thing that might happen and it would be bad to happen. Yes, it's bad, tumblr shouldn't do this, this'll let AI models get continual updates of content for far easier than just scraping them would be, tumblr betrayed user trust, and so on...

but realistically, this is not a black and white matter of "if only tumblr didn't do this, then we'd be safe from AI models!"

Nope. We already lost that battle. I'm sorry, and it does suck, but that's just how it is. The avalanche has already started, it's too late for the pebbles to vote. * I'm assuming here that you don't run a private blog that's set to only followers or something. You'd be safer then, of course, but you're not really my target audience for this rant

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BYE I GUESS

yea so i won't be posting any new art to this site bc of this shit obviously i marked my blog(s) as not fair game but they had already transferred ALL info to midjourney before we got the chance to "opt out" so its only for show. they are not going to sift thru their whole data set to fish out what ppl dont want used. these people are in no way ethical.

i'm considering starting an opt-in art blog with only glazed/shaded posts but at this point i'd rather tumblr just die, badly.

ive been a tumblr user for like 13 years, ive weathered so much bullshit bc i love to look at images on the internet. i kept posting art here when no one cared anymore bc i genuinely loved this site. i hope the other long-time users who somehow arent on the "AI hype train" will also pull their work & effort. this is so insulting and evil and shady. I SHOULD HAVE, BUT SOMEHOW I DID NOT SEE THIS COMING

ANYWAY i have been already using cohost so if you care about seeing my drawings you can follow me there ^_^ and i know i always post about patreon but i'll keep posting all my art there (for the time being.....i bet they are getting offered huge piles of money by midjourney as well. GLAZE YOUR WORK YOU ARE NOT SAFE)

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Please be aware that the "opt-out" choice is just a way to try to appease people. But Tumblr has not been transparent about when has data been sold and shared with AI companies, and there are sources that confirm that data has already been shared before the toggle was even provided to users.

Also, it seems to include data they should not have been able to give under any circumstance, including that of deactivated blogs, private messages and conversations, stuff from private blogs, and so on.

Do not believe that "AI companies will honor the "opt-out request retroactively". Once they've got their hands on your data (and they have), they won't be "honoring" an opt-out option retroactively. There is no way to confirm or deny what data do they have: The fact they are completely opaque on what do they currently "own" and have, means that they can do whatever they want with it. How can you prove they have your data if they don't give everyone free access to see what they've stolen already?

So, yeah, opt out of data sharing, but be aware that this isn't stopping anyone from taking your data. They already have been taking it, before you were given that option. Go and go to Tumblr's Suppport and leave your Feedback on this (politely, but firmly- not everyone in the company is responsible for this.)

Finally: Opt out is not good under any circumstance. Deactivated people can't opt out. People who have lost their passwords can't opt out. People who can't access internet or computers can't opt out. People who had their content reposted can't opt out. Dead people can't opt out. When DeviantArt released their AI image generator, saying that it wasn't trained on people who didn't consent to it, it was proven it could easily replicate the styles of people who had passed away, as seen here. So, yeah. AI companies cannot be trusted to have any sort of respect for people's data and content, because this entire thing is just a data laundering scheme.

Please do reblog for awareness.

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wellll not sure how i feel about posting new art here aheh heh... but WELL! NEW MONTH NEW STICKER ! you can sign up via ko-fi or patreon ~ thanks i love you~ okay bye~

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typa shit i been on lately

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haha i also forgot to mention this is only open til the 31st!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thats tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so if you want one in february you should sign up pretty soon sorry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

hi i forgot to tell anyone but look at the sticker i made for february! its a lil dragon i made in paint3D on a super sparkly glitter background! i am really excited for the year of the dragon to commence~

u can get one for $5 or two for $7 !

sign up via patreon or ko-fi .𖥔 ݁ ˖๋ ࣭ ⭑

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hi i forgot to tell anyone but look at the sticker i made for february! its a lil dragon i made in paint3D on a super sparkly glitter background! i am really excited for the year of the dragon to commence~

u can get one for $5 or two for $7 !

sign up via patreon or ko-fi .𖥔 ݁ ˖๋ ࣭ ⭑

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art tip

try drawing badly

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fwm