#and ai is making it impossible for artists to make a living or even just have fun with their art because guess what??????

[sexyleon]

i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai

[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!!!

[sexhaver]

are you a fan/supporter of AI-generated art, and if so, why? i've frankly never understood why people like it and i'm trying to wrap my head around it. thanks :)

asking if im a "fan" of AI art is like asking if im a "fan" of Photoshop. it's a tool that has the potential to be used for shitty things (i.e. photoshopping pictures of someone to make them look bad, or training an AI model specifically on one artist and then undercutting that artist on commissions), but it's also a really fucking powerful tool that has the potential to push art in directions it could never feasibly go before. like, how do you read "people without an artistic bone in their body will be able to spin up dozens of pictures of whatever arbitrary thing they want" and jump straight to the ethics of sourcing the datasets and "robbing artists" and supporting draconian IP law without even admitting that, at a base level, that's a really cool and useful piece of technology to have.

part of the reason i keep posting about it is because i work in warehouse automation. ive spent the last decade learning how to automate shitty tasks that nobody in their right mind would want to do for free, and people STILL get upset that robotics are inherently "stealing their jobs". this is literally only a problem because of capitalism; in any sane world, a machine that can do shitty jobs would be a godsend. but when you need to work for a living, these robots become competition instead of tools to make your life better. and yet people will still direct their outrage at the robots themselves and not their bosses or capitalism as a whole

the same thing is happening with AI art. without capitalism forcing artists to draw for survival, the ability for non-artists to create art at a whim would be a tool with a wide range of applications. under capitalism, however, these tools become competition. and yet again, people are directing their rage at the people making this good-in-a-vacuum technology instead of capitalism, or even more specifically, the miniscule percentage of AI artists who use the tech to financially harm artists by undercutting them on commissions.

of course, there's the added twist that, unlike stacking heavy cardboard boxes, art is something that a lot of people actually do enjoy intrinsically and would do for free. this has spawned an entirely separate branch of arguments against AI art based on ethics and philosophy instead of laws and finance. this branch argues that AI art is not just bad because it can directly financially harm artists who don't use it, but that it's actively eroding the concept of "art" itself. this is the branch that spawns soundbites like "AI art just copies from humans", "that's not art because it's soulless", and "what's even the point in making art when a robot can do it faster and better?"

i'm going to be blunt: this branch, just like any other train of thought that hinges on an unspecified definition of "true art" that ebbs and flows at the speaker's whim, is complete horseshit at best and outright reactionary at worst. unfortunately, it has also infected most of the anti-AI-art crowd to the point where it's almost impossible to find any arguments against AI art that don't eventually fall back on it

tl;dr: AI art is a powerful tool with the potential to benefit humanity at large, and desperately trying to stuff that genie back into the bottle [by donating to Disney's IP lawyers] because it scares you is not going to work

[fierceferrets]

The problem with all this AI shit, from a creative side, isn't even just the rampant theft; it's that we're making one of the biggest glaring problems even worse. It wants us to believe we have a work-rate problem, when we instead have a rate of consumption problem.

Social media has created this terrible vision and life for creatives, who already had to be like 10 different jobs, now also have to be their own marketing team while some how putting out new content every. single. day.

It is impossible to keep up with. And rather than changing narratives, emphasizing how REAL people are behind this stuff and need rest and time to make quality work. Instead of teaching patience, compassion, empathy, and love... these people are like "nah we should use robots to pick up the slack." And no matter what you do you will never get the same quality has a sentient living being. So yeah, fuck AI in like 90% of its current application usage. If you want to do something nice for your favorite artists or other creatives; tell them its ok to take their time. Tell them you love their work, even if their last update was months ago. Tell them they deserve to rest.

Because I guarantee you they don't think they do.

[paigenoelchas-blog]

Moonvale

I have not finished Episode 1 so maybe I shouldn't be writing any of this, but I have some opinions about Everbyte.

1. I believe that they are going to do a fine job at weaving a story (Duskwood) that is so beloved into something new.

2. AI is here to stay, that fact sucks. It takes the ability for true artists to make a living, it removes creativity from the world and it deprives of a real emotion and depth of feeling in our art, but it is cheaper and easier to use than actors. I would have appreciated real people and the impact it would have made they had dealt with profiles in a different way, but if they are busy writing a good story and weaving Duskwood in and out of it, I can accept that some things have to be sacrificed.

3. It is hard to create a story. It is hard to program a computer game that is as full of life and creates as many feelings as Duskwood did for a lot of us. It is hard to please old fans and new ones at the same time. Certainly mistakes will be made. We have all made mistakes and will make more before we leave the Earth.

4. It is impossible to please everyone. A company that basically created this genre should be given the chance to try something new. They deserve our loyalty and at the very at the very least some human kindness and respect. They are people and no matter how much you disagree the should to be treated as such. Words hurt even if they are typed anonymously.

I may have a different opinion after I finish episode 1. I am just hoping that the team at Everbyte continues to produce this game with the passion and care that they have in the past. I personally want to play through this game and find out what they have done.

I don't like to push buttons or start fights or be involved in drama, but I feel bad for the game creators. I hope they know that some of us are still behind them and will follow all of the stories they plan to tell.

[pathfinderunlocked]

Gargantuan Linkserpent - CR11 Kyton

If you hear a chain rattling and feel the ground rumbling, it’s too late to run.

Image generated on Artflow.ai.

I normally do my best to find an artist to showcase with each post.  For this one, though, I had an idea and couldn’t find any real artwork that was even remotely close, sorry.  It bothers me enough that I don’t think I’ll do it again.   It kind of makes sense, though, considering that the monster creates illusionary terrain that you could very easily flavor as looking like an AI-generated image.

This is a lower level version of a CR14 creature I made some time back, the Colossal Linkserpent. As the name implies, this weaker version is one size category smaller. If your adventure is a few levels lower, it might be more appropriate.

In the Shadow Plane, it’s perhaps fortunate at times that distances between location are fluid and long distance travel is somewhat dreamlike, because that leaves an infinite amount of space for the Gargantuan and Colossal Linkserpents to roam.  They never seem to reach settlements, but in the bleak and lifeless wilderness, Linkserpents hunt down travelers and torment them.  They are capable of causing a traveler’s journey in the Shadow Plane to stretch out endlessly by circling around them beneath the ground.

A relatively small number of these creatures are believed to exist - maybe a hundred or fewer in the world, although it’s impossible to tell for sure.  The animal-like intelligence of a Gargantuan Linkserpent is unusual among kytons, but this creature enjoys inflicting pain and torment just as much as the more intelligent kytons with humanoid appearances.

Unlike many kytons which wear the chains that were used to bind or torture them, a Garguantuan Linkserpent’s entire body except for its head is made of a great number of living metallic chains, which were given life and melded together by other kytons after being used to bind or torture other creatures. The difference between a Gargantuan Linkserpent and a Colossal Linkserpent is simply how many chains the kytons are able to gather when creating it.

Gargantuan Linkserpent - CR 11

Made of interwoven metallic chains stretching more than 30 feet long, this enormous serpent-like creature bursts from the ground with a rattling sound.

XP 12,800 LE Gargantuan outsider (evil, extraplanar, kyton, lawful) Init +3 Senses darkvision 60 ft., tremorsense 1 mile; Perception +15 Aura stretch terrain (120 ft.)

DEFENSE

AC 23, touch 9, flat-footed 20 (+3 Dex, +14 natural, -4 size) hp 138 (12d10+72); regeneration 5 (good weapons and spells, silver weapons) Fort +14, Ref +11, Will +8 DR 10/silver or good Immune cold SR 21

OFFENSE

Speed 40 ft., burrow 40 ft. Melee bite +18 (3d6+15) Ranged molten steel spit +11 touch (4d8 fire plus hardened steel, 30 ft. range increment, see text) Space 30 ft.; Reach 30 ft. Special Attacks constrict (4d6+21), enwrap, unnerving gaze (30 ft.; DC 16)

STATISTICS

Str 31, Dex 16, Con 22, Int 1, Wis 18, Cha 8 Base Atk +12; CMB +26; CMD 39 (cannot be tripped) Feats All-Consuming Swing, Cleave, Great Cleave, Improved Vital Strike, Power Attack, Vital Strike Skills Climb +20, Perception +15 Languages None

SPECIAL ABILITIES

Enwrap (Ex) As a standard action, a gargantuan linkserpent can coil its body around a creature at least two size categories smaller than itself, attempting to hold it in place.  This functions as a grapple combat maneuever, and provokes an attack of opportunity, except that if successful, the gargantuan linkserpent can maintain the grapple as a move action each round and can continue to make bite attacks.  A creature grappled in this way is moved into the center of the gargantuan linkserpent’s space, instead of adjacent to it as normal for a grapple.

Molten Steel Spit (Ex) As a standard action, a gargantuan linkserpent can spit a glob of molten steel.  This is a ranged touch attack with a range increment of 30 feet which deals 4d8 fire damage.  A target struck by this attack is entangled, and its weight increases by 120 lbs.  Both the entangled condition and the additional weight last until the target removes the steel, which immediately hardens around the target.

A flying target struck by this attack must succeed on a DC 25 Fly check or immediately plummet, and takes an additional -10 penalty on Fly checks on top of any penalty it takes from the added weight.

The hardened steel has 10 hardness and 30 hit points, and can be removed by dealing enough slashing, piercing, bludgeoning, acid, fire, or force damage to break it apart or melt it.  Acid or fire attacks against the hardened steel also damage the entangled creature.

Stretch Terrain (Su) As a free action, while in an area of natural terrain on the Shadow Plane, a gargantuan linkserpent can cause creatures within 120 feet to be unable to escape a 120 foot radius around the gargantuan linkserpent.  Creatures and objects which attempt to move further than this distance away seem to be moving, but their distance from the gargantuan linkserpent never increases to further than 120 feet.  Even teleportation effects are unable to move further than this distance, although plane shifting works normally.

A gargantuan linkserpent must be able to take a free action each round to maintain this aura.  The aura ends at the end of the gargantuan linkserpent’s turn if it is helpless or otherwise unable to act.

Unnerving Gaze (Ex) A creature that succumbs to an gargantuan linkserpent’s unnerving gaze has all of its movement speeds reduced to 0 for 1 round as it imagines being strangled in the coiled chains of the linkserpent’s body.  This gaze effect has a range of 30 feet and is negated by a DC 16 Will save.  The save DC is Charisma-based.

[multimuseticles]

You know... I've been drawing ever since I was like 5 years old. It's something I've spent pretty much my entire life doing. The longest I'd ever really go without drawing is like a couple of months maybe, and lately I've been drawing on an almost near daily basis. But if I'm being honest, I'm fairly close to actually quitting.

I still love to draw and I don't really want to stop, but it's getting to a point where AI slop is just entirely taking over the internet. Finding even reference images these days is so difficult because google is filled with AI crap and a lot of actual art sites allow AI art(looking at you Pixiv and DeviantArt).

I used to get a couple of commissions a month just a few years ago. Then covid hit and I got a little less work because people didn't exactly have the same amount of money to spend, which makes perfect sense. But getting closer to the end of covid when people could actually go back to work etc, AI decided to creep its head up and now I'm lucky to get one commission every few months. Originally, AI art was laughable and it was only able to make really stupid shit that was basically illegible. Like that Dall-e thing.

Putting the rest under a read more because it's somewhat long.

But nowadays, a lot of people prefer to use AI than give actual artists attention. Especially now that a lot of big companies are pushing their own AI crap(looking at you Adobe and Meta). Instagram used to be a great place for artists, now its filled with AI crap that Instagram seems to fucking love and is basically training their AI on your own posts. They say you can opt out, but if you live in the USA? You seemingly can't. In the EU you can because of laws, so I was able to opt out. However. I don't trust Meta not to train off my shit anyway.

Then you've got Adobe, which y'know, was a thing for artists to create stuff, be that through Photoshop, Illustrator or even their video editors. But now they're just pushing their lame AI crap to do everything for you, and still charge a ridiculous amount for their service.

Now I'm not just complaining because I'm getting less work. It's just depressing that creativity is dying. Generative AI is being used in video games, movies, tv shows, music, youtube videos, voiceovers and pretty much EVERYTHING else. It's impossible to avoid these days. Sites that allow AI but ask you to tag it so people can hide it doesn't work either, because people just don't tag that shit.

Due to all this AI crap, artists are being accused of using AI to create their art, regardless of if they show proof or not. It hasn't happened to me yet, but I feel it's inevitable simply because I absolutely suck at drawing hands and I can just barely get the hang of them most of the time. A ton of actual artists have been essentially bullied to the point where they don't post their art online anymore, or are forced to change their art style.

It's so much harder for artists to get their work out there anymore because AI is taking over all of these sites so the majority of the stuff you see is generated bullshit. It has led to people being like "Why would I pay someone to do this when I can just write a prompt and get what I want in seconds?" and no matter what you say to people with this line of thought, they just do not give a single shit.

I'm fine with AI to an extent. I think it's fine to just use it for dumb shit between friends, or helping to get a design idea for an OC or something. But the moment you start making money from AI or posting it online and claiming it as your own(and saying that people should credit you if you used it???) is the moment I think it's not okay. Have you seen Facebook or Twitter lately? Filled with really messed up AI images and AI responses. Facebook is rampant with weird and disturbing looking AI generated images and Twitter is 90% bots these days.

This whole post was spurred on by a conversation I saw between two of my friends. One of my friends wanted to get into graphic design, and being the artist of the group and having experience in graphic design, he came to me for advice. He got some very basic stuff done and he was really proud of it. He was showing some of the stuff he made to our other friend who simply responded with an AI generation of the same thing saying "Just use AI man, it's quicker and looks better." It was super depressing to see, especially since I've had conversations about how much I hate generative AI with these same friends.

So at this point I'm on the edge of just stopping. I probably won't, but I'm starting to lose motivation because I feel like there is no safe place to upload my art anymore. Will I stop? Probably not, but the temptation is there. I dunno, fuck generative AI man.

Sorry for the long ass rant, but I'm just getting so fed up with this crap.

[ot3]

omg thank you for being the first normal person I've seen so far about AI who's also an artist T-T like obviously all the stealing is horrible and it's good it's talked about but almost everyone really is acting like the idea of computers being capable of creating images killed their firstborn child

(also I don't mean it as one of the weird AI art bros but as an artist myself I'm just glad that there are other artist with open mind to the concept)

no right like its insane to me to see how many other people who seem reasonable and level headed are falling for the kneejerk response to say ai Isn't Art Can't Be Art ! It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater to an almost incomprehensible degree.

Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that we live in an era where essentially all new technology's first and prime purpose will be for ghoulish, capitalistic, anti-human ends. But to reject any other uses for the technology doesn't do anything other than make you look like an anti-tech weirdo. This is genuinely insanely impressive and revolutionary tech! There are a TON of legitimate artistic uses for AI image generation.

It also seems weird that everyone is delving into this false binary of 'dont use AI, learn to draw' as if there is any conceivable reason for these things to be mutually exclusive? Like, before all of the AI discourse really popped off i was doing some experimenting with using AI in my process.

the texturing used in this drawing was made by VQGAN + Clip (different type of image generation than the stable diffusion model that is producing most of the AI art that's up for debate right now) running through google colab. I made a bunch of these weird, ethereal images that would have been almost impossible for me to produce under my own power - it would have taken a titanic amount of time, effort, and design to produce any of these through illustrative or photo editing techniques.

here's a sampling of some of the textures i made. Now I think it would be a real struggle to try and claim that these images made are plagiarisms. However, I stopped messing with the google colab generation for one key reason: i didnt know enough about the image databases being used to train these models. That's the real stumbling block

the internet is CHOCK FULL of images that are free to use commercially and repurposes, there's stuff like wikimedia commons, the smithsonian open access, unsplash and pexels which have free stock photos, etc. I honestly think a nonzero amount of artists would consent to having some of their work used in image generation databases if they were promised noncommercial use of the resulting images, also. But the problem is the people training these AI don't give a shit about any of that. It's just the complete entitlement to other people's work and neglect for creative boundaries that makes AI generation bad.

The fact that people are attempting to replicate the art of living, working artists, or people like kentaro miura who by all accounts were so dedicated to the craft that they worked themselves to death sickens me. And the fact that the companies responsible for this are using that as an active selling point for their product is even worse. It's a pretty miserable time to be an artist, and this is just the icing on the cake.

But I don't want silicon valley greed and bizarre, impotent jealousy from redditors who want custom waifu jpgs to mean that nobody who could really benefit from AI image generation gets to use it.

like, my dad for example. he's been a creative person his whole life but it never really went anywhere. He drew a lot as a kid and then went and got a degree in filmmaking. My parents were living in LA when I was born, with my dad managing a filming/sound studio and the two of them trying to break into writing screenplays. This did not happen because they had three kids, and for the past decade and then some my dad had been doing database programming on contract for the CDC. Now, in his mid 50s, he's finally got a permanent and secure position and, rather than spending all his free time raising children or getting PMP certified to try and angle for a string of promotions, he can start having hobbies again. there's a comic he's been wanting to draw for as long as I can remember.

only, one big problem - in 2021 he had surgery on his cataracts and never healed properly. He's got severely impaired vision and looking at stuff too hard for to long causes him a ton of eye strain and pain. He has to look at a lot of screens for his job so by the time he's off work for the day he's pretty much too fatigued to do all the intense visual stuff it'd take to make a comic.

I wanted to tell him AI image generation could help him make the kind of stuff he always dreamed about making as a kid but instead I had to tell him that as it stands, the predatory nature of AI modeling means it's insanely hard to use it without ripping off vulnerable creatives. Instead we chatted a bit about combining 3d assets, digitally edited photos, or photobashing/digital kitbashing methods to try and make a pipeline he could do without drawing, but the time commitment to learn these methods is probably just not feasible unless his eyes make a pretty unprecedented recovery in future years.

Like, that's the worst thing about all of this. The idea that AI makes the production of certain kinds of art more accessible to people with disabilities isn't just a 'gotcha' being used by the pro-AI people, it's also true. I would love for my dad to be able to make his comic. I myself also have a huge string of health issues and sometimes the main thing stopping me from drawing is that it hurts to do so. Anything in my process that could reduce the strain drawing puts on my body is an accessibility concern in some ways. Eventually degrading so much that I can't draw at all is one of my biggest fears.

But that doesn't counter all of the negatives! It just doesnt! Which fucking sucks man it just sucks so fucking bad that we have this cool incredible thing and we can't use it without being complicit in some stuff i am fully ideologically against! As things stand I really cant imagine that 'ethical' AI image generation will ever exist, so unfortunately it will have to be in the hands of the people using it to decide for themselves if they are using it in a way that is predatory or harmful, or as a legitimate tool to make meaningful works of art.

[horseforeplay]

hi! what do you make of ai art? im conflicted cause i see how its great for disabled people in many ways, but then i look back at the work people put into becoming artists and mastering the craft and feel many things lol i wish i could look at it similarly like i look at producers for example, where you have a vision and tools and you know how to use it well so you dont need the musical training background to be creative, but i cant help but feel like its more complicated with visual art? that theres a whole other side besides having a vision and good understanding of a shortcut tool. im very very torn and also sorry for all that on your succession blog but knowing youre a fantastic artist whos recently been dealing with this sort of impossibility to make art i wonder if you have some insight in this area.

sending love!

i appreciate u wanting to know my opinion on a Hot Topic such as this! i dunno man i have an aversion to any definition of art of any kind that requires effort or skill as essential features that make the art “real”. i think a lot of what is happening with AI discourse is that people are appropriately appalled by the way capitalism mangles creative output and even what kind of relationships artists can have with their work and with the rest of the world. i do not have a problem with a machine that digests and reconfigures information — a machine is just a machine. if one copied the way i make texture with colored pencil and produced an approximation of a new original work by me, i would be fascinated by what reactions i might have to it. would i feel threatened by it? would i be flattered? what might it open up for me, to see my work broken into a particular machine’s data? this is just a dream, though. i see many artists understandably frightened by what the exploiter class may choose to do with their new toys (and what they are already doing to us with them). it just sucks to see that very plain class antagonism passed over with arguments about the “purity” of human-made art, how it is somehow apparent to any observer when a work is truly endowed with a “soul” (if these arguments sound eerily like fascist aesthetic principles, it’s because they are fascistic).

and then to see people cheering for their own doom with this thing of mr. game of thrones & co suing chatGPT, complete with condescending explanations of how it’s not going to hurt fanfic writers because the problem these multimillionaires have is actually with people monetizing their work, and the true humble Fan would ne’er ask a but penny. do people really not see how this is making the divide between the “artist” and the “common person” greater? it is so goddamn expensive to survive right now, and the wealthy are using fear of technology as a tool to prevent you from making money, and yes, making art at all. only those with enough capital to protect their intellectual property with the force of the law are allowed to express themselves through art. yes, i think it should be well within your rights to bind and sell (for money, yes, money) your game of thrones fanfiction. so many of us are living in poverty right now, bombarded by entertainment but prevented from ever chewing it up or spitting it out. ed roth’s rat fink character had it right. fuck mickey mouse. like, we’re actually back to saying “fuck mickey mouse” being really cool. put him in a blender full of data, have it put him into a beach scene with BBW anime versions of lara croft and princess peach. intellectual property is a historically recent phenomenon. it is a tool to make the rich richer and get you well and squarely fucked. theoretically, yeah, it sounds good to have your work and livelihood honored and protected, but just like they’re trying to replace artists and actors and writers with AI, every single tool becomes a weapon in the hands of the rich. the hell people are worried they need more punishing copyright law to fix is already here. the woman who designed care bears & strawberry shortcake never saw a penny from it. AI art is only a threat in the hands of the corporations that happily do these things in the first place.

anyways. lol. i’m not very technologically minded in my own art practice — i’m not naturally drawn to new technology as a part of my work, and find many of the results i’ve seen from current AI art tech to be kind of aesthetically unpleasant. artwork contains unpleasantness, though. i’m not really interested in arguments over what artwork “should” contain, only what it does. i think the best AI art i’ve seen (ie: the stuff i’ve enjoyed the most) has been from alan resnick:

it is so terrifically disquieting. it leans into what makes AI-generated BBW lara croft kind of difficult to actually jack off to. the overlapping lines of bodies, the nonsense text. but then, if this work has merit, is that because alan resnick is uniquely special, thus proving the point that the technology is only valid in the hands of a “real artist”? can mr. resnick be said to be the “artist” of these images at all, because he trained a program to his own style and input interesting ides? does he deserve lots of money for his work creating iconic adult swim shorts like this house has people in it? well sure

or would this art only have value if somebody put a tremendous amount of labor into it? you know. my mother used to tell me, “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work”. she said she should nail the phrase to my forehead, like martin luther at the church doors. having very recently become disabled & chronically ill, i don’t believe it anymore. i believe we should be able to use technology to make ourselves more free. we should not be so financially insecure that we are threatened by anyone expressing themselves with something we made. the ultra-wealthy are threatened by infringement because they need everybody else to stay poor, and the poor are threatened because they do not want to be poor any longer. it’s got nothing to do with strange scrambled pictures. if i could take pictures of every work of art i’ve ever loved and put it into a machine that mixes it up and turns it into a monster, i would do it just for a bittersweet laugh at it.

[assenavlp]

AI Sucks.

AI is not punk. AI is a tool of The Man. Of billionaire Tech Bro sociopaths and accelerationists. AI is not subversive. Edgelords and petty contrarians utilizing AI does not make it so. AI is not revolutionary. Sentimental schlock will not save the suffering. AI is lazy. AI is a cheat. AI is plagiarism. AI is slick and facile. AI produces Pablum for the masses, shat out as easily as it's digested, no different than any banal meme of the week.

AI is not art. It can't even be called Digital Art. It isn't art, period. Digital art still has a human component. AI isn't even in the same league as any of the long traditions of collage, assemblage, or found art, or even of electronic music, musique concrète, or music sampling, or of, in writing, the cut-up technique.

If one is going to steal shit, as all artists, musicians, and writers do - "there is nothing new under the sun" - one should at least have the decency to put in one's own work. The blood, the sweat, and the tears, and fucking make it one's own, rather than simply letting a computer algorithm regurgitate vapid, plasticky-looking, fumble-fingered, dilettante-pleasing, scam and hoax-facilitating, uncanny-valley kitsch.

AI does not democratize art. It is designed to take ownership of it. To render it even further into a mere commodity. NFT's anyone? To appeal and pander to the masses, unschooled in the arts. To render true artists, photographers, writers, musicians, and actors, irrelevant, unworthy of making a living, as they cannot compete with the speed and high turnover that, among other things, social media affords this AI kitsch. Anything real, anything tactile, will soon pale in comparison to any of these fantastical images that seem to fool far too many people; undiscerning audiences raised on decades of ridiculously "airbrushed" magazine covers and multi-million dollar CGI popcorn movies that look like video games. And as education becomes less and less of a priority, the quality of the written word will matter less and less, as well.

And AI is absolutely being used to fool people on a daily basis. To distort reality for the sake of a buck. Not only to devalue these various "creatives", of all stripes (painters, cartoonists, sign writers, stained glass artists, ceramicists, blacksmiths, furniture designers, yarn artists, cake artists, fashion designers, and so on), but as yet another way to scam the gullible with impossible products, and separate them from money they don't have to begin with.

To, in fact, devalue the individual, the consumer, the employee, the everyday Joe; losing jobs to AI-powered automation, forced to communicate with soulless chatbots and their frustratingly meaningless automated replies, and everyone's favourite, the indignity of the self-check-out. Of course the youth are so anxiety-ridden, now, by this mess we've all left them, they're welcoming the lack of human interaction. Great.

And, even more worryingly, to further sabotage the already broken political process, with fake images, spread through memes, that not only successfully fool fans and detractors of any leader or candidate, alike, but allow them to also deny reality. To claim that legitimately damning photos, authentic audio or videos have been, in fact, faked, whether they actually believe that to be so or not.

There's a difference between something that's clearly (or should be) satirical, and something that purports to be authentic, even if expressing something in a humorous way. And, unfortunately, that line is becoming hazier and hazier, as people seem to, somehow, be less and less informed, in this, supposedly, the information age. Not to mention the rationalisations: "well, 'they're' doing it". But as we move further into this age of disinformation, it is imperative that the left does not engage in this sort of chicanery. There are enough damning statements and real photographs of various political foes. Just because the (alt) right does it is not a good reason. Of course it was already an issue, to some extent, with Photoshopping, but AI is clearly compounding the problem. Some might say, purposefully. Indeed, all aspects of this malfeasance are being used by grifters, strategists, and propagandists, alike, to full effect.

In sum: Fuck AI.

[hero-israel]

I just came across an Al-Jazeera article where they recreate a Palestinian village destroyed in the Nakba (according to them. It could totally be true but I feel like it wouldn't be impossible to find evidence to contrary one way or another) using, get this, images generated by Artificial Intelligence. The least they could've done is use all their Qatar funds to hire a fucking human artist. How about actually giving a Palestinian some work? I'm sure plenty need the money and would love to make nationalist nostalgia art. But no, they've gotta jump on a BS tech trend that's primarily being developed in Israel anyway. What a joke

Jesus Herb Christ this is one of the most pathetic things I have ever seen online. This is like the Wizardchan of land disputes.

Note that the AJ article fully admits that the people of Beyt Nabala: were the first to initiate violence with the Jews in December 1947; had also been part of the Arab Revolt in 1936 which was aimed at ending Jewish immigration and driving up the Holocaust death count as much as possible; and that they were ordered to vacate the village in May 1948 by Jordan's Arab Legion! Benny Morris likewise lists that village as one of those voluntarily abandoned without a Jewish attack. AJ also uses very interesting wording - about how other Arabs "brought reports of atrocities" by Zionist militias, including rape and disemboweling pregnant women at Deir Yassin. There were certainly "reports" of rape, and these were later admitted by Arab sources to have been lies meant to whip up popular disgust and revulsion (and inadvertently led to more people fleeing).

But yeah.... the soulless, emotionless, algorithmic, techbro-fad AI "art". Even for a picture of an old-fashioned well, which would probably have taken about 10 minutes for a living Palestinian artist to draw and get paid for, they had to chase those clicks and sell their souls to SEO. The comfort with fakeness and shallowness.... For an issue that people supposedly care about, and act like is important to them, it's just ugly, pointless trend-jumping. It is impossible to take it seriously. How much Jewish art is there, how many ways have we seen of re-envisioning our past?

[plethoraworldatlas]

apparently some Tumblr funnyman author decided to go to bat for "AI" (it was only a matter of time) and in addition to the same old weak defenses, they held up the EFF's AI opinions as another defense, despite the fact that the EFF has rightfully been criticized for how weak and naive those opinions are. "You can't regulate using AI because big companies would just ignore it/pay fines and do it anyway (amazing stance for an activist group to take)", or "you can't reform copyright to take into account AI because you would have to reform copyright law which is controlled by big companies and thus impossible (AMAZING stance for activists to take)". And another defense, not from the EFF but from a certain subsect of people who treat their stance as gospel, "You can't reform copyright law to actually be useful to small artists because don't you know art isn't labor, artists are all big corporations or ivory tower wine drinking brunch club elites, and anyone who actually wants things like royalties or to be able to live even in part from their artistic labor, let alone doesn't want the work they make fed to the garbage word scrambling genie machine are actually stealing from the "real poor"/are class traitors/etc."

[animebw]

Short Reflection: Pluto

Naoki Urasawa is fascinated with the darkness of childhood imagination.

Admittedly, I've only watched two anime based on his work so far- Madhouse's masterclass adaptation of Monster and now this- so I can't say how common a thread it is in his other stories. But even just from those two, his fixation on twisting childhood into something sinister and unsettling is undeniable. Nursery rhymes and half-remembered country folk songs repurposed as grim omens of doom, picture books foreshadowing real world nightmares, the innocence of his child characters and childlike imagery juxtaposed against a creeping darkness that seems born from the pits of hell itself... the mind of a kid is frequently the most terrifying place to be in Urasawa's work. Whether there's any greater meaning to it or if it's just something he things is cool, I don't know. But it certainly makes him the ideal artist for a story like Pluto. Who else but a guy like him could take one of Japan's most iconic mascots of childhood fun and use his world as the basis of a serious minded political/philosophical thriller that seeks to explore the nature of hatred itself?

Now, as someone who only knows Astro Boy by reputation and has never so much as seen a single episode of any show bearing his name, I can't comment on this story's relation to its source material. Luckily, I don't need to; Pluto is fully stand-alone and you don't need to know a scrap of Astro Boy lore to understand or appreciate it. Although I imagine it would make some of the goofier robot designs a little less immersion-breaking. I dunno, there's something inherently funny about seeing Urasawa's grounded, realistic style of character and world design, his thickly textured and non-exaggerated human faces with realistic proportions and naturalistic wear and tear, next to some of these robots looking like they were pulled straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. It makes me wonder how certain American cartoons would look if given this treatment. Imagine if someone, like, re-imagined The Powerpuff Girls this way, and you had to see these realistic child versions of Blossom et al next to Mojo Jojo or whatever. Oh well, it would probably be better than that CW show they cancelled, at least.

But I'm getting off track. Pluto is a story about a futuristic sci-fi world where robotics have gotten advanced enough for robots and humans to life side-by-side as part of the same civilization. Every year, it seems, robots and humans are growing closer together, to the point where people are genuinely starting to wonder if there's still any meaningful difference between them. But the seeming peace is shattered by a mysterious attacker, an unknown, unseen killer targeting the seven strongest robots in the world and destroying them one by one. One of these robots, a Europol detective named Gesicht with a robot wife of his own, decides to dedicate himself to tracking this killer down. But as his journey takes him all over the world, meeting countless different robots and humans all with their own bit of commentary to offer on the relationship between man and machine, we slowly peel back the sins this world is built on, uncovering a darkness much greater than a single mysterious killer... and a hatred that may change the nature of robotkind as we know it.

It's a heady, thought-provoking affair, and despite my jokes earlier in the review, it's shockingly good at justifying its bizarre premise. The world feels real and lived-in, from its complex alt-history to its eerily familiar present. It feels like a world that would arise from robots growing increasingly close to humans, and it makes all its musings on the distinction between them genuinely compelling. What would anti-robot bigotry look like in such an accepting time? What things would come naturally to humans that might be impossible for robots, and vice-versa? How would the presence of highly advanced AI effect the political history of warfare and diplomacy? And, most unnervingly, what new atrocities could result from a world this advanced? It's a show that's deeply interested in what ultimately makes us human, and what it would take for an inhuman machine to be considered human as well. But it's also interested in what is already inhuman about us, and if there's anything we, in turn, can learn about our own humanity from a "species" still living just outside it. And while there's plenty of action throughout its run, it's not afraid to take its time on conversations and machinations to really let those ideas settle.

Of course, it's been many years since the manga this was based on was published, and those kinds of "Can a robot learn to feel?" questions have been pretty beaten to death in other media that's come out since then. These days, a story can come off as pretty corny trying to tackle such topis. And truth be told, Pluto can't help but make you roll your eyes with its attempt to explore these ideas a lot of the time. Some of that's due to the oversaturation I just mentioned, but some of that's down to Pluto itself being a very corny show, in ways I don't think it's really aware of. It tends to deliver its story in the most on-the-nose, telegraphed way imaginable.This cranky old musician doesn't think robots can understand art but watch as he learns how to feel again! This robot just wants to paint pictures of flowers but his inner nature as a brutal rage machine is dragging him down! People make promises to their family to see them again right before they're brutally killed! You can see every emotional beat coming miles away but it still expects you to be surprised when it finally arrives there. And considering that the tension of uncertainty is one of the most important parts of any good thriller, it kinda makes it hard to get invested at points.

Sadly, that isn't the only problem holding Pluto back from greatness. Aside from the corny delivery, a lot of plot points feel pretty contrived and stupid, the hand of the author shoving the pieces across the game board with little regard to making sure it feels natural. I also don't think structure this show as eight hour-long Netflix specials was good for the pacing; it means every episode meanders over countless subplots that don't always fit together smoothly and melt into a sludge of Things Happening with little connective tissue to justify putting them together. You can practically see the points where there would be episode breaks if they were a normal 24-minute length, but then they just keep going into what feels like an entirely new episode with no breathing room. So it ends up feeling like a 24 episode show Frankensteined together into a series of bloated triple-length episode booster packs, rather than a story carefully curated to take advantage of its extended episode runtime.

And yet, for all its faults, I found myself getting drawn back in over and over again. Say what you will about Urasawa, the man knows how to keep your eyes glued to the screen. And for all the shows and movies I've seen exploring what it takes for a robot to be human, Pluto's take is still unique and fascinating enough to be worth the watch. It's nowhere near the simple, offensive allegories of, say, Detroit Become Human, nor is it so intellectual that it robs the story of its humanity. It's a genuine attempt to contend with humanity in its entirety, light and darkness alike, and what we may need to sacrifice- or what we might gain- by bringing artificial intelligence over the threshold to join us. It also helps that it looks fantastic; aside from a few moments that just plain look ugly (Atom's first fight with the mysterious killer made my eyes hurt, I swear), the thick lines and fluid animation bring this world to life in stunning fashion. Even outside the impressive action scenes, Pluto is a show worth looking at. Sometimes, that sweet Netflix money hits just right.

Is Pluto a great anime? I'd argue no; it's got too many basic issues holding it back. In my opinion, Monster is a superior Urasawa offering, and I didn't even particularly love that show either. But masterpiece or no, Pluto is a work of remarkable ambition, and it demands your attention regardless of its faults. It's a thoughtful, potent, sometimes frustrating, often eye-rolling, but always compelling work of sci-fi reimagining, proof that even something as simple as a cartoon robot with rockets on its feet can be fertile ground for so much more. And I give Pluto a score of:

6.5/10

And now we wait to see if Netflix struck gold again with its upcoming Scott Pilgrim adaptation. See you next time!

[hatboyproject]

Opening Dialogue With NAVA: Hopes For the Future

Last night, I sent a carefully considered e-mail to an outreach group that deals with professional voice actors and AI voice technology. In this e-mail, I outlined some points about myself, my use case, fanwork creators, broad intentions behind our non-commercial use of the technology, and a little about the modding communities I'm familiar with. My intent is to open something of a longer conversation between fanwork creators and professional voice actors on the basis of better mutual understanding. Of course, it's impossible for one person to adequately represent everyone, but with my body of relevant work and knowledge of the scene, it was generally agreed upon amongst our community that I ought to be the face of this discussion. It is one that needs to be had, especially as attitudes involving this technology are evolving. In some cases, escalating.

I included a link to my video that I made back in February, as well as a PDF detailing some more in-depth versions of points I originally outlined in the first point of contact. In an ideal world, I'd love to come to some kind of understanding and work together to create an official solution of some sort. There are a number of things that occur as potential avenues, but none of them are possible without degrees of mutual effort - a big ask, to help out a group of artists without financial resources. However, modders already do what we do for free. On our side, I can't say I anticipate a lack of people who'd be willing to serve as a voluntary panel screening project briefs or something similar - but this is only an idea meant as a point for thought. Realistically, I am hoping simply for more VAs to be aware of our perspectives as fanwork creators, and not to see us as unilaterally threatening. I am hoping the value of what we create can be considered, if not accepted. Realistically, I am hoping for VAs who are confronted with individual projects using this technology to be judicious with regards to asking them to be removed. To be clear, I believe a VA has the right to ask for a project to be removed; I simply am hoping for the weight of such a request to be known, and the only way that is possible is by having someone listen to us. This morning, I received an acknowledgement of my message and that it would be read through and presented to the group. So, things are in motion, now. Naturally, I'm bricking it; I have now presented myself, my achievements, my work, my ethos, and my video to a group of people I greatly respect, and who are likely naturally inclined somewhat against me. I really do feel like "Who am I to be putting this across to these people? I'm just some weirdo artist from Canada living in the UK with her cat. I'm not famous or important." But I can't let myself think that way. If I give in to my natural tendency to minimise myself with this, no one will make this case for me, and I believe projects like my own deserve to exist. I've had other fanwork creators contact me with their own use cases for this technology and they're all like mine. Earnest, hopeful, done out of love, and I want this to be known about. I also detailed the time the community tried to club together and hire a SAG-AFTRA affiliated actor, and couldn't even get to the stage of discussing a contract to find out what they'd need to pay. The process simply isn't cut out for people who don't work in that industry, and that's fine and fair enough, but it does put an obstacle in the way we as fanartists can't realistically pass. PS though, unions are great and I support them - it's only that as a budgetless fanwork creator, it's something people in my situation aren't able to navigate.

[mymangakajourney]

Why did I become an Artist?

I used to draw a lot more. In fact, one of my favorite things to do was draw as a kid, but it faded away (we all know why).

As an adult, I feel it's harder to be creative, but I had that excitement when I was fresh out of high school and I was very much inspired by seeing these game environment artists at the time. I loved seeing their process and how you could make this amazing thing from essentially nothing...from your head! To me that was mind-blowing; coming from a family who had a pretty traditional view on things: go to school, get good grades, get a job, blah blah blah...if you didn't get good grades you were considered a loser.

That's where my art journey began, really.

I eventually learned the video game industry is not exactly great, and moved on to other things. I got inspired by illustrators and animators, but soon realized I was holding myself to too high of a standard, and a lot of the advice was not good for my mental health. along with the rise of AI art I had to take a break from doing drawing for a long time. I moved on to graphic design.

I studied graphic design for 2 years, I loved making things, but it felt impossible to be one. The amount of materials I had to learn was never-ending because jobs always asked new requirements besides knowing adobe CC and programming languages. The whole list of reasons why they wouldn't accept you to the job listed is a can of worms in itself. Then you could be a freelancer.

"but don't you manage your own time as a freelancer? isn't it more easygoing, and all that?" You may ask

Not really. first of all you gotta have a skill that people would pay you for. Secondly, you gotta check how saturated that market is on the platform you want to freelance on. Next, you have to market yourself to death because you will be flooded by other people from overseas working for a lot less money than probably you do. Also if you do creative work like me your "unique" style won't show up on the site's algorithm no matter if there's people who like it or not. it's a very cookie cutter way of creating work. Why did I explain all this? Because I am tired of living cookie-cutter. I wanted to tell stories, I realized that making art is much more than making pretty images. If you want pretty images go to an AI image generator there's thousands of them online. I have learn that art is a form of communication, so I wanted to tell stories with my art. I wanted to write a webcomic. "Wait but doesn't your blog say mangaka? what does that mean?"

Yes I am really inspired by anime. I watch a lot of anime and I love the stories from them. so I want to create stories in a similar fashion. I also really like the anime art style and im really inspired by that and hope to have my own manga one day. However I want to start off with smaller goals for myself and start with learning how to draw and do a web comic first. I told myself I am not going to stress a lot about the art because then nothing will ever come out of my hands. "But most successful webcomics have amazing art, mangas too" I know but you can't just have amazing art from the get go. Also I don't want to pause my whole story just because the art is bad. Take One Punch Man for example, if you look at its early chapters it looked really unrefined. a lot of people sad One's art was terrible, even from himself, but people loved to story and now it's one of the most popular anime watched. A similar story happened with the creator of Attack on Titan

[silvermaplealder]

Okay so by request of @gothamslostboy I'm going into my rampage about how due to greed and the desire to mass produce (like cutting out artists by using AI generated things) we lose important knowledge and whole trades.

I went to college and accidentally studied agroecology. My main focus turned to oxen, which is a term quite a lot of people don't even know today. So to start, oxen are working cattle that are 4+ years old. Working steers are anything younger than 4 years that are training to be oxen. I was given the opportunity to raise my own team in college. These were my boys:

Working steers/cows and oxen were a vital part of life for thousands of years. We've been working alongside these gentle giants for countless generations, and yet now you never see them anymore. I'm certain you've seen horses pulling carriages, or people riding horses, but oxen and working cattle were used for these purposes too. Horses are much faster than cattle, but they are more flighty and are very expensive to care for. Oxen on the other hand are slower, stronger, and tend to be more docile. And we can't forget that we get a majority of our dairy products from cattle.

So... what happened? The Industrial Revolution happened. Before the IR, all cattle were considered triple purpose: beef, dairy, and draft. Though now, if you say triple purpose you'll get a few laughs. "Dual Purpose" is the new term because draft isn't used anymore, at least not in the US. With the demand for greater production in the late 1700's, there became two different types of cattle: beef and dairy. Horses could outspeed oxen any day in a field. There became a steady decline of the 'family milk cow' which were also used for draft work. Farmers turned horses for working fields while using beef and dairy for production.

And then we lost the horses too once the tractors came along. There had been so much development in various equipment for oxen to make them more comfortable. People spent their whole lives working with these animals. They passed their knowledge onto their children. But with changing times, oxen weren't the best suited to keep up anymore with the demands. Even now, dual purpose breeds are becoming rarer and rarer.

If you look up oxen yoke makers in the US, you'll only find a handful. Older folks who are still trying to pass on the tradition. If you look up oxen harness makers in the US, you'll find 1. Just one. Otherwise, oxen folk now have to rely on making everything themselves or refurbishing old equipment. You know there used to be oxen shoers? Like horses, oxen used to wear shoes. Good luck finding someone to shoe your ox. It's almost impossible now. In a recent survey, some states said that they didn't have any farmers left that use oxen, or even own oxen. Though this can't be confirmed due to many folks that may not have had access to the survey.

With dwindling interest, and the constant loss of folks with the knowledge, oxen working in the US is almost unheard of. You'll find it at living history museums still. Some county fairs in the North East still have oxen pulls. There are some organizations that are still trying to preserve the knowledge, but access to land and equipment becomes harder and harder for younger folks.

This is the fate that other trades face. As artists are being pushed away by AI generated things, there will be a loss of talent. Techniques will be lost. Styles will be lost. It might not be our generation. But it could be the next. Or the one after that.