#artists nightshade and glaze your stuff

[longwuzhere]

Tumblr is doing more dumb shit. You can opt out when this goes live, but that fact that its even happening at all is fucking stupid.

[tofupixel]

TofuPixel Links + FAQ - Commissions Open!

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Yes you can use / cross-stitch my work for personal use! <3

🎨 Pixel Art Beginner Guide

Hello, I'm Tofu, a pixel artist based in England. I work full-time doing pixel illustrations or game-art. I started learning in my early 20s, so no it's not too late for you!

I run a 7k+ member Discord server called Cafe Dot, where we host events like gesture drawing and portrait club.

I currently have Good Omens brainrot so expect some fanart on this blog. I also occasionally do/reblog horror art so be mindful of that!

Due to so much AI nonsense on every platform, all my public work will be filtered/edited with anti-AI scraping techniques. Supporters on my Ko-Fi can see unfiltered work and also download it.

Want to learn how to do pixel art? Check my tutorial tag!

Other tags:

tutorial (not pixel specific)

my art

follow (artists i recommend)

🌟Free Stuff!!!

❔FAQ

What app do you use? I use Aseprite on PC and occasionally Pixquare on iOS (use code tofu for 30% off Pixquare!! <3) Free alternative: Libresprite on PC

Why does your art look so crunchy / compressed? Glaze

How did you learn pixel art? I first started out watching MortMort and making tiny sprites. Then once I started getting interested in landscapes/environment art, I did many, many Studio Ghibli studies.

How can I also protect my art? You can use Glaze and Nightshade- Glaze protects against Img2Img style copying, and Nightshade poisons the data so the AI thinks it's the opposite of what it actually is. There is a lot of misinformation going around (likely from pro-AI groups) so do your own research too! If you're a pixel artist you can also tilt or blur your art after upscaling, which will make it near useless to AI models (or regular thieves) once downscaled again.

Feel free to send me an ask if there's anything you want to know! I am always happy to help beginners :--3

[adorkastock]

Hi Adorkastock!

With the new agreement between Tumblr and OpenAI/Midjourney, I immediately started worrying about your poses being scraped without your knowledge/consent (well, scraped *again*, we already know DeviantArt did it, I got hit there too).

There's apparently a toggle you can use in your blog settings to opt out of third party forwarding (although it's not confirmed if Midjourney/OpenAI will honour that), and if you want more protection I'd suggest looking into whether or not you could apply Nightshade and/or Glaze to your photos before posting, which would make them useless for LLMs to use as training data.

Thank you for everything you do, I've been following you for many years now and your references have been an amazing resource.

Thank you so much! Yes, I have all but completely given up on keeping my poses out of computer generated image databases. There's too much of me everywhere online and a bunch of my stuff was probably in the initial scraps from places like DA and Pinterest. But I'm glad you sent this because even though Tumblr is being a shit on a stick and not making the OPT OUT DEFAULT AS IT SHOULD BE just like DA did, you asking this might mean more people see this so they can go opt out on all their blogs. I came back to tumblr because DeviantArt did this exact thing. Companies have a chance to stand with artists, stand with creative people, but again and again they choose shiny things and money over us. Ty for the heads up even though I did know and I've already done this. Such an exhausting song and dance to be trapped in over and over and over.

[cervinelich]

To my artist friends thinking of leaving Tumblr:

1. The truth is, your art was probably already scraped. AI models did not ask permission before large-scale scraping, there is no reason to believe this partnership means anything that wasn't already happening.

2. If you delete your blog or your posts, they already exist in all of the reblogs and chances are the opt-out function doesn't extend to other people not opting out who have reblogged your art.

What does this mean? Are things just hopeless?

Well... for artists on social media it seems like jumping from platform to platform just isn't really going to change how tech companies are all too eager to lie, cheat and steal from real artists.

What I am planning to do is go through and re-upload all of my art after it has been glazed and nightshaded and I think everyone else should do the same. At this point our biggest weapon is poisoning their programs until they are too expensive or unprofitable to maintain, imo.

That and make sure you yourself are not supporting people spreading stolen content as much as possible. Reposters, AI prompters, and hell... work on a plan to stop using stuff like Spotify that is no longer paying small artists.

I understand the panic going on right now, but the sad truth is that damage has likely already been done.

We NEED to stop giving undeserving pieces of shit our money and go back to our punk roots. Piracy, DIY, community building, malicious non-compliance and supporting artists directly.

💜 💜

[tendermiasma]

Sorry if this is kinda a depressing question, but how do you find the will power to keep posting your art? Personally I'm struggling to be more confident in sharing my art in a world full of ai programs data scraping and being really scared of putting myself out there consistently, I don't understand how others manage to keep doing it. How did you overcome nervousness (if any) as a beginning artist? I keep scrapping blogs and remaking and burning out and then deleting again before I do it all over.

I'm sorry you're struggling with art, it's not fun. In my case I have this unfortunate disease that makes me think everyone needs to see every thought about my obsessions that passes through my brain and I've been that way forever. I have a lot of feelings about the things I love and this is how I communicate them. I'm as frustrated at AI as anyone else but sharing my art is just a really enjoyable part of my life and it's the remedy to things that upset me. I don't see a reason to cede ground to something inferior that will get destroyed in litigation anyway because nothing can be copyrighted. It's also kind of my job to be online because it's where a lot of networking happens; being prepared for financial disruption is a powerful motivator.

It sounds like you're getting a little bogged down in the blogmaking stage so I'd try not messing with UI or organization and just focusing on making and posting art for a while. The other stuff can be done later. From my experience in doing things that are intimidating, they'll never not be intimidating until you do it so you just have to push through for a bit. Also putting Glaze and Nightshade on your work help protect against AI scraping.

[ralfmaximus]

Do you know anything about Glaze and Nightshade, tools to help artists protect their art from AI scraping? I just heard about these

Sure!

The idea behind these tools is to 'poison' the art you publish by embedding pixels within the picture that humans don't notice but AI generators do. They then hoover those extra pixels up as part of the artist 'style'.

Then, when that poisoned data is used to generate new artworks, the output is skewed/distorted/bad. The human who prompted the AI becomes disillusioned, and moves on.

That artist's style has been protected!

And yes, that sort of works. But there are caveats:

it is naïve to assume AI models are only just now discovering your art, after it's been poisoned. these things have been grinding thru the internet for years and years. chances are, the art has already been stolen

same for writing, chats, memes, etc

for example: tumblr put a nice "opt out" switch in your privacy settings, but honestly? AI generators have been consuming tumblr content for years. that particular horse has already left the barn

while Glaze/Nightshade/etc do what they say NOW, the nature of AI generator technology is that it is always evolving. the next gen will be smarter, and see through this kind of protection

it is a war of escalation: AI gets better, Glaze gets better, the AI generation after that breaks the new protection, Glaze gets better again

lather, rinse, repeat

So we're totally fucked, right?

Maybe not.

As more and more AI generated bullshit makes it into the wild, that stuff goes right back into the training data for other/newer AIs. Eventually enough of that training data is mediocre/bad/meh generated bullshit that the output starts looking like that bullshit too.

In 2024 requesting "Bart Simpson as a real human" yields acceptable results. But by 2026? You'll get the hyperattenuated super-duper bad uncanny valley version that screams fake AI. Not what the user wanted at all.

And of course, the guys building these AI systems might figure out a workaround for that but maybe by then people will have figured out that our current fixation on AI is really just a stupid technology bubble, like NFT apes.

Here's hoping.

[drawnfamiliarfaces]

Since this is currently my most active blog with some followers, just wanted to say a few things:

It's so incredibly depressing to see tumblr sellout to the whole AI shit and try to pacify users by the opt-out toggle option when it mostly likely won't do jack shit. Tumblr has been doing shitty things for awhile now, but out of all old social media it was a last shabby bastion for various weirdos, including a fandom weirdo like me.

I'm just an old silly hobbyist artist who badly draws fanart of old cartoons, but even the idea that my stuff will help train AI to be better to stealing desirable art of actual artists, whose work is their livelyhood is fucking maddening. Opting out won't help (Sources say data is already available to companies). Deleting stuff won't help (tumblr have access to deleted blogs and reblogs put your stuff in reach too). Using Nightshade and Glaze is not a viable option for me (my old laptop's specks is not up to support those programs, and I'm too afraid to try and accidently fry it and than all my shit would be lost) and even those doesn't solve the problems of all of my old stuff across like 7 sideblogs+my old tumblr account's 2 blogs.

Of course, maybe all hope is not lost for tumblr. There may be solutions and decisions later down the line. But for now I probably won't be posting any new stuff for a bit while I decide if I want to stay on tumblr and be complicit in feeding the insidious and insatiable AI machines.

And as alternatives, I created new account for bluesky, and consider pillowfort and cohost to share my random silly art. Even dusted out my old tapas and newgrounds accounts, and consider webtoons and comicfury to post and archive my few comics. Hopefully I will share links in my pinned post when I set whatever I decide up, even if all of it is so exhausting and depressing.

And hey, if you read this so far - just a reminder:

Opt out on that 'share with third parties' toggle like explained here! - it may do jack shit, but its better than nothing.

Write a polite disagreeing feedback to staff like suggested on this post. - remember not all staff had a hand in this, so no need to be rude, but make sure to have your voice be heard.

Use Nightshade and Glaze to poison your art - if you are an artist and are able to do it unlike me. It may not be sure proof way to stop/kill AI, but it sure shows that artists will fight back.

Use ArtShield - an online lowtech alternative to Nightshade & Glaze, puts a stamp/watermark on your art, invisible to humans but supposedly makes AI think its unsuitable to train on. (edit)

And please, take a moment for yourself. Because it fucking sucks.

So, I'm gonna go take a step back and burrow into some hole and cry for all of those who AI fucks over. I won't be gone forever, but for now I'm too frustrated and dissapointed to do anything.

and ALSO just to be fucking clear

🇺🇦 I STAND WITH UKRAINE 🇺🇦

🇵🇸 FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE 🇵🇸

🏳️‍⚧️ TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS 🏳️‍⚧️

🚫 AI CREATIONS ARE NOT ART🚫

fuck you shitty side tumblr I wish you all a fucking hammer car explosion

[arcadekitten]

How do you feel about Instagram using non-consenting art to training their Ai models?

Will you delete your account to move to another platform?

Or will you glaze your art in order to poison said Ai data?

Or will you continue posting regularly in spite of that?

(Sorry for so many questions! 😅)

So here's my hot-take on the whole thing *cracks knuckles*

A website saying they're using your art to train AI doesn't mean your art WASN'T being used to train AI before that.

Say Instagram "takes it back" and decides to undo AI-integration. That means little. AI bros are still going to be screenshotting your art, and feeding it into AI to train it off of. Even saying "screenshot" is being generous. Can your art be found by searching on google? Probably! And AI bros are scraping those in large to train their models!

Art will always be used to train AI regardless of consent. While I respect the efforts of glaze and nightshade, they still come with flaws and loopholes. (Ex: the AI might not be able to mimic the style in a glazed artwork but can still copy the composition and ideas presented)

And even if I did delete my old art and start glazing my new stuff, it's not like I'd glaze the assets or CGs for my games or anything--and those could still be fed into an AI anyways.

Now like, this is all just based on things Ive seen and heard and my personal experience. I'm not an expert on this nor should I be treated as such.

I just feel, in my own opinion, glaze/nightshade are bandaid solutions to much bigger problems involving the lack of respect for the arts as well as unregulated+unlawful AI training and usage.

So yeah I'm not really planning on doing anything different for myself. But I do hope we can work towards and get to a place where AI artwork isn't actively harming artists(and the environment) anymore too.

[eggnogo]

I am beginning to run out of patience for all this, I barely remember to keep up one page let alone 4 of them (that I have to keep tabs on just in case one of them decides it'll be funny to start handing my stuff over to some generative ai trash fire)

on top of every platform I rely on for exposure burning down, there's people telling me left and right "just glaze your art lol" like I'm gonna put my computer through the equivalent of a 25 minute 3D render every time I post a sketch

I feel like none of these people have actually touched either glaze or nightshade, or realize how many artist draw on shitty old laptops or things like ipads, I have a lot more spare resources than the average artist and it'd still be a huge annoyance for me

I miss when I could just post stuff and the only thing I had to worry about was some 12 year old on amino pretending they were me

[sexhaver]

Hi there! I hope this doesn’t sound antagonistic (I’m not trying to be, just playing the devils advocate. Also, my background is more in bioinformatics, so I’m not sure if that counts as “layman” or not, but I do handle a lot of data and databases) but a lot of blowback regarding AI stuff is the sheer desperation a lot of artist feel regarding the scraping of art. Work really has dried up for many artists directly as a result from AI, and it doesn’t help a lot of studios have been laying off people. The people at the working at Nightshade and Glaze understand it’s not a perfect tool or solution, but, like they clarified before, it does provide some friction and it’s still being worked on. Personally, I would also like some of the energy directed to making some legislation happened, but it’s going to take time and a concerted movement before that happens.

May I ask what are your thoughts on this? I would love to hear more from you! I think most of the time people act rashly is from desperation more than stupidity.

any "legislation" around AI art would take the form of corporations using this as an opportunity to expand IP and copyright law in ways that would only benefit them (corporations) and directly harm everyone else, including independent artists

the Luddites were wrong

[bawmbo]

FUCK AI!! Artist made by people will ALWAYS be more valuable and enjoyable than art made by the machine, especially unethically. Reminder that stolen art is still stolen! AI is an amalgamation of artists hard work stolen without their permission and frankenstein'd together to create something that should have never existed in the first place. And while there CAN be AI used for good, such as how they used it in SpiderVerse to aide the process - it was used by consenting artists that did not do the entire job for them, but rather menial tasks.

AI is incredibly dangerous for other means, especially with the making of videos, games, and other stuff. As someone who finds home in artist fairs / alleys and whose whole love and joy comes from creation, the feeling is disheartening but more-so lights a fire. Human art will always prevail. We will never die, and to not let AI steal - in reference to my previous post, Go into your settings (under visibility) and check off a setting that lets Tumblr use your art for training - and if you're on computer and have the means to do so, use Nightshade / Glaze and poison your art. How this works, is that the programs will shift the pixels ever-so-slightly, unnoticed by the human eye but will completely fuck up the training for the AI - so your picture of a cat could end up looking like a really uncanny picture of a cow to the bot :) ( Though, I do realize it takes a long time to download? I haven't quite gotten around to using it yet, but I've heard from quite a few people that it works x) ) on the other hand, there's a warmup sketch and i have been trying to think of ways to experiment with my art style :))

[doodlemancy]

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhh

so here's the deal re: this fucking horseshit. god i hate this.

i, personally, have mostly given up on trying to dodge inclusion in AI datasets. the stuff i make generally isn't what they're looking for anyway and there's no real way to 100% avoid being scraped short of becoming entirely invisible online, which would um, lead to me having no money and dying. that's part of the cruelty of all this, but also, in a way, it's the same risk artists online have always taken; if you want people to see your work, you have to post it knowing that some of those people are fucking lowlife piece of shit scumbags who will try to resell it on redbubble or something for a quick buck. AI is just a new and exhausting way for garbagey people to stink worse. i am not in any way excusing that behavior or trying to imply people should not be mad about it or that we shouldn't condemn this move and fight back. "if you don't want your work stolen, don't put it online" is the kind of shitty Internet Tough Guy talk i've always hated since my dA days. it's as useless and heartless as telling people that if they don't want their bikes stolen, they shouldn't leave them at the bike rack. i'm saying that i, personally, will not let a bunch of soulless thieving shitheads drive me offline. i belong here. they belong in a wifi-proof dumpster.

nightshade and glaze eat my artwork alive. they make it look terrible. when you have to sell things on the basis that they look nice, it's a big problem when protective measures make them look like dogshit. my work is not a good candidate for these processes. even if that weren't the case, i don't have the stamina, especially right now while my chronic pain is flaring for the third month in a row and my adhd meds are scarce, to go back and shade/glaze everything, and it wouldn't work on reblogs anyway. given the way midjourney and its equally stinky siblings have already scraped years and terabytes' worth of image data from popular websites, it doesn't seem worth my time. if you think it is worth yours i am not going to like, yell at you. i am just one person. but i want to be clear about the kind of situations some of us are being forced into.

i think some of the doomsaying about AI and what it will do to us has been overblown-- they need you, for marketing purposes, to believe that someday their shitty robot will be as good at "drawing" and as practical to work with as a human-- but the consequences of "AI" (which is not even actually AI) are already real and visible and obvious to anyone paying attention. i unfortunately am not infinitely wise and powerful and therefore do not have an ideal all-encompassing solution to this deeply stupid problem that the Most Unlikeable Manbabies On Earth have imposed on us after NFTs fizzled out.

what i do have is a very large repository of nice anime and game screenshots i've taken, knowledge of many archives of nice public domain images, a computer that can run nightshade overnight or while i'm off doing other things, and, most importantly, near-infinite capacity for pettiness. i do kinda feel like the jury is still out on how well nightshade/glaze will work in the long run, but in the meantime, i suppose it wouldn't cost me a lot to... perhaps... every time i get Mad About AI™, channel that anger into dumping some thoroughly-but-not-spammily-tagged, high-quality, inconspicuous poison onto this godforsaken hellsite via a secret side blog. i could make a batch of poison ahead of time, keep it on my phone, use my Toilet Scrolling Time or my Public Transit Time to post and tag up an image here and there. it could be a fun challenge to try to make some pretty robot poison that some humans will still enjoy.

the other thing we need to poison at this point, IMO, is the word "AI" itself, by being loudly and mercilessly critical of any company that dabbles in it, the same way we all clowned on any company that pushed their luck with NFT/crypto shit a couple of years ago. we need to have every corporation terrified that association with AI will tank their sales and hurt their brand. AI must = number go down and lots of people screaming at you. companies will fuck around. we must provide the finding-out. we shouldn't have to. but we can!

so make sure to let tumblr know you hate this. maybe you could include this interesting link (tw child abuse) about how Stable Diffusion was trained on some extremely serious crime. or these screenshots of Midjourney devs just sort of admitting what their whole thing is, which i got here but which have kinda been spread all over since January.

spite and anger can be forms of hope. that's all i have to say, or at least all i'm willing to type with my left hand tonight.

[kim-hu]

Hi! I’m a big fan of your art and found your work via tumblr. However I’m not an artist myself (not as much as I used to be, anyway) and I know you’re on Cara now. Is it worth it for non-artists to join? I love seeing your work and that’s pretty much the only reason why I’d join Cara, but at the same time I don’t want to make an account I’m going to forget about. 😅 What are your thoughts on it for non-artists?

Hey nonny, thank you so much for the kind words, I am happy you enjoy my art so much! 🧡 I am very sorry for not posting on Tumblr anymore and abandoning everyone on here, but I just cannot with good faith feed all my stuff into Midjourney AI by posting it on here, even with Glaze and Nightshade added on, it just feels bad knowing it will DEFINITELY end up in the dataset. I have deleted my instagram for the same reason. :(( About Cara! I would say art appreciators are welcome, too! You have a social feed to which you can share memes, posts, and art you enjoy. You also have a dedicated bookmark system with folders, so you can collect the posts you like. But especially the social feeds make it worth it for non-artists as well, I'd say. It is a combo of both portfolio and a social like twitter/tumblr- SPEAKING OF, if that is still too art-centric for you, I have also hopped on twitter successor Bluesky. Which can lovingly be described as a cross between twit and tumblr (the good parts), and I am very active on there. So that is also an option, especially if you miss the memes, shitposts, and Tasky stanning, as it is heavy on them! PS, both sites can also be accessed without making an account at all, so you could technically just bookmark them and check in on it every once in a while. :) Or if all that is too much, my discord has a public channel to which art updates get posted! I hope any of these options can help you 🧡

>> CARA >> BLUESKY

>> DISCORD

[echo-bleu]

Re: tumblr selling our data to AI companies.

I don't know if it's overly cynical to say, but it's nothing that all the other social media haven't done already, with more or less publicity. I see people being like, "I'm going away from Tumblr, I'll be on Instagram instead" and. Do you really think Facebook and co aren't selling all of your stuff already. They are.

The AI companies are buying a shitload of data now, I'm guessing mostly so they can say they have "legally acquired" content when the laws and lawsuits start rolling in, but they were scrapping tumblr before that. They were and are scrapping AO3 and whatever other website you use. It's disturbingly easy to get ChatGPT to write shitty omegaverse. If you ask the image AIs to give you Maedhros from the Silmarillion, they'll spit out red-haired guys - that's not because it's canon (it's not even in the Silm) but because it's been trained on our fanart.

This is undoubtedly a shitty move on Tumblr's part, I hate it, etc. This is sure as hell not a defence of them. Do toggle the toggle to "opt-out" for whatever good it's going to do. Do Glaze your art if you can, Nightshade if you can (remember that Nightshade doesn't protect shit though), I don't think either of those are the panacea I've seen them described as but it's better than nothing. But ultimately, all of our stuff online (not just art, and not just public things) has been scrapped and will be scrapped. It doesn't matter if it's on your personal website or on shitty social media.

The internet's core concept is sharing, and that involves a certain amount of goodwill on all sides of the transaction. And that goodwill, when it comes to those big companies, just isn't there. The only way to protect your art from being scrapped is to not share it anywhere.

I don't have a solution. Those models are probably going to burn themselves out eventually, but the next thing will be as bad or worse. The big companies have considered themselves above the law for years and legal frameworks are unlikely to do much. The choice is between not sharing anything and giving up on the communities that bring me joy, or accepting that my art will be stolen whatever I do. Personally I'm going to keep sharing my art on here with the people who enjoy it, and try to remember even in the worst moments of imposter syndrome that it will always be a thousand times better than whatever shitty things the AIs are sprouting by stealing it.

This isn't the solution (or even compromise) I wish I could have. I'm writing this because all the posts I'm seeing are panicking and guilt-tripping, and I've caught myself feeling guilty for still wanting to share my art even though it's going to feed the Machines(TM) and. Can we please stop that. Can we not make the artists somehow responsible for being stolen from.

[messydiabolical]

I've seen there's posts going round saying you need to delete all your art from tumblr, right now! This very second! Because it's gonna get scraped for AI!!! And I totally get anyone who does delete their stuff to avoid that, or at least deletes the old stuff and reuploads with glaze or nightshade But I dunno, I've reached the point where I feel like all these companies (the AI creators, and the social media sites etc.) are so blasé about your data, so out of any fucks about privacy and personal ownership and only care about £$ line go up, that it's probably all been scraped a thousand times already?! Tumblr's move will certainly make this even easier and more likely, but, whenever I post anything online anymore I am under the full belief that this is gonna get taken and used by anyone who wants to already 🤷‍♂️ Perhaps that is a negative mindset, but I dunno guys, it feels like the damage is largely already done and deleting all my art at this point will only serve to make my life less fun. On a more positive note, the kind of people that are running AI are ridiculous tech bros, the exact types that ran nft's and various other hair brained schemes straight into the ground, so there's hope there too. If AI was being developed seriously as an actual tool for artists to use it's one thing, and I think there could be legitimately interesting uses there. but the current state of affairs with the rampant theft and fuck you get mine attitude ignoring any copyright laws in their path, it could easily all crash and burn a couple of lawsuits later. Or people will just get bored and move on. In the mean time yes, it is doing real damage to artists, not arguing that. Just saying as negative as my attitude to this situation is, I also have hope that it may not be the all out artistic apocalyptic event some predict. But as it stands now, I feel like everything online is 'free real estate' to these people, no matter what checkboxes you ticked or watermarks you added, or new policies dickhead CEO's add to their social media sites. To be clear: It shouldn't be this way, it fucking sucks, and by all means delete your stuff if you feel it necessary. I don't plan to at the moment. I do have glaze set up for future posts. Anyway just my thoughts on the matter at the moment. Anyone else feel this way? Or, if you are deleting your stuff now, what are you going to do going forward? New websites/come back and repost with glaze/other?

[wyldblunt]

oh, sorry to say, it turns out those data poisoning things work on ONE type of ai art model- and can be defeated by applying a 10px guassian blur. don't ruin your work with it, it's not going to do anything.

that's too bad to hear, though i don't think it's new info and it's not something glaze + nightshade haven't acknowledged in their documentation iirc (for example, it's known that glaze can't protect from img2img). i think it's still worth it to link to the tools and allow ppl to read the documentation and decide for themselves whether they'd like to use it, and given that it's mainly meant to be a deterrent -- a 10px gaussian blur is pretty significantly damaging, especially depending on original image size, and i'm not automatically opposed to anything that at least inconveniences or slows down people who are trying to scrape tags to train models on our stuff without artist consent. i'm not saying ppl might not still come to the decision to not use these tools -- i'm still weighing it myself, more on the front of time + effort than even efficacy at this point -- but i don't think either "these tools will definitely protect us and everyone SHOULD use them!!" or "these tools are useless, there's no point" are complete or accurate answers