#to discern and make value judgments on content authorship like normal human beings and maybe improve this whole nightmare of theft culture

[legionofpotatoes]

Not the same anon as the matrix art ask, but there are plenty of artists I've seen who have a general "do not use my art for anything" rule simply to make their stance very clear on people not using/reposting their artwork without permission

Granted, thieves are gonna thieve anyway, but I guess it helps minimize people trying to take your words out of context. I've seen plenty of assholes take "personal use" to mean "oh, so I can sell your art for my own profit, cool" and then shit talk the artist when they get called out for being a scummy prick (uncommon, sure, but I've seen it enough times to know it's a real issue)

Obviously, there's no harm in using someone's art as your background/wallpaper if that's genuinely your intention, but I think anyone asking for permission to do so is probably aware of the art theft junk to some degree and is honestly just trying to be respectful

my caveats with "personal use" were private, individual, and non-commercial. I definitely don't go around touting those two words freely either, and I deal with enough art theft to force me to partition a separate work day every month to curate takedown requests. I'm as jaded as they come, I'd like to think.

and sure, those are all good and sound arguments for someone's internal moral compass and I respect that, and I fully appreciate them in almost every other case of "use"; be it reposting, roleplaying, using as icons or banners, tattooing them on, etc. since all of those uses, in some shape or form, imply public display of those images that will then invite the audience's eye and drastically improve artist discoverability if a credit is slapped on, but will create an invisible two-step barrier that most will not work to engage with if that credit isn't there. I get all that, and I aggressively champion authorship credits in my overall content sharing etiquette on the internet, for those exact reasons.

But I'm gonna be 100% honest with you here, when it comes to background pictures for my extremely private goober that I carry around in my own pocket and use with my own two eyes and no one else's, I tend to just save and set whatever wallpaper I want? 😬 it falls into a completely different category of "use" to me. again, I am not saying I don't appreciate the respectful place these asks are coming from, but they do truly baffle me on some level when I try to imagine that headspace: how would an artist be a) impacted monetarily; b) lose even granular awareness; c) or even find out to then exercise some other form of arbitrary reasoning? it's a bit strange!

but I'm not gonna like die on this hill cause everyone asking is a total sweetheart and again I love where it is coming from. But it is still strange with the lockscreens! is all I'm saying 😅