I am so exhausted. Buckle up, this is a bit of a rant.
I haven't done art in months. I feel like when I pick up a pen or my drawing tablet now, it's muscle memory, it's a reflex. But the ideas don't come. My sketchbooks are gathering dust and dog hair in the corner. My pen case is beside them. I cringe when I look their direction.
Last year I tried to make my way into A Full Time Career I was initially excited about. And while the management wrung any remaining enthusiasm out of me (leading to me leaving within ~10 weeks), I realized in turn that I had no energy to do anything when I got home. I couldn't cook, I couldn't do laundry or dishes, and I certainly couldn't pick up a pencil. Our home fell into disrepair and so did my drawing muscle.
I've rarely felt at home doing anything except drawing and painting. And I know one day I'll get the motivation back; I'm not worried about that. I know one day an idea worth more than a bar napkin doodle will break down the door in my brain and demand, with a gun to my prefrontal cortex, to be rendered in reality. I will have no choice. I will block out everything until the page is full and the idea has been satisfied that It Exists, and its shouting quiets.
But what then? Where do I put it?
In the modern day, "online" has historically been the answer. Instagram was the art and picture platform. Facebook has devolved into a cesspool but still made for a keyword you could pitch to people when they'd ask, "where can I see more of your work?" And now there's the website that I and my lovely partner share.
But now. I am terrified to put my work online. And I won't pretend here: I'm not a Dungeons & Dragons illustrator, or a popular cartoonist, or anyone notable with a recognizable name. But I see these people, these fellow creatives, devastated they've found their art either manufactured into an NFT, or AI scraped so thoroughly that some incurious techbro can plug "nude masturbating Princess Leia in the style of Simon Bailly" into Midjourney and have it spit out something Bailly never would have bothered drawing. Even Adobe has made it plain that your cloud storage is fair game for them to train their machine learning on, and users have no option to opt out.
Because that's just it, right? The whole goal is not to pay artists. The goal is to supersede humans entirely. Humans who need to eat and pay rent and work in order to survive capitalism. Humans who, in many instances, live and breathe specifically to create.
The solution touted by many of these AI evangelists is to either embrace it, or get a job in tech. These conversations are mind-numbingly fruitless so I won't bore you here, but the bottom line comes down to, "Doing art is easy and useless."
If it's so useless, then why are you stealing it?
I don't know where to go with this from here. I've deactivated my Instagram for now (apologies to everyone for the lack of notice), and I think I'm going to just focus on updating my work on Bozemart. We know about Nightshade and will be implementing it in all future uploads.
I know this is the future, but the future sucks. When I draw again, you'll know. Take care. -Nan
(originally posted June 7th, 2024)