humanist + humorist

Trying something new:

On Tumblr, I’m queuing a set of 30 past Leif & Thorn strips, with a bit of director’s commentary for each. No particular order, and I’m not trying to find my Favorite Strips of All Time, just “hey, I have something to say about this one.”

And then I’m crossposting them on Facebook, Instagram, Xitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky. (That’s right, I’m seizing the moment to experiment with Bluesky. If you’re there too, give me a follow.)

Which site gets the best response? Which posts get the most traction? Which platform(s) will I keep posting on after this project is complete? TBD!

(I’m not crossposting on Dreamwidth, or WordPress, because neither of those is a great “get your work in front of people who don’t already follow you” platform. Will stick to using those for, you know, regular old-fashioned blogging.)

Back in November 2022, DeviantArt introduced a toggle for “My Art Is/Is Not Authorized For Use In AI Datasets”, which you could set for individual posts or for your account as a whole.

When launched, it was “authorized by default, unless you opt out.” After a barrage of complaints from furious users, they changed it to “unauthorized by default, unless you opt in.”

Now, almost a year and a half later, Automattic — the company that owns Tumblr, and WordPress.com — is gleefully stepping on the same rake.

FFA thread, with the full news-breaking article + commentary. And the official Tumblr staff post explaining how you can opt-out your blogs. Will they follow in DA’s footsteps with the rest of it, and acknowledge that the only honest way to “support your rights” and “give individuals control over their content” is to not use anything without a user’s active, purposeful opt-in? Time will tell.

Bonus: some details from rahaeli (Dreamwidth founder Denise) on the technical reasons why this is happening. Main thing is, you need mass quantities of pure unsullied human-generated art and writing for your training data, or you end up in a messy cannibalistic loop of bots ingesting the output of other bots.

I keep hearing artists recommend “data-poisoning filters” for your art. I’m…not convinced these make a real difference. We’ve seen this in the other direction, where art thieves tried to use filters to hide that their uploads were stolen art, and DA’s plagiarism-detecting bot still matched them to the original images:

Seems pretty likely that the plagiarism-doing bots will be just as hard to thwart.

Honestly, I’m wondering if the only way to genuinely “poison” these models is…start slipping them full-on bot-generated content. Uploaded by genuine digital artists, to the sites we know they’re scraping, and tagged as our original work.

For example, here’s some new fanart of the Moon Knight headmates drawn by Erin Ptah:

And some new fanart of the Madoka Magica holy quintet drawn by Erin Ptah:

100% safe authentic human-created artwork! Featuring thoughtful canon-accurate details, and lovely non-melting hands! Midjourney should definitely train on this.