OccultArt: My take on the AI situation and protests
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My open letters to Artstation:
Part 1: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/r9qDqJ
Part 2: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Jex8E0
Part 3: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/B3Z5Km (My reply to the reaction from Artstation)
Thanks for reading!
Replies
Call me ignorant if one must, but I Think if anyone wants Artstation/Epic Games to appropriately respond to these matters. The best measure is to devalue the platform.
How?
Everyone Deactivate, or delete all of your accounts *If deactivation is not possible. Put a halt to all Artwork being displayed. Because an art gallery is no longer a art gallery if there are no images to be displayed within it. For it is just a "space" that remains.
The letters are a nice gesture, but they will not move dollars.
The problem is the owner is epic games that has vast capital to keep the platform up even if revenue is 0.
A more valid reason regardless of the AI situation to leave is the caps on free accounts.
But you could just as easily end pro subscriptions.
It isn't artists leaving artstation that will damage it but AI art being mass posted to it.
Though by and large I never understood why anyone uses it unless they are utterly dependent on the platform for exposure.
When I saw "OccultArt" in the title, I thought this was going to be an interesting take on how AI art is kind of like tarot cards or divination; like, you can encode an intent into it while writing the prompt, and then decode it the way you would a tarot spread or dream or tea reading. And instead of protesting it in more traditional ways, we should make sure it gets "claimed" by the weirdo new-age witchy scene, by using it openly and widely in such a way, which will make it poisonous to the more typical dev types.
Good letters, though the contents were different than I expected! I think they raise good points and anything that gets Artstation thinking more about their role is good.