what a breath of fresh air after being surrounded with corporization of all things
we just chillin here

in case you didn't know For You feed on bsky that's singlehandedly carrying this entire platform is being run on some guy's gaming computer, somewhere.

... but you're not drawing for them—you're drawing for you—and you're not doing yourself any favors by convincing yourself that it's meaningless. Art is meaning, art creates meaning, and if there's one thing artists are good at, it's finding meaning in an seemingly meaningless world.

Yes, people can still repost your art and run it through an AI, but the people who'd go out of their way for that are the kind of people who'd want to spite you anyway—and would love nothing more than you to stop drawing and serve as an example to people who'd question any aspect of AI.

Anyway, it's true that artists will probably be threatened by AI into the forseeable future, probably even *after* the bubble pops—but falling into a malaise and ceasing all creativity is just succumbing to the idea that any and all human involvement in art is obscelete. It's not.

(I am about to be beaten to death by every law student friend I have)

And the people that do have a bone to pick with you? Aside from wasting their time, remember that *you* have rights. Most websites will respect a takedown request if your work has been reposted there without permission. They might drag their feet, but they're also typically obligated by law.

It won't dissuade somebody who believes that they are Prometheus, stealing back the flame of art from begrudging artists—they'll invest the time out of spite. But it *will* dissuade your mom, your dad, mobile users, casual browsers, doomscrollers, and anyone who doesn't have a bone to pick with you.

Posting images as gifs or on another site won't stop people from running it through AI. It didn't stop them before. But it does create an inconvenience, a few button presses, saving, posting, running it though—a few seconds of inconvenience at best, but it adds up, and is enough to dissuade most.

The issue with Twitter's Edit Image feature isn't the fact that it can utilize glazed and poisoned art—the issue is that it's convenient. A button on every image on the platform. a single press, a short sentence, and you can completely override somebody's art or photo in a matter of seconds.

Still, it was effective—not because it's infalliable, but because it's a nuissance to undo. It won't stop a particularly determined person, perhaps working out of spite, but the vast majority of people care little about such things, only saving and reposting works as is—signature, watermark and all.

Of course, that doesn't prevent a thoroughly determined person with enough time and motivation to undo those efforts anyway. Signatures can be erased, a transparent watermark can be removed with a negative copy of the same watermark, and worse comes to worse, one can just trace over another's art.

People have always been able to steal another's work. This was true even before generative AI became prominent. Artists would hide their signatures, spam watermarks in the background, and go through hell and high water to prevent their art from being stolen and used by unscrupulous people.