Alys Guerin

#romanticacademia #inaccessibleheart #fallinlove #loveme #lovesolitude

As of 2021, We actually reversed the progression of the hole in the ozone layer, and it is projected to be completely repaired by 2060. 🌍

Good job us!

…

For anyone born after Shrek 2 (2004) who might not know. HCFC and CFC emissions from, well, pretty much all aerosol sprays, globally, were damaging a portion of our atmosphere call the ozone layer around the poles. CFC were banned in Sweden in 1978 and many countries followed suit. They were internationally banned in 1987 and the ban took full effect in 1994.

Ozone, being a relatively weak bond of O3 in the upper atmosphere, prevented a lot of solar radiation from entering our atmosphere. It is essential to maintain homeostasis for our current biosphere ecosystems —It counteracts the primary source of global warming.

There’s a protest going on against AI art over on artstation, so I feel like now is the time for me to make a statement on this issue! 

I wholeheartedly support the ongoing protest against AI art. Why? Because my artwork is included in the datasets used to train these image generators without my consent. I get zero compensation for the use of my art, even though these image generators cost money to use, and are a commercial product. 

Musicians are not being treated the same way. Stability has a music generator that only uses royalty free music in their dataset. Their words: “Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues.” Why is the work of visual artists being treated differently?

Many have compared image generators to human artists seeking out inspiration. Those two are not the same. My art is literally being fed into these generators through the datasets, and spat back out of a program that has no inherent sense of what is respectful to artists. As long as my art is literally integrated into the system used to create the images, it is commercial use of my art without my consent.

Until there is an ethically sourced database that compensates artists for the use of their images, I am against AI art. I also think platforms should do everything they can to prevent scraping of their content for these databases. 

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.

Entreaty To A Lover

Watercolor On Black Paper

2022, 11"x 14'

Orchid and Hummingbird near a Mountain Waterfall, 1902/Orchids and Hummingbirds, 1875–1890