Octopus Blog

Taras Shevchenko and Ira Aldridge by Heorhiy Melikhov, 1963

and everyone is posting their 4th of july manis

except this year its very few american flags and red white and blue and stars.

and a LOT of pond scum inspiration

Please never lose your passion ❤️

Hi anon ^^

Thank you so much for joining the party and enjoying my work! It’s really kind of you to take the time to leave a comment. 💗

I’m sorry your incredible art style has been stolen and is so often used by AI. 

It started really early, you know. I was already finding Bucky fan art on Pinterest that was veeeery close to my style (but with weird textures and shading), and I quickly realized they were AI-generated images. They were almost certainly made by feeding my work from The Life of Bucky Barnes (my Steve/Bucky side account) into models like MidJourney. 🙃

That’s life, I guess. 😅 There’s not much you can do about it, and I don’t think tools like Glaze help all that much. Even if I protect my new pieces, I have a huge back catalogue that can already be used to train these machines. Enjoy the feast, Nano Banana! 😞👌

To be honest, the fact that my work gets fed into AI isn’t even the worst part for me. What really gets to me is that people are now calling my art AI, including pieces from TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN. 🙃 Usually when someone accuses me, I just sigh, explain that it’s not AI, show my old works, share process shots, etc. Most people are understanding, but sometimes you end up arguing with people who know nothing about digital art. And they’re often younger than my DeviantArt account…It’s getting exhausting in the long run, and I have a feeling this is only the beginning. 🤓

On top of that, my style seems to be exactly what AI loves to copy. Not to mention that my inspirations for this kind of work (like here, here and here) are artists such as John Singer Sargent and Waterhouse…the very same artists AI is trained heavily on. So, at the end of the day, I study these masters, AI studies them too, and it also steals from me. The result? My art looks like AI…or AI looks like my art. I don’t even know anymore. 🤓✌ “My art looking like it was made by a robot” definitely wasn’t on my bingo card when I started my Tumblr in 2010.

So even when kind people like you tell me not to “lose my passion”, it’s hard not to wonder sometimes… what for?

AI can almost do what I do now, and a lot of normies (I’m using “normies” without any condescension here) genuinely can’t tell the difference. They’ll call a piece AI even if I spent ten hours on it. They can’t fathom that you can achieve these textures and this level of realism by drawing from scratch in Photoshop or Rebelle. It’s draining, and it makes you question whether you should change your style… even though AI will probably copy the new one too. 🤓 No style is safe anymore. People think AI only copies Ghibli, Artgerm, or 19th-century paintings? Nope. This shit copies everything, from children’s drawings to medieval manuscripts to obscure artists with two pieces hanging in a suburban Nagoya gallery. We’re fucked. 😂🤘

I’m not the only one feeling this way. It’s becoming harder and harder for artists because people now constantly demand proof like videos, tutorials, the whole thing. I really dislike this atmosphere of constant suspicion, and for three main reasons:

It’s often just a roundabout way of getting free resources. Many artists put WIPs and tutorials behind a Patreon paywall, so demanding “proof” is basically asking for paid content for free.

From what I’ve heard from anime artists on Twitter, some people ask for tutorials specifically to feed AI video models so they can generate fake step-by-step processes and trick others into thinking their work isn’t AI. The more you know, I was BAFFLED when I heard this…😂 A lot of these people charge for commissions but don’t disclose that they use AI. I’ll be honest, I can’t always tell what’s AI and what isn’t anymore, especially with anime-style art. I miss the early MidJourney days when it was obviously spewing digital goo and you could spot MJ v2 from a mile away. I can’t stand AI bros, but at least some of them are honest about using it. They call themselves "artists", sure, but they don’t try to scam people about how the work was actually made.

I could also say that artists who post for free owe you shit, politeness be damned, and that we should just answer like this to any kind of demand:

Anyway, here I am rambling again…

Welcome to my account, anon! Thank you so much for enjoying my art ^^ I still have some pieces I haven’t posted yet, including pre-serum Steve, Sherlock, Spidey/Deadpool, and more.

It's unhinged to assume that someone's taste in fiction equates to what they believe is moral or good, or is something they want to see or experience in real life.

That is a bonkers assumption to make.

I'm tired of humoring people with long arguments about it when the simple fact is it is a totally fucking absurd reach to accuse someone who enjoys something in fiction of being in favor of it in real life.