Vanquishable

FUCK HARD

FUCK FAST

FUCK BADLY

NEVER USE GENERATIVE AI

CREATE JOY

MUSIC ALWAYS

PSPSPSPS AT KITTIES ON THE STREET

YUMMY SOUP

go see the doctor about that thing

BE TRANSGENDER

KISS YOUR FRIENDS

EAT CHEESE

NEVER KILL YOURSELF

I need you 🫵 to fill out this survey!!!!

the link will be at the bottom of this wall of text, but read all of this first!!!! im putting on my professional corporate voice for you!!!!!!!! don't piss on the poor!!!!!!

-

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are conducting a research study on the sentiments and effects of generative AI in the labor market of visual arts. This study consists of an anonymous survey and potential for compensated interview (optional). It is open to participants from any country, but participants must be professional artists (see below for what qualifies).

This link at the bottom of this post is a short screener to ensure that you are a professional artist and prevent spam/brigading, hence the request for a portfolio. It is not the full study, that will be sent to you after verification. The submission request does not have to necessarily be a full portfolio website. They just need any kind of proof that you derive income from your art—resume, social media links, proof that you have sold commissions recently, profiles on employer websites, etc are all viable alternatives. You qualify as a professional artist for this study if you are over 18 and have made any amount of recent income from your art.

Again, you will receive an invite to the full survey AFTER your info is verified (this may take up to 2 business days, they have to sort through them manually). Make sure to leave your email, they can't send you the invite without it!

If you are concerned about data collection (valid), the info in the screener is used only for verification of professional status and sending the invite and will not be kept beyond that. The actual study survey itself is anonymous. I know the researchers (hence why I am posting this on their behalf) and have also already personally participated in the study.

If you have questions, feel free to either leave comments on this post (the research team will monitor it) or reach out to [email protected]

The form will remain open through the end of February, 2026.

Begging people to stop reblogging this AI trash from “The Phantom Painter” on Instagram (instagram.com/phantom.painting). I’ve been seeing it on my dash more and more often from people who are otherwise anti-AI and either can’t tell it’s AI or don’t care because it looks cool.

This is the kind of shit that is VERY CLEARLY trained on the works of existing talented artists’ with distinct styles and this asshole is selling prints and making a profit off of stealing other people’s hard work.

Don’t give people like this money or attention and they will go away.

@thegnat That’s the problem, it’s getting really hard to tell what’s AI and what isn’t. This phantom painter person at least says on each post on Instagram that it was created with AI, but when people re-post it on tumblr, it isn’t specified, and people end up reblogging it.

There is no one single unifying giveaway beyond a strange sense of uncanny that you will eventually begin to recognize the better you attune yourself, and certain models have their own unique “styles” you can begin to recognize (midjourney and stablediffusion produce very different looks, for example). There are however a few things on which one can tend to focus.

Edges: AI, as of this post, still struggles with distinct edges of objects and figures and has a tendency to blend details together. Look for hair, ribbons, and other flowy details if present. Do they fade into other details? Look at how the hair fuses with the smoke:

Edges 2: Sometimes they will also have the edges completely avoid each other, with a foreground figure slightly warping along the edges in a way that matches the background edges, like repelling magnets:

Patterns: AI, as of this post, still struggles with patterns. Filigrees, mandalas, brickwork, scales, anything that involves a high level of intricate detail tends to get blurred together. This can be a tricky one, because a lot of artists will also fudge pattern details in looser renders, but usually in a way that makes sense as an impression and not…. this:

Architecture: Are there buildings present in the image? AI has a tendency to make Escher-esque nonsense structures, with pillars in places they don’t belong, arches that go nowhere, bricks that don’t align, and support beams that start on one plane and connect to another. It also struggles with perspective, but, so do many humans so I would not consider it evidence alone. Check out the placement of this pillar, and also the detail on the… window? Candle cage?? Thing?

Resolution and quality: AI cannot make high-resolution images. It just cannot. While most artists aren’t posting their full resolutions, generative images can’t be enhanced, and the “artist” will not be able to provide proof of work. You should be able to zoom into work by an artist and admire their strokes, relate to their errors, and appreciate their process at every skill level– zooming into generative images somehow makes them even less clear, a mess of pixels that are somehow both blurry and also look like they have been run through a sharpen filter:

Text and signatures: AI struggles with legible characters in any language, and the result is a simlish-looking approximation of characters at worst, and hilariously misspelled words at best. Since these models are trained off real artists, they will also often have artifacts of a signature that oopsed its way into the image. These signatures are always illegible or, if “legible”, are not actually the names of real accounts.

P.S: Don't like! Reblog! <3