sam

Online, you can find quite a lot databases for photography in the public domain that you could use (always check their specific rules regarding commercial use), like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Pexels.

But, even a tad more charming, there are also hundreds of thousands of paintings in the public domain. If the artist has been dead for over 70 years, the image is (typically) in the public domain and can be used however you want it. This is not a new concept, big publishers like Penguin and the Oxford’s World Classics do the same!

When you use such images, always make sure that 1. the painting really is in the public domain (sometimes the art itself may be in the public domain, but the photograph you are using to see it is not!), and 2. that it is an appropriate image. Sometimes, an image may look innocent and fitting, but would actually cause irritation, like accidentally using a painting of siblings for a romance or using a controversial image for different reasons.

Some places you can find art in the public domain (always double check!): National Gallery of Art, Artvee, Public Domain Image Archive, and most websites of bigger museums.

You can find the game here - even just adding it to your wishlist helps TONS. Also, my voice is featured in the beginning, so that's nice 🥹

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)