Siah Sargus

1. Four teenagers.

2. They are friends that deeply care for each other.

3. They solve mysteries.

Okay, so last year, my mom bought this Christmas moose that she lovingly named Barry

This is him

Cute, right?

Well, for whatever reason only known to my brother, he decided that he wanted to put Barry in different rooms of our house and it usually scares the shit out of whomever happens upon Barry; usually the person who finds him is the person that my brother wanted to scare.

So far, Barry has been found

On our dining room table

On my dad's side of my parents' bed

In my parents' closet

Outside their bedroom door (at 5 in the morning and scared my mother shitless)

Near the kitchen door

Near my fucking bed

At the bottom of my sister's stairwell

In our bathroom

And down the hallway

This has gone on for 9 days and it doesn't seem to show signs of stopping. Most of the time we know who gets Barry because it's always followed with a very loud "FUCKING BARRY!!!!!"

He found his way into my sister's room.

steamboat willie is due to enter the public domain on new year’s day 2024, and the lobbying efforts of disney/time warner/viacom/etc. were integral to getting the Copyright Term Extension Act passed in the late 90s - but republicans have implied that they’d be more hostile towards any copyright legislation pushed by the mouse now as retaliation for disney (reluctantly) opposing the don’t say gay bill

so if the entertainment industry wants to push for further copyright extension, they’ll need popular support since their usual cronies (or at least the upfront-about-it half) won’t have their back this time

along comes a new tool with potential for abuse and a bunch of greasy annoying techbros hawking it as a way to make easy money off other people’s work, and boom, you have a panic about an already-precarious field (the arts) becoming even more so

in this climate, if a stricter copyright bill is framed as “protecting the livelihood of artists from AI theft,” those same artists will embrace it even though the average individual online illustrator is only going to be fucked over by disney et al. gaining an even bigger legal mallet to crush artists with

So much art actually does, like, no job! Those images on say finance articles, its just like…walls of text are scary? So you need to give your eyes a break? But they are fucking cowards and won’t put pics of hot anime chicks in the middle of their discussion of the carried interest loophole so they pretend by making the image ‘topical’ its adding value. That is all it does! Intent of the artist isn’t relevant in the slightest.

And that doesn’t even begin to touch the reality of making big, commercial art. if you are doing say animation in modern toolsets like Toonz they have automated in-betweening tools; you draw keyframe A, keyframe B, you need frames in between to smooth the motion, and the program draws the inbetweens for you. That is AI art! Its been used for years now. Advances in AI  will make that more powerful, you can get better results, draw less frames, etc as that improves.

In animation so much art is made that isn’t in the final product - concept sketches, early layouts, etc. These don’t exist to be ‘intent of the artist’, they are tools to guide a production process. You could absolutely use AI tools to improve the effiiency of that process, its what we *currently* do, its been the history art & technology for the last 3 decades. This kind of art is what the majority of money and time in the art world is spent on - freelance ‘online’ art is just a piece of that world.

This isn’t a statement to invalidate the whole debate or anything (or shitting on freelance artists, I love them). I tend to be ‘pro’ AI art, as much as that framing makes any sense at all (it doesn’t), but there are a ton of other aspects to this debate that are more complex. For example, we have legally decided you can’t copyright art styles, which, fine, I agree, but that does sit in tension with a company being able to legally claim IP ownership of a tool built out of those art styles. Maybe those tools should be open access, the legal regime isn’t built for this scenario - or like the entire scenario of modernity, it all sucks.