Support Indie Creators; Fight Piracy
Hey, how’ve you been since the last newsletter? Good, good, glad to hear it. That is truly how I feel, as a person and not a chatbot.
Yes, it’s important to distinguish between AI and chatbots: AI is what you use to create images, the “hallucination” feature of scraping hundreds of thousands of images (usually unlicensed and without notice) to create a “new” image that didn’t technically exist before but which feeds on the stylings of artists, many of whom are still alive and trying to make a living off their work. See the problem there? Here, look at the prompts baked into a sample Perchance iteration.
If I include too much detail in the prompt, the auto-prompt strips itself down to a simple state concerning lighting and detail. But here I just wrote “young woman studying at a desk,” so to flesh the image out the auto-prompt also included:
art by kantoku, in art style of redjuice/necömi/rella/tiv pixiv collab, inspired by wlop art style
Kantoku is alive, living in Saitama Prefecture.
Redjuice (Tomoyuki Yamasaki) is still producing in Shibuya.
necömi is alive and well, making a living in Kanagawa.
Rella (aka Rellakinoko, Mogu, and Bu Anding)is a 29-year-old Chinese artist, living in Japan.
Tiv is a South Korean artist, also residing in Saitama Prefecture.
wlop is a Chinese software engineer and freelance artist whose dreamlike and masterful artistic style is commonly ripped off by AI art engines.
These are living people, men and women who’ve disciplined themselves over their lifetimes to excel in their craft. They’re famous for manga, anime, and video games. Their talent in illustration is what earns them money, so when AI engines absorb all their work and allow lazy, no-talent nobodies to emulate the end product of their labor, then that’s a commission these artists were deprived of.
True, these consumers likely don’t have the money it would take to commission a piece by these artists. So much of the broader Size community is composed of lurkers looking for free porn. I understand, I was one of those at the beginning of the internet. I wanted to see what existed and I didn’t care where it came from. Now, however, the “fans” of Size content are actively punishing the creators of Size content. Sites like 8muses boast of their antagonistic relationship with artists and writers, bragging they’re outside the reach of DMCA notices, blaming the theft on the artist. They don’t believe in fairly compensating the creator for their labor, money that would go to upgrades in equipment and better product, not to mention rent and meals and medical support. They believe they’re entitled to the work of the artist before it’s even made; they actively hate the people who are making the work they desire.
Whereas things like ChatGPT and Claude and whatever Bard calls itself now are chatbots, text-only machines dedicated to working out “what would a reasonable answer sound like?” People expect them to function like a search engine, but the chatbot has no parameters to concern itself with facts and research. Perplexity comes close, providing citations for where it pulled its info, but it’s far from perfect.
Why is this relevant to Size content? Watch till the end to find out. (Holy fuck, I hate that notice in IG/TikTok videos.)
Size Fantasy Games
I pointed out a couple Size-themed video games in the last newsletter, didn’t I? I got curious as to what else might be out there. And there are many independent artists all working on games (The Police Mystery and SAEKO), as well as higher-production companies who incorporate Size as a factor to puzzle-solving in the game (Grounded and Giants Uprising). Well, if you have time to spare, and a computer you don’t care that much about, check out this itch.io gallery of games tagged “giantess.”
And I know that some people are doing great work in Second Life to re-create the mixed-size experience, whether playing a giantess or a tiny person, but there seem to be other platforms working on the same. I believe Virtamate is a VR interface where you interact (intimately) with others, making whatever crazy avatar for yourself you like. Better, there are forums dedicated to supporting you playing a giantess or a tiny person in the site. I’m guessing this also requires a lot of investment in haptic peripherals for the full experience, but it’s still progress. We’re getting closer every day to consumer-grade “step on me gobbes” technology.
Musical Interlude
This is going to sound a little beside the point, maybe, but it charmed me and I wanted to include it. The musical realm occasionally intersects with the Size realm. A long time ago, someone played for me a song I think was called “Attack of the 50-Foot Girlfriend,” and I thought he said the band was Little Feat, but fuck me if I can find anything like this anywhere. He got really excited, describing the part where her footsteps pounded with heavy bass through the song. This was before I’d even thought to attempt anything like Size writing, or else I might have connected with him on this point.
Some of you might know I wrote my own shrunken-man song. I like it a lot, which I can’t say about all my creative work.
Google Alerts let me know about Dr. Elizabeth Robinson, an accomplished flautist (the article calls her a “flutist”) and assistant professor of music at SDSU School of Performing Arts. Last month she performed a recital, a selection of technically challenging works. “Amazonia for flute and piano,” by Valerie Coleman, actually addresses the threat to Amazonian rain forests rather than unusually large and powerful women. Near miss, but the next one was a direct hit.
Composer Carter Pann wrote “Giantess for flute and piano” in 2018, and its piano component has the reputation of being “nearly too difficult to play.” This enticed accompanist Mark Stevens to master it, supporting Dr. Robinson in her virtuoso performance. Some might find this abstract piece inaccessible, but when I disconnect from my expectations and completely open myself to it … I see some pretty interesting visuals; regardless, one cannot deny the talent and proficiency of this work.
Image Theft
Callback to the opening screed! Thanks to Google Alerts, I was directed to a chatbot-generated “news” website, one of those places where someone with zero ideas or talent thinks he can make a fortune selling his automated services to legitimate publication outlets, or at least anticipates generating modest income through ad revenue.
In particular, I was guided to the article “Giantes Writing: An AI-Powered Fantasy Adventure Novel” (I won’t link to it, to discourage their accrual of precious clicks). Disregarding the typo in the title, it is clearly a chatbot-created piece:
The author, “Alex,” writes a dozen completely unrelated articles each day, topics including effects of Clomid, repairing roof moss, buying bulk linen napkins, and a piece on Guadalajaran driving schools, written in German.
The article is poorly written with odd turns of phrase and occasional grammatical errors. It’s generating hype for an AI-written fiction series about a giantess in an isekai context. While the article refers directly to the content in the story, “Giantess Writing by AI” by Registered.23, suggesting the program has “read” it, the article is too laudatory. It describes this chatbot-generated story as “an amazing accomplishment” and even vaunts it above human-written work.
The ads supporting this publication are a column of links to gambling websites full of typos, leading to international sites guaranteedly housing malicious software.
Though I’m not losing any money by their appropriation of my image, I’m going to file a DMCA takedown notice on principle. The comment function on this article is broken (of course), and the contact info includes two PO boxes in Cleveland, OH, and Orlando, FL, putting them in jurisdiction. When I do a whois on the site, however, all the admin info seems to be based in Toronto, ON, rendering DMCA irrelevant; however, you submit the DMCA to the hosting service, which seems to be in Provo, UT, making them eligible again. It’s only of some concern that the hosting service’s website appears shoddy and unprofessional.
The image in question was made far before I started pasting that garish watermark on my images, to protest the practice of image thievery rather than as any real deterrent. There’s no way to know whether this “magazine” would have grabbed it anyway, or if the sole human on staff would’ve had the wherewithal to trim/occlude the watermark.
My point is, ripping off other people’s shit for credit is shitty. It’s a mean thing to do. It doesn’t gain you anything, you don’t grow or benefit from it in any meaningful way, and you’re actively harming someone else. Being a creative is hard enough, what with depression, self-promotion, and health issues. Why make it even harder? Pay people for their shit, and take up the craft yourself.
Even if no one sees it, it’s a rewarding practice on its own. I myself have paused my podcast and begged for more time from my commission patron, I’ve not written a story or created a Daz render in many months. I’m even walking away from the Size community in some ways, because I think it has developed beyond what I recognize. But then, so have I.
But even now, I’m working on an exciting and dangerous project that no one else must see. It will never be uploaded for display, neither for fans nor for thieves; it will never receive public acknowledgment. But it is intensely satisfying to me: I told my wife that I care about the characters so much, it feels like I’m cheating on her. Because it will remain private, I have complete liberty to explore everything I want to, and that feels amazing, thrilling! Even better—believe it or not—than finding three new likes on a month-old post.
Stay cool, friends. I’m glad you’re here, reading, thinking.
In Her Shadow,
Aborigen
©2024 Aborigen/Size Riot