Escape Motions AI position

Hey, just got the latest newsletter and wanted to thank you for the strong, clear position on AI. This is a hugely problematic technology for creatives in multiple dimensions and a real "with us or against us" moment for the makers of software. Unfortunately we know where some of the companies stand. Glad you have taken the ethical approach.

I applaud your stance on this topic! Well done and thank you for supporting us artists. I didn't know about Cara either, so will most certainly look into that! 

I also want to express my deepest gratitude, as this helps immensely the art community and Art itself, its future, the teaching of it, the art students, the freelancers, the indie comic artists, it helps all of us, painters. And like Cara, it brings hope to new and veteran artists. Absolutely great ethical move. It is my hope that more painting software developers would join this position, making such important statements.

The way I see it, this is even more important than Cara, as much as I love this new platform.

It's up to every artist to decide what art means for them. We don't need to choose sides or police one another's self-expression. 

Many of us use conventional digital art tools in conjunction with, or in addition to, AI. The art I make with AI is conceptual. I have creative control over every detail, and whether the image was rendered by hand is irrelevant to the expression. 

I've been happy to support Rebelle becuase it's an amazing digital art application that deserves to be more widespead. I wouldn't expect Rebelle to incorporate generative AI, or for AI art to be posted here, but it's competely unnecessary for Escape Motions to email me polemics that characterize some of my art — the art to which I feel the strongest personal connection, actually — as "inauthentic."

I'm unsubscribing and will consider upgrading in Decemeber, if the new version is really worth it, but it's no longer a given. 

I appreciate Escape Motion's stance on this issue. As someone that has experimented a bit with generative AI in the past, I think it can be a lot of fun to work with and it can be a real asset for abstract art which is what I specialize in. However, once I became more educated on the issue I do realize that there probably isn't any such thing as an AI app that was ethically trained, so I had to come to the decision to not use generative AI in any work I'd be selling, and if I ever use it again, it will only be for fun.

Some additional thoughts on the subjects of Cara and Yuify. I think it's great that Cara exists with their stance regarding generative AI. However, I feel that if people want to use that site, they shouldn't expect Cara to protect their work from being scraped. They can put those no AI tags on by default but if a scraper chooses to ignore the tags, there's nothing Cara can do and they even state this in their FAQ. And as for having Glaze built in, I recently read an article that Glaze/Nightshade are useless and that AIs can already get around them. Sure those apps might update to become better, but then you have to redo all of your images and the AI will probably still get around them again at some point.

Regarding Yuify, it sounds like a great idea in theory, but I tried the beta version with Photoshop and unfortunately in it's current form, it's a dealbreaker for me on two different fronts. First, the so-called invisible watermark isn't invisible. I created a test image (black background with white text saying "test image) in Photoshop, exported it with Yuify and when I reloaded the exported image back into Photoshop I could see markings on several spots on the image that looked similar to QR codes. It was fairly faint but still very noticiable. Second, exporting the images with the Yuify plugin didn't attach any of the metadata that I'd set in Photoshop onto the image. I always import everything into Photoshop even if I'm not doing additional edits specifically for the purpose of adding metadata to the image consistently. So that's a 2nd dealbreaker for me. Maybe I'll check out the plugin again sometime when it's out of beta and see if it's any better, but I'm not using it in it's current form.

I think the reality of the situation is that you have to accept that art theft can and will happen, whether it's human thieves or AI scraper bots, and just don't let that stop you from creating and sharing your work.