Tumblr's new policy, and updates going forward
Yeah, I bet we all saw this coming, huh.
So, given tungl dot hell(tm)'s new deal with midjourney, I think pretty much all artists on tumblr are, well, not having a great time. Like deviantart, tumblr has provided a way to opt out from having your blog content scraped, but like deviantart, it's a little unclear what has already been shared before the opt-out went into place, and how much they'll actually work to stop machine trawlers from trawling opted-out blogs.
I'll put the tl;dr up front:
King of Shades will not be leaving Tumblr, but due to the new policy, I won't be posting full pages here anymore.
There's no point in taking down all the pages I've already posted. Deleting them from my page won't delete subsequent reblogs, and there's a pretty high chance that tumblr has already scraped them. (haveibeentrained.com seems to think I haven't been yet, at least. I don't think I really have a big enough following for that to happen, although I don't want to jinx it...) But I certainly won't be posting the full-size pages here anymore.
Instead, I think I'll go the Trying Human route and post a little preview of the update (possibly heavily watermarked; my computer can't run glaze/nightshade, unfortunately), so you guys will still get notifications, but you'll have to visit the ComicFury main website in order to read it. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience (although I will say that I think it's a much better reading experience over there)!
I have never and will never ask for any kind of compensation (other than your wonderful feedback, which I've just been absolutely blown away by) for doing this. Even putting legality aside, that's not why I'm here! However, if you've enjoyed this comic, ever thought that you might be willing to tip me on ko-fi if I had one, or even just want to continue having an internet that isn't entirely a corporate wasteland, I ask that you consider donating to ComicFury instead.
ComicFury is a relic of the old, good internet: it's been around for at least 15 years, and it's all hosted and managed by one guy (Kyo). Aside from his team of volunteer moderators, everything on this website is done by one person with a passion for supporting artists. I've chatted with him a little, and he's a great dude! Most of his operating costs are paid for out of pocket, and the site is currently hurting a little bit because it doesn't run ads, it doesn't have subscriptions or paywalled content, it doesn't have any corporate interference or monetization of any kind outside of his Patreon. And—perhaps most relevantly for this post:
I will cut right to the chase, we have decided not to allow AI-art based webcomics on the site. [...] As for our reasoning, there are obviously ethical concerns regarding the source images of most commonly used AI image generators (namely them just being scraped off the internet without anyones permission). But even beyond that, another concern is that due to the extremely low effort involved, webcomics of this nature could just over time completely drown out in numbers art by passionate people who put a lot of time into it , which would be a real shame. So we asked ourselves what would be better for the community, and we agreed that banning it would probably be the better thing overall.
—Kyo has been quite firm that he will not allow AI art to be posted to or scraped from any ComicFury domain. While this isn't a protection against huge web trawls or people putting someone's art in individually—there's not a lot anyone can do about that yet, even with tools like glaze and nightshade—it's a little peace of mind that the art posted there won't abruptly be sold en masse to the highest bidder.
The Patreon starts at $2/month, and Kyo has said that he doesn't mind people pledging for a short time and then dipping if they can't afford an ongoing subscription. If and only if this is something you can afford, and you want to continue seeing independent webcomics including King of Shades, please consider donating!
The Patreon is here. There's not much in the way of reward tiers, especially if you're not a member, but I posit that the real reward is being able to read free webcomics done by real humans as labors of love, without being advertised to or sold as the product. And also maybe the friends we made along the way. Or something.
Once again, there is no pressure, and no shame if you're not willing or able to give money. But if you've ever thought you might be willing to tip me for what I do, consider passing it along to the guy who makes it possible instead.
P.S. Page 64 is coming, I promise! Recent developments kind of kneecapped my motivation for making online art 🙃
