Nicole Deal Art

www.NicoleDeal.com www.twitter.com/NicoleDealArt  

[nicoledealart]

Hi, I'm a freelance illustrator who loves making book art and fantasy-based landscapes/character art.

http://Nicoledeal.com

Commission Info/availability: https://nicoledeal.com/commissions-about…

Instagram: https://instagram.com/nicole.deal.art/…

[what-eats-owls]

I had some thoughts about paying to feed your face into a generator built on unpaid work used without consent. Transcript and links under the cut.

So let’s talk about AI art, and how incredibly unsafe y’all are being with it.

First, most of these apps, including the avatar makers, are developed using a generator called Stable Diffusion that was trained on LAION 5B, a database containing 5 billion pictures scraped off the internet, including illustrations from deviantart and pinterest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion#Training_data

It also contains thousands of images of patients scraped from private medical records. And the database creators have refused to remove them or take any responsibility. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/artist-finds-private-medical-record-photos-in-popular-ai-training-data-set/ 

Many artists have spoken up about how unethical it is to use their work without their consent to make an art generator that is now being used for paid products. These generators wouldn’t exist without the work of thousands of artists around the world, but they never gave permission for their images to be used this way, they can’t opt out, and they are not getting paid even for apps that charge *you* to use them.

Maybe that’s enough to change your mind about the “magic avatars” and “time travelling portraits.” But I get that they’re fun, and frankly, people will overlook a lot of harm when they’re having fun. Which brings us to the “find out” part of this video.

When you are giving these apps 10-20 pictures of YOUR FACE, where in the terms of service does it say they won’t sell those pictures to police surveillance companies? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

When you are giving them your face, where in the TOS does it say they’re responsible if their databases get hacked? If their data is used to impersonate or stalk you? https://thenextweb.com/news/people-using-facial-recognition-app-stalk-adult-actresses 

Deepfake attacks can easily trick facial recognition

Plus: Next PyTorch release will support Apple GPUs so devs can train neural networks on their own laptops

Where in the TOS does it say your face can’t be used by companies training AI to help genocide? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55634388 

Where in the TOS does it say your face will not be sold to a service that will splice you into porn? https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/13/1035449/ai-deepfake-app-face-swaps-women-into-porn/ 

That will create an on-demand version of you for strangers to assault? https://vocal.media/viva/why-are-men-creating-ai-girlfriends-only-to-abuse-them-and-brag-about-it-on-reddit 

And you are giving some of them your payment info? You are giving all of them 10-20 pictures of your face? 

They don’t care about the people whose work makes their generators possible. Why do you think they’re going to care about you?

[madcat-world]

Searching for Survivors - RHADS (Artem Chebokha)

[densewentz]

This is an ai “artwork” hate blog now

[densewentz]

like look you have this soulless thing that has anonymously and indiscriminately cannibalized years of hard-earned learning and discipline and struggle and creativity.

and you type in a little thing and it just. spits out some mashed up amalgam of other peoples inspiration, other peoples skills and dedication and livelihoods. and you sit there and smile and tag it “my art” like its not a horrible spit in the face of every artist who made that shitty little program possible. and now you think you have no NEED to pay an artist, you can just make it yourself. as if you’ve made anything??? fuck you and fuck ai “art”

[breebird33]

And don’t even get me started on all the fascist rhetoric coming from the creators of these generators, how many users simply want to “humble artists” of spite for not taking the time and patience to learn to draw or paint. 

To quote the article “Art is dead Dude” - the rise of the AI artists stirs debate from the BBC’s website:

Many artists were furious, but Mr. Allen was unmoved: “It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost”, he told the [New York Times]. …. So what is [Mr Mostaque]’s message to young artists worried about their future career, perhaps in illustration or design? “My message to them would be, ‘illustration design jobs are very tedious’. It’s not about being artistic, you are a tool”. He suggests they find opportunities using the new technology: “This is a sector that’s going to grow massively. Make money from this sector if you want to make money, it’ll be far more fun”.

They don’t care if the art is soulless and striped of culture. The only care about creating a product to consume and will gleefully stripe away everything that makes one an artist in favor of the cheap, instant gratification of custom art.

People already view art posted online as author-less and up for grabs (which is why they have no qualms with copyright infringement), so they are banking on people’s entitlement. 

[what-eats-owls]

I said this over on twitter (sigh, please come back Hive) and I’ll repeat it here.

There was some plausible deniability when this was new. It’s not anymore. I see way too many people posting “I have mixed feelings about AI…. but here’s the experiments I did anyway!” Your mixed feelings don’t help the artists whose work is being fed into an AI without consent or compensation.

From today onward, if I see someone posting AI art, I am blacklisting them from my commissions. I encourage other artists to do the same if they can. I will make my blacklist available upon private request from other artists.

If you are an artist going “my job isn’t threatened, I’ll just fix AI’s mistakes” consider where art AI was five years ago and perhaps reevaluate. If you are an artist with a stable living situation and reliable income, know that this fight is for the artists living commission-to-commission.

And if you think AI art, in its current manifestation, is just a new tool, think again. It is wholesale fabrication, made possible by massive amounts of work that artists did not consent to contribute, and are not compensated for. AI can be used ethically with limitations (e.g. building datasets on public domain images, or ones artists donate.) There are no such guardrails now.

If you tell me this is just “the future of art,” then know that you’re embracing a future built on unpaid, involuntary labor, and ask yourself if that’s really progress at all.

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[blairamour]

i know it's been said before, but Jacob Geller has an incredible video discussing this and many more situations similar to this, and I cannot recommend it enough.

[corinnereid]

The Keeper

[corinnereid]

Ascendance, the story of Lucifer. (with progress shots)

[seventeeneightyfine]

let me explain why i’m flooding your dash with posts about the harpercollins strike

As a bookseller, I want you to know that one of the worst things about our industry is the unsettlingly pervasive idea that we should financially suffer for working in it. There is a powerful idea in creative fields (as in many, many fields under late capitalism) that one should be willing to forego necessities of life – namely, an adequate wage – in order to have work that one resonates with emotionally.

In bookworld, I’d say that this is frequently aided and abetted by two factors. First, we often feel a strong sense of community with our coworkers and the book creation/promotion world at large and feel we should sacrifice personally for them; that to do so is right. Second, we have a sense that, due to a confluence of factors  from Amazon monopolization to the rise of the Internet to the pandemic’s financial tolls, we work in a permanently struggling industry – that we should be willing to take the hit, as it were, to help keep our business afloat.

Neither of those feelings is accurate in an independent bookstore. It doesn’t matter how narrow the profit margins are or how close you are with your coworkers. Your labor is labor, and it must be compensated. They are even less true in the context of a multi-billion-dollar publishing corporation, where the people at the top (including the parent company’s owner, who is literally Rupert Murdoch) benefit from growing monopolization while employees are unable to afford basic cost-of-living expenses. May I remind you that of HarperCollins’ thousands of employees, many are required to live in New York City – one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the world. While working long hours, HarperCollins staff making a starting salary (45,000/year) make $18,600 less than the average annual cost of living in New York City for a single person.

This is unacceptable. As one sign carried on the picket line read– PASSION DOESN’T PAY THE RENT.

Fair wages do.

[kiwipon-deactivated20240228]

Wee animation done on procreate of Jinx after watching Arcane! so much talent was involved in creating it, I love it , definitely need a rewatch

Also added a preview of my piece for the DIVIDE ZINE (Ekko is linked to their carrd if anyone is interested to know more)🤩

Worked on these months appart but I think the color gamut is quite similar.

[simkaye]

I knew patrons wanted possums, so 🥰

[intheheatherbright]

Costume. Chitons.

[intheheatherbright]

Marjorie & C. H. B.Quennell, Everyday Things in Archaic Greece (London: B. T. Batsford, 1931).

[killerchickadee]

Wait, wait…. Is that seriously it? How their clothes go?

[treewizarded]

that genuinely is it

[itwashotwestayedinthewater]

yeah hey whats up bout to put some fucking giant sheets on my body

[sourcefieldmix-deactivated20161]

lets bring back sheetwares

[hostagesandsnacks]

also chlamys:

and exomis:

[hidingthemane-deactivated201801]

trust the ancients to make a fashion statement out of straight cloth and nothing but pins

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Wrap Yourself In Blankets, Call It a Day

[awhiffofcavendish]

Wear blanket. Conquer world.

[goys2men]

That last one looks dope

[moniquill]

Squares and rectangles: easy to weave!! No cutting means no hemming.

[hc-svnt-dracones]

And easy to construct, you don’t have to have complicated seaming and patterning to turn fabric into clothing!

[pendragyn]

ancient Egyptian robes

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

This sort of clothing solution wasn’t just for the Mediterranean, or northern Africa, either. Behold the Belted Plaid:

(auto generated captions)

[marlynnofmany]

Has anyone already reblogged this with saris? It’s cool how many cultures have similarities like this hidden in plain sight.

[tieras]

https://kalaavarsha.com/how-to-wear-or-drape-a-saree/

[deliciouswastelandgoddess]

The lungi is a traditional garment worn in many southern states of India. It's different from the dhoti, in that it is a tubular shape (like

Since we are here might as well share the dhoti and the lungi

https://www.wikihow.com/Wear-a-Lungi

https://www.wikihow.com/Wear-a-Pancha-Kachcham?amp=1

It’s only men in the photos but really anyone can wear them. I am wearing a lungi right now.

I also know Thailand and Sri Lanka have their versions of a lungi as well.

[nicoledealart]

just wanted to doodle something of one of my fav shape-shifting fellas. :)

[jmfenner91]

Night is calling.

[nicoledealart]

Cardan from Holly Black ’s Folk of Air Series.  

[nicoledealart]

<3 <3 Thanks, Im just too inconsistent for same face. lol

 It varies ,  but I often think of cardan as a bit gangly cause he’s young appearing? 

But I have painted him as older and younger *shrug* 

[nicoledealart]

Prince Napkins Is a Himbo

[maru-illo]

Mr Disco Tiger ( April 2021)

[ekbelsher]

There’s this scene in Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) that I want to draw but it’ll be hard. When Miryem meets the Staryk king, he’s mounted on this terrifying white deer with sharp teeth and red eyes, and looking down at her in his supercilious way and she can’t decide if he’s beautiful or freakish. I took a stab at his face today. I am on a Viking braid kick. Will try a few sketches of the deer next!