Taking a Break from the Socials

TL;DR

Being an artist on the Internet is hard so I’m gonna go touch grass and take a break from social media while working on this blog for fun. I mean I’ll probably still doomscroll but I just won’t be posting as much.

It’ll be like my own little mspaintadventures where I can present my art how I want without having to shape it into a post on Instagram.

Artists in an Ad Space

For the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to establish an online presence for myself as an artist, primarily on Instagram. In terms of growing an audience, Instagram has been great for connecting with other artists that I meet in person, as well as helping me spread my art through hashtags.

If you were to ask me what would be the best social media platform for getting big as an artist at the moment, I would probably say Instagram. Despite some social media platforms being more viable than others, I can’t say that I find any social media platforms right now to be artist friendly.

Modern social media platforms earn most of their revenue from advertisers, therefore their biggest priority is showing as many ads as they can and making sure those ads are as effective as possible. The algorithms that determine what gets promoted and what gets ignored on social media see users' posts as windows of engagement, and the posts that keep people in the app the longest stay are the most successful. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into a post, social media platforms are looking for advertising space in between a constant flood of content and the more content in that flood belongs to you, the more successful your page will be.

Enter: AI Art

A popular new thing nowadays is AI Art. You can type a prompt into a website and it will generate an image derived from art used without the permission of the artists who created the art. Much like the human-like faces of https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/, artificial intelligence takes existing images and effectively scrambles around some pixels to where it looks similar to the original data while technically being unique. In other words, AI and the people who claim to be artists from the prompts they use rub their snot on original works and claim that they created an entirely unique work without the consent of the original artists and without actually contributing anything to the creative process.

Users on social media will share their AI generated images and claim the images as their own original artworks that they created. As far as social media algorithms are concerned, AI generated images are a faster method of generating “new” content and unless human moderation gets involved, the competition for attention on social media is only going to get more difficult unless enough users are convinced to disregard AI art and make it difficult to get traction using AI art.

Even platforms like ArtStation and DeviantArt that are artist oriented are now giving away users' art to AI Art generators by default and making it tedious and unintuitive to keep your art from being automatically scraped by approved AI Art generators.

Book Good, Phone Bad

I’ve become frustrated with the platforms available for me to share my art on. I have yet to find a platform that acts in the interest of the artists it serves as users.

Is this the part where I create my own artists-first social media platform and lead the fight against AI Art on social media?

… nah that’s someone else’s goal probably …

My gripes aside, I have also been wanting to reassess myself as an artist, figure out how I want my art to be without worrying about posting, and actually learn how to draw anatomy properly.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to step aside from social media for a moment to grow as an artist offline and come back when I feel like I have a better idea of the art that I want to share online. Much like artists before social media, I want to use this website as a hub for me to present myself as an artist and serve online content the way I want as opposed to the way social media wants you to. I don’t anticipate that this website will replace my social media presences in the future, it’s just a nice middle ground for me to be the artist I want to be without worrying about competing with non-artists for attention.

Support Artists

I should make clear that what I’m doing is a privilege. I’m not looking to grow an audience at the moment and I’m not looking to make my art into a full time job, otherwise I would be prioritizing engagement and growth. It’s still not fair that the majority of artists online have to exist in online spaces that don’t fairly compensate the effort that is put into their work. Your art is merely content and if you put in more effort than typing words into a website then you’re already at a disadvantage.

Support your local artists and your favorite artists online. Share their art, buy their art, subscribe to their Patreon. There is rarely a safety net for any artist that pursues a career in art, even one small purchase can help lift some of the burdens off their shoulders.