Today’s deck is the Freak Show Circus Tarot.
Here’s a piece of advice to anyone that wants to make a tarot deck: Resist the temptation of coloring the card borders. Not only does it peel off immediately after the first shuffle, not only do your hands get glittery if you use glitter, but also it makes the cards stick, needing you to go one by one to peel them off from each other and a bit of stock might pull in the process.
That thing where wands are a juggler but the amount juggled changes sure is the first time I’ve seen that, actually.
Today’s reading celebrates that an impasse got solved and properity will come as a result. I couldn’t think of anything externally but the moment I was thinking about an internal conflict I went “ok yeah, checks out.”
You know, something I think about on and off is what the “soul” in a work is, specifically in the context of AI Art and lacking said soul. And today I found a very interesting argument to add to the others I’ve mentioned here before.
You see, it all starts with this post from Suzuki Nene announcing they were having one of their illustrations put up in one of Melonbooks’ illustrator festivals.
I immediately jumped in to preorder the fancy A3 print because a) I love Suzuki Nene’s work especially their stuff with Acerola and b) I distinctly remembered that illustration specifically and couldn’t resist the opportunity of having it all nice and fancy on my wall.
And then, obvious as it will sound, it suddenly dawned on me. If this same scenario happened with an AI-generated illustration I wouldn’t have this excitement and a couple of things came into relief. And let’s set aside for a moment the moral and aesthetic arguments and see this in terms outside of THAT.
That titfuck illustration up there was made by a person that has been honing their craft for years and specifically wanted to convey they thing that clearly gets them going the hardest. The angle, the background, the futon over tatami, the fact that both are wearing the sort of yukata you wear on an onsen, if you pay attention you get the context of what leads to the illustration or at the very least the general idea of it. And then the facial expression, the way the hair rests on the breasts ever so slightly. Every detail no matter how small is deliberate, you don’t need to have a novel preceding it to understand.
Someone made that, someone laid their soul bare, their sexual fantasies no less, for all to see and then used hard-earned skills to turn it into an illustration.
The print I’m getting is not a one-of-a-kind print, but it IS carrying a one-of-a-kind work. One-of-a-kind in that way where the most personal things nonetheless resonate with millions of people. Even if the subject matter isn’t unique (lord knows I hoard things with that specific fetish), the circumstances that led to that choice of angle and scenario were.
Now, for a moment, let’s say someone is offering a similar fancy print of an AI-generated illustration, and again, for the sake of argument let’s ignore the morals of where that AI learned the illustrations, and the aesthetic quality of the print.
Why would I buy that? I can just go into whichever LLM, input a bunch of words, get the same thing but slightly more my thing and print it… and I wouldn’t, precisely because the machine can just barf illustrations one after the other they lack that “this took effort” value to consider any of them worthy of printing.
Like, why waste ink when you can just keep pressing the button and get iterations of the same thing until you’re satisfied. Whose skills are you supporting by buying this hypothetical print? A singular illustration is done and then that’s worth printing as a snapshot of skills, as a moment in time where a fight was fought and won, but with GenAI that stage never exists when you just put in words and keep pressing the generate button.
When I first saw that illustration a while back before it got put up for that festival, I remember feeling like (and this is true for every illustration and illustrator I really like, not just this one) “Damn, this is such a good drawing, and someone made it? Someone used their limited time in this planet to learn to draw and make this thing that stir in me a number of feelings I cherish?”, and then the natural wish to support those that make you happy kicks in.
To this day I share as much VA-11 Hall-A fanart as I see regardless of skill level precisely because the fact that someone liked the thing I made enough to put their own time and effort back into making something just to express how much they liked it moves me like you’ve got no idea.
There’s this one quote that makes the rounds every so often that’s like “a machine can’t make art because a machine can’t fear death” or something like that, and while it’s a cool turn of phrase, the meaning I take from it is the thing that goes hardest about it.
The idea that we’re all gonna die and have to choose our time on earth accordingly, and then the most foolish of us choose to dedicate that limited time to the pursuit of putting into physical matter things that are too abstract, taboo, or personal.
On the flipside, there’s those that face that fear and decide that learning skills is “ableist” and want a shortcut because they cannot deal with the fact that they have to spend precious hours never feeling like what they’ve done is good enough.
There’s a certain irony, then, in how if you follow that mindset, the tech behind LLMs carries more artistry than the vapid oversaturated trash the tech is being used to generate. Because ultimately the technology of LLMs isn’t inherently bad, hell, my own camera has settings that let it detect and automatically focus on specific animals, on people, even in specific kinds of vehicles, and that’s possible because you feed a machine a gazillion bird photos and go “put the focal point on THIS the moment you sniff it on frame”.
And again, that’s all BEFORE you consider things like how mathematically averaged every GenAI illustration looks DOWN TO THE COLORS, or the morality of “well, where are they taking the learning material from?”.
It’s funny that porn tends to be the thing that elicits this sort of conviction the hardest in me, but it makes sense also. It’s easy to forget in an online context, let alone a terminally online one, but porn and sexual preferences are a heavily personal matter, and if art is about laying your soul bare, there’s no bigger baring of the soul than the baring of naked skin and how you’d like said skin to be defiled.
And to be honest pondering about that has been the most exciting thing today, because otherwise I spent most of the day cleaning the house. There’s this cupboard I end up using more to shelf snacks which I figured was being redundant considering I already had a cupboard and kept forgetting to use it, so I’m clearing things so I can instead use that space to put a bunch of recycle bins instead of my current method of “singular trash bag I fill bit by bit”.
I did, however, finish what I call Smut Attempt Number Two, emphasis on finish. I have a lot to say on the matter (that’s what today’s reading was probably referencing) but I’ll save that for after I post it.