Where is all the furry AI porn you’d expect to be generated with PonyDiffusion, anyway?
From my experience, it’s on Telegram groups (maybe Discord ones too, but I don’t use it myself). There are furries who love to generate hundreds of images around a certain theme, typically on their own desktop computers where they have full control and can tweak parameters until they get what they wanted exactly right. They share the best ones, sometimes with the recipes. People comment, and quickly move on.
At the same time, when someone gets something with meaning attached, such as a drawing they commissioned from an artist they like, or that someone gifted them, it has more weight both for themselves, as well as friends who share on their emotional attachment to it.
I guess the difference is similar to that many (a few? most?) notice between a handcrafted vs an industrialized good: even if the industrialized one is better by objetive parameters, the handcrafted one is perceived as qualitatively distinct. So I can imagine a scenario in which there are automated, generative websites for quick consumption—especially video, as you mentioned—and Etsy-like made-by-a-real-person premium ones, with most of the associated social status geared towards the later.
A smart group of furry advertisers would look at this situation and see a commoditize-your-complement play: if you can break the censorship and everyone switches to the preferred equilibrium of AI art, that frees up a ton of money.
I don’t know about sexual toys specifically, but something like that has been attempted with fursuits. There are cheap, knockoff Chinese fursuit sellers on sites such as Alibaba, and there’s a market for those somewhere otherwise those wouldn’t be advertised, but I’ve never seen someone wearing one of those on either big cons or small local meetups I attended, nor have I heard of someone who does. As with handcrafted art, it seems furries prefer handcrafted fursuits made either by the user themselves, or by artisan fursuit makers.
I suppose that might all change if the fandom grows to the point of becoming fully mainstream. If at some point there are tens to hundreds of millions of furries, most of whom carrying furry-related fetishes (sexual or otherwise), real industries might form around us to the point of breaking through the traditional handcraft focus. But I confess I have difficulty even visualizing such a scenario.
Hmm… maybe a good source for potential analogies would be Renaissance Fairs scene. I don’t know much about them, but they’re (as far as I can gather) more mainstream than the Furry Fandom. Do you know if such commoditization happens there? That might be a good model for what’s likely to happen with the Furry Fandom as it further mainstreams.
That’s the problem, of course, and why it can’t replace the mainstream sites. It’s trapped in fast mode and has no endurance or cumulative effect. So it sounds like there is plenty of demand (especially allowing for how terrible Telegram is as a medium for this), it’s just suppressed and fugitive—which is what we would expect from the cartel model.
At the same time, when someone gets something with meaning attached, such as a drawing they commissioned from an artist they like, or that someone gifted them, it has more weight both for themselves, as well as friends who share on their emotional attachment to it. I guess the difference is similar to that many (a few? most?) notice between a handcrafted vs an industrialized good
Ah yes, the profoundly human and irreplaceable experience of ‘Paypaling some guy online $1000 for drawings of your fursona’...
How can AI ever compete with the deeply meaningful and uncommodifiable essence of the furry experience in ‘commissioning from an artist you like for your friend’? Well, it could compete by ‘letting you create the art for your friend instead of outsourcing it to the market’. What’s more meaningful than paying an artist to make a gift for your friend? You making it yourself! That’s what.
Further, I think you might’ve missed my point in invoking ‘commoditize your complement’ here. The choice is not between a world in which you experience the deep joy of handing over huge sums of money collectively to artists & middlemen, and a meaningless nihilistic wasteland of AI art where there is naught but ‘atoms and the void’; it’s between the commissioning world and all of the many other options beyond paying for some drawings, like going to conventions with your friends with the freed-up cash, or building elaborate D&D-esque campaigns or fictional worlds with your fursona character now that images of it are ‘too cheap to meter’, or creating a band in VRChat with voice-changing software and recording you & your pals singing filks, or… something. (Use some imagination.)
I’m not a furry, I’m not going to pretend I know exactly where you will derive all of your personal meaning and what form will parasocial relationships take in the future; but I note that nowhere else in subcultures does there seem to be a similar cartel-esque community where personal relationships/identities are mediated through so much payments to artists, nor does it always seem to have been a part of furry culture. So I do not expect that to be the unchanging essence of furrydom, but a more historically contingent fact related to Internet & online payments developing faster than AI—and potentially a fast-vanishing fact, at that.
From my experience, it’s on Telegram groups (maybe Discord ones too, but I don’t use it myself). There are furries who love to generate hundreds of images around a certain theme, typically on their own desktop computers where they have full control and can tweak parameters until they get what they wanted exactly right. They share the best ones, sometimes with the recipes. People comment, and quickly move on.
At the same time, when someone gets something with meaning attached, such as a drawing they commissioned from an artist they like, or that someone gifted them, it has more weight both for themselves, as well as friends who share on their emotional attachment to it.
I guess the difference is similar to that many (a few? most?) notice between a handcrafted vs an industrialized good: even if the industrialized one is better by objetive parameters, the handcrafted one is perceived as qualitatively distinct. So I can imagine a scenario in which there are automated, generative websites for quick consumption—especially video, as you mentioned—and Etsy-like made-by-a-real-person premium ones, with most of the associated social status geared towards the later.
I don’t know about sexual toys specifically, but something like that has been attempted with fursuits. There are cheap, knockoff Chinese fursuit sellers on sites such as Alibaba, and there’s a market for those somewhere otherwise those wouldn’t be advertised, but I’ve never seen someone wearing one of those on either big cons or small local meetups I attended, nor have I heard of someone who does. As with handcrafted art, it seems furries prefer handcrafted fursuits made either by the user themselves, or by artisan fursuit makers.
I suppose that might all change if the fandom grows to the point of becoming fully mainstream. If at some point there are tens to hundreds of millions of furries, most of whom carrying furry-related fetishes (sexual or otherwise), real industries might form around us to the point of breaking through the traditional handcraft focus. But I confess I have difficulty even visualizing such a scenario.
Hmm… maybe a good source for potential analogies would be Renaissance Fairs scene. I don’t know much about them, but they’re (as far as I can gather) more mainstream than the Furry Fandom. Do you know if such commoditization happens there? That might be a good model for what’s likely to happen with the Furry Fandom as it further mainstreams.
That’s the problem, of course, and why it can’t replace the mainstream sites. It’s trapped in fast mode and has no endurance or cumulative effect. So it sounds like there is plenty of demand (especially allowing for how terrible Telegram is as a medium for this), it’s just suppressed and fugitive—which is what we would expect from the cartel model.
Ah yes, the profoundly human and irreplaceable experience of ‘Paypaling some guy online $1000 for drawings of your fursona’...
How can AI ever compete with the deeply meaningful and uncommodifiable essence of the furry experience in ‘commissioning from an artist you like for your friend’? Well, it could compete by ‘letting you create the art for your friend instead of outsourcing it to the market’. What’s more meaningful than paying an artist to make a gift for your friend? You making it yourself! That’s what.
Further, I think you might’ve missed my point in invoking ‘commoditize your complement’ here. The choice is not between a world in which you experience the deep joy of handing over huge sums of money collectively to artists & middlemen, and a meaningless nihilistic wasteland of AI art where there is naught but ‘atoms and the void’; it’s between the commissioning world and all of the many other options beyond paying for some drawings, like going to conventions with your friends with the freed-up cash, or building elaborate D&D-esque campaigns or fictional worlds with your fursona character now that images of it are ‘too cheap to meter’, or creating a band in VRChat with voice-changing software and recording you & your pals singing filks, or… something. (Use some imagination.)
I’m not a furry, I’m not going to pretend I know exactly where you will derive all of your personal meaning and what form will parasocial relationships take in the future; but I note that nowhere else in subcultures does there seem to be a similar cartel-esque community where personal relationships/identities are mediated through so much payments to artists, nor does it always seem to have been a part of furry culture. So I do not expect that to be the unchanging essence of furrydom, but a more historically contingent fact related to Internet & online payments developing faster than AI—and potentially a fast-vanishing fact, at that.