This probably doesn’t generalize beyond very niche subcultures, but in the one I’m a member of, the Furry Fandom, art drawn by real artists is such a core aspect that, even though furries use generative AI for fun, we don’t value it. One reason behind this is that, different from more typical fandoms, in which members are fans of something specific made by a 3rd party, in the Furry Fandom members are fans of each other.
Give that, and assuming the Furry Fandom continues existing in the future, I expect members will continue commissioning art from each other or, at the very least, will continue wanting to be able to commission art from each other, and will use AI-generated art as a temporary stand in while they save to commission real pieces from the actual artists they admire.
I was surprised to hear this, given how the fur flew back when we released This Pony Does Not Exist & This Fursona Does Not Exist, and how well AstraliteHeart went on to create furry imagegen with PonyDiffusion (now v6); I don’t pay any attention to furry porn per se but I had assumed that it was probably going the way regular stock photos / illustrations / porn / hentai were going, as the quality of samples rapidly escalated over time & workflows developed—the bottom was falling out of the commission market with jobs cratering and AI-only ‘artists’ muscling in. So I asked a furry acquaintance I expected would know.
He agreed inasmuch as he said that there was a remarkable lack of AI furry porn on e621 & FurAffinity and just in general, and what I had expected hadn’t happened. (Where is all the furry AI porn you’d expect to be generated with PonyDiffusion, anyway? Civitai?* That site is a nightmare to navigate, and in no way a replacement for a proper booru.) But it was not for a lack of quality.
He had a more cynical explanation, though: that despite huge demand (lots of poorer furries went absolutely nuts for TFDNE—at least, until the submissions were deleted by mods...), the major furry websites are enough of a cartel, and allied with the human artists, that they’ve managed to successfully censor and keep AI art out of bounds. And no AI-accepting furry website has hit any kind of critical mass, so it’s broadly not a thing.
I wonder how long this can last? It doesn’t seem like a sustainable cartel, as the quality continues to increase & costs crash. If nothing else, how do they intend to suppress AI video...? (There is not even a fig leaf argument that you should avoid AI video to cater to hardworking human animators, because manual animation is so colossally expensive and will never ever be realtime.)
And then consider the advertisers who pay the bills for e621′s colossal bandwidth usage: from an advertisers’ perspective, someone who sells dragon dildos or custom fursuits or convention tickets, say, propping up human artists is a waste of money that could be spent on their wares which do not have adequate AI substitutes. 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 if there are any good statistics on how much furry money gets spent on art total, but if the anecdotes about spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, particularly from rich techie furries, are true, then it seems like the total must be at least in the tens of millions annually.) Individual advertisers would never dare suggest this, because anyone who sticks their neck out will get it chopped off by e621 et al, pour encourager les autres, and a consortium would probably squabble and leak and not do any better.
But that means that a third party could potentially enter in and profit from breaking the equilibrium. All they need is to get big enough that they can peel off an advertiser or two, and then it’s all over. So if someone like NovelAI integrated an e621-style booru and invested enough to make it a usable substitute for e621 and integrated their own furry models into it, they could make a killing in both signups & advertising on the booru.
* another datapoint: ’I have seen furry AI art on Pixiv. Where else is it? Probably on Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter. It got me curious: does furry Mastodon often allow AI art? I have checked a sample of 10 instances from https://furryfediverse.org/. Their list is in random order. (The dark mode switch isn’t tristate, boo!) The result: 3 instances banned AI art outright; 4 had no rules about it; 1 required tagging it (“No untagged AI slop.”); 1 explicitly allowed it “unless used for nefarious purposes”; 1 was ambiguous (requiring “bot” content to be unlisted with language that may or may not apply to AI art).′
A supporting data point: I made a series of furry illustrations last year that combined AI-generated imagery with traditional illustration and 3d modelling- compositing together parts of a lot of different generations with some Blender work and then painting over that. Each image took maybe 10-15 hours of work, most of which was just pretty traditional painting with a Wacom tablet.
When I posted those to FurAffinity and described my process there, the response from the community was extremely positive. However, the images were all removed a few weeks later for violating the site’s anti-AI policy, and I was given a warning that if I used AI in any capacity in the future, I’d be banned from the site.
So, the furiously hardline anti-AI sentiment you’ll often see in the furry community does seem to be more top-down than grassroots- not so much about demand for artistic authenticity (since everyone I interacted with seemed willing to accept my work as having had that), but more about concern for the livelihood of furry artists and a belief that generative AI “steals” art during the training process. By normalizing the use of AI, even as just part of a more traditional process, my work was seen as a threat to other artists on the site.
I’d guess your work is in the blended category where the people currently anti-ai are being incorrect by their own lights, and your work did not in fact risk the thing they are trying to protect. I’d guess purely ai generated art will remain unpopular even with the periphery, but high-human-artistry ai art will become more appreciated by the central groups as it becomes more apparent that that doesn’t compete the way they thought it did. I also doubt it will displace human-first art, as that’s going to stay mildly harder to create with ai as long as there’s a culture of using ai in ways that are distinct from human art, and therefore lower availability of AI designed specifically to imitate the always-subtly-shifting most recent human-artist-made-by-hand style. It’s already possible to imitate, but it would require different architectures.
I don’t think AIs are able to produce the product that is being sold at all, because the product contains the causal chain that produced it. This is a preference that naturally generates AI-resistant jobs, as long as the people who hold it can themselves pay for the things. I mean, you might be able to value drift the people involved away if you experience machine at them hard enough, but it seems like as long as what they’re doing is trying to ensure a physically extant biological being who is a furry made the thing and not the thing is high sensory intensity at furry-related features, it seems like it would actually resist that.
Now, like, you propose preference falsification. If that’s the case, I’m wrong. I currently think I’m right at like, 70% or so.
I think you’re right: I have heard this claimed widely about Art, that part of the product and its value is the story of who made it, when and why, who’s in it, who commissioned it, who previously owned it, and so forth. This is probably more true at the expensive pinnacles of the Art market, but it’s still going to apply within specific subcultures. That’s why forgeries are disliked: objectively they look just like the original artist’s work, but the story component is a lie.
More generally, luxury goods have a namber of weird economic properties, one of which is that there’s a requirement that they be rare. Consider the relative value of natural diamonds or other gemstones, vs synthetic ones that are objectively of higher clarity and purity with fewer inclusions: the latter is an objectively better product but people are willing to pay a lot less for it. People pay a lot more for the former, because they’re ’natural”, which is really because they’re rare and this a luxury/status symbol. I think this is an extension of my category 5. — rather then the human artist acting as your status symbol in person as I described above, a piece of their art that you commissioned and took them a couple of days to make just for you is hanging on your wall (or hiding in your bedroom closet, as the case may be).
There are basically three reasons to own a piece of art: 1) that’s nice to look at 2) I feel proud of owning it 3) other people will think better of me because I have it and show it off The background story doesn’t affect 1), but it’s important for 2) and 3).
This might also be part of why there’s a tendency for famous artists to be colorful characters: that enhances the story part of the value of their art.
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.
Good one! I think I can generalize from this to a whole category (which also subsumes my sex-worker example above):
4. (v2) Skilled participant in an activity that heavily involves interactions between people, where humans prefer to do this with other real humans, are willing to pay a significant premium to do so, and you are sufficiently more skilled/talented/capable/willing to cater to others’ demands than the average participant that you can make a net profit off this exchange. Examples: Furry Fandom artist, director/producer/lead performer for amateur/hobby theater, skilled comedy-improv partner, human sex-worker Epistemic status: seems extremely plausible Economic limits: Net earning potential may be limited, depending on just how much better/more desirable you are as a fellow participant than typical people into this activity, and on the extent to which this can be leveraged in a one-producer-to-many-customers way — however, making the latter factor high is is challenging because it conflicts with the human-to-real-human interaction requirement that allows you to out-compete an AI/robot in the first place. Often a case of turning a hobby into a career.
This probably doesn’t generalize beyond very niche subcultures, but in the one I’m a member of, the Furry Fandom, art drawn by real artists is such a core aspect that, even though furries use generative AI for fun, we don’t value it. One reason behind this is that, different from more typical fandoms, in which members are fans of something specific made by a 3rd party, in the Furry Fandom members are fans of each other.
Give that, and assuming the Furry Fandom continues existing in the future, I expect members will continue commissioning art from each other or, at the very least, will continue wanting to be able to commission art from each other, and will use AI-generated art as a temporary stand in while they save to commission real pieces from the actual artists they admire.
I was surprised to hear this, given how the fur flew back when we released This Pony Does Not Exist & This Fursona Does Not Exist, and how well AstraliteHeart went on to create furry imagegen with PonyDiffusion (now v6); I don’t pay any attention to furry porn per se but I had assumed that it was probably going the way regular stock photos / illustrations / porn / hentai were going, as the quality of samples rapidly escalated over time & workflows developed—the bottom was falling out of the commission market with jobs cratering and AI-only ‘artists’ muscling in. So I asked a furry acquaintance I expected would know.
He agreed inasmuch as he said that there was a remarkable lack of AI furry porn on e621 & FurAffinity and just in general, and what I had expected hadn’t happened. (Where is all the furry AI porn you’d expect to be generated with PonyDiffusion, anyway? Civitai?* That site is a nightmare to navigate, and in no way a replacement for a proper booru.) But it was not for a lack of quality.
He had a more cynical explanation, though: that despite huge demand (lots of poorer furries went absolutely nuts for TFDNE—at least, until the submissions were deleted by mods...), the major furry websites are enough of a cartel, and allied with the human artists, that they’ve managed to successfully censor and keep AI art out of bounds. And no AI-accepting furry website has hit any kind of critical mass, so it’s broadly not a thing.
I wonder how long this can last? It doesn’t seem like a sustainable cartel, as the quality continues to increase & costs crash. If nothing else, how do they intend to suppress AI video...? (There is not even a fig leaf argument that you should avoid AI video to cater to hardworking human animators, because manual animation is so colossally expensive and will never ever be realtime.)
This also makes me think that this is an unstable preference falsification setup.
And then consider the advertisers who pay the bills for e621′s colossal bandwidth usage: from an advertisers’ perspective, someone who sells dragon dildos or custom fursuits or convention tickets, say, propping up human artists is a waste of money that could be spent on their wares which do not have adequate AI substitutes. 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 if there are any good statistics on how much furry money gets spent on art total, but if the anecdotes about spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, particularly from rich techie furries, are true, then it seems like the total must be at least in the tens of millions annually.) Individual advertisers would never dare suggest this, because anyone who sticks their neck out will get it chopped off by e621 et al, pour encourager les autres, and a consortium would probably squabble and leak and not do any better.
But that means that a third party could potentially enter in and profit from breaking the equilibrium. All they need is to get big enough that they can peel off an advertiser or two, and then it’s all over. So if someone like NovelAI integrated an e621-style booru and invested enough to make it a usable substitute for e621 and integrated their own furry models into it, they could make a killing in both signups & advertising on the booru.
* another datapoint: ’I have seen furry AI art on Pixiv. Where else is it? Probably on Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter. It got me curious: does furry Mastodon often allow AI art? I have checked a sample of 10 instances from https://furryfediverse.org/. Their list is in random order. (The dark mode switch isn’t tristate, boo!) The result: 3 instances banned AI art outright; 4 had no rules about it; 1 required tagging it (“No untagged AI slop.”); 1 explicitly allowed it “unless used for nefarious purposes”; 1 was ambiguous (requiring “bot” content to be unlisted with language that may or may not apply to AI art).′
A supporting data point: I made a series of furry illustrations last year that combined AI-generated imagery with traditional illustration and 3d modelling- compositing together parts of a lot of different generations with some Blender work and then painting over that. Each image took maybe 10-15 hours of work, most of which was just pretty traditional painting with a Wacom tablet.
When I posted those to FurAffinity and described my process there, the response from the community was extremely positive. However, the images were all removed a few weeks later for violating the site’s anti-AI policy, and I was given a warning that if I used AI in any capacity in the future, I’d be banned from the site.
So, the furiously hardline anti-AI sentiment you’ll often see in the furry community does seem to be more top-down than grassroots- not so much about demand for artistic authenticity (since everyone I interacted with seemed willing to accept my work as having had that), but more about concern for the livelihood of furry artists and a belief that generative AI “steals” art during the training process. By normalizing the use of AI, even as just part of a more traditional process, my work was seen as a threat to other artists on the site.
I’d guess your work is in the blended category where the people currently anti-ai are being incorrect by their own lights, and your work did not in fact risk the thing they are trying to protect. I’d guess purely ai generated art will remain unpopular even with the periphery, but high-human-artistry ai art will become more appreciated by the central groups as it becomes more apparent that that doesn’t compete the way they thought it did. I also doubt it will displace human-first art, as that’s going to stay mildly harder to create with ai as long as there’s a culture of using ai in ways that are distinct from human art, and therefore lower availability of AI designed specifically to imitate the always-subtly-shifting most recent human-artist-made-by-hand style. It’s already possible to imitate, but it would require different architectures.
I don’t think AIs are able to produce the product that is being sold at all, because the product contains the causal chain that produced it. This is a preference that naturally generates AI-resistant jobs, as long as the people who hold it can themselves pay for the things. I mean, you might be able to value drift the people involved away if you experience machine at them hard enough, but it seems like as long as what they’re doing is trying to ensure a physically extant biological being who is a furry made the thing and not the thing is high sensory intensity at furry-related features, it seems like it would actually resist that.
Now, like, you propose preference falsification. If that’s the case, I’m wrong. I currently think I’m right at like, 70% or so.
I think you’re right: I have heard this claimed widely about Art, that part of the product and its value is the story of who made it, when and why, who’s in it, who commissioned it, who previously owned it, and so forth. This is probably more true at the expensive pinnacles of the Art market, but it’s still going to apply within specific subcultures. That’s why forgeries are disliked: objectively they look just like the original artist’s work, but the story component is a lie.
More generally, luxury goods have a namber of weird economic properties, one of which is that there’s a requirement that they be rare. Consider the relative value of natural diamonds or other gemstones, vs synthetic ones that are objectively of higher clarity and purity with fewer inclusions: the latter is an objectively better product but people are willing to pay a lot less for it. People pay a lot more for the former, because they’re ’natural”, which is really because they’re rare and this a luxury/status symbol. I think this is an extension of my category 5. — rather then the human artist acting as your status symbol in person as I described above, a piece of their art that you commissioned and took them a couple of days to make just for you is hanging on your wall (or hiding in your bedroom closet, as the case may be).
There are basically three reasons to own a piece of art:
1) that’s nice to look at
2) I feel proud of owning it
3) other people will think better of me because I have it and show it off
The background story doesn’t affect 1), but it’s important for 2) and 3).
This might also be part of why there’s a tendency for famous artists to be colorful characters: that enhances the story part of the value of their art.
In my attempted summary of the discussion, I rolled this into Category 5.
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.
The sheer number of Geek Points that This Pony Does Not Exist wins is quite impressive.
Good one! I think I can generalize from this to a whole category (which also subsumes my sex-worker example above):
4. (v2) Skilled participant in an activity that heavily involves interactions between people, where humans prefer to do this with other real humans, are willing to pay a significant premium to do so, and you are sufficiently more skilled/talented/capable/willing to cater to others’ demands than the average participant that you can make a net profit off this exchange.
Examples: Furry Fandom artist, director/producer/lead performer for amateur/hobby theater, skilled comedy-improv partner, human sex-worker
Epistemic status: seems extremely plausible
Economic limits: Net earning potential may be limited, depending on just how much better/more desirable you are as a fellow participant than typical people into this activity, and on the extent to which this can be leveraged in a one-producer-to-many-customers way — however, making the latter factor high is is challenging because it conflicts with the human-to-real-human interaction requirement that allows you to out-compete an AI/robot in the first place. Often a case of turning a hobby into a career.