Hello, my fellow dirty little animals! It's me, your warm, slightly "bitey" furry friend and fellow connoisseur of hot anthro art, Lulu here~!
Let me start by saying I love to share and let people learn from my work the way I have from others, it's like a magical cycle of giving, and in another place, I leave all of my prompts and such public... but here, well, I need to be real with you about something.
I want to address a few unfortunate facts in our creative spaces, and how they affect us. Firstly, AI art, is not commonly appreciated as valid. I'm not just talking about the haters who don't see the hours we pour into prompting, generating, refining, re-generating, and touching up flaws in our images and still secretly crying inside wondering if they're any good at all- I'm talking about the courts and patent offices, which erroneously and vaguely declared that AI art is not valid for protection unless "significant human effort" was involved in it's creation. This is deliberately ambiguous and impossible to prove wording that gives them a blank check to deny anything they wish, without argument. Some people suggest literally screen capturing your entire creative process, from start to finish as "proof", but even that is likely a wasted effort- when the word "AI" is involved they are determined to deny you, and they have crafted a legal loophole to allow it.
Suggestions to "record your creative flow" are like the ones from people who say you have an "automatic copyright" and "the system is there to protect you"- well-meaning, but underinformed.
Which brings me to my next point- image theft. It is rampant now. I am friends with some amazing people who pour their hearts and souls into their work, and see it stolen on sold on sites like that certain site of deviant arts every day. DA is even so toxic, they won't let you easily file a stolen art claim except by providing a link to where it is already posted... on their site. They're literally using the fact that their users steal from you to arm-twist you into signing up for their platform! And don't forget that explicit content is only shareable there with a membership and hidden behind pay-to-view galleries and all of that. For adult art you have pay to post there to easily prove it's yours, and then others have to pay to see it... How's that for making money, right?
And I'd also like to call out that certain worldwide e-garage-sale-Bay, where you can find scammers selling vinyl decals of art stolen from Civit users by mass data-scraping bots, including, heartbreakingly, my friend's works and even a few of my own. Nobody is "too small" a creator when AI bots just search images of "girl" and auto-steal anything sexy enough. And I did file report claims with links to my originals and screenshots- 6 times. They use AI to read the report and automatically deny you within an hour or two. Finally I gave up and sought out living support agents (a feat in itself) and had two direct conversations about 30 minutes long each in which my report was "taken very seriously" and I was "thanked for bringing it to their attention". These resulted in... nothing. But their automated site DID offer me a discount of 17% on that item I was "interested in" I'd been looking at! (Insert cat tears of rage and hopelessness here.) I'm wasting more time and money fighting a losing battle than whatever anyone is stealing from me in theft, and the math just doesn't add up... so I gave up fighting.
And that's the idea, isn't it? Nobody wants to do anything, so they create systems- copyright laws, automated reporting systems, pay-to-play memberships, all so they can write you off at the speed of the internet.
On Civit you can "hide prompt" and all it does is prevent on-site remixing. You can read images with "hidden" prompts by using metadata viewers to read them anyway, you can drop images into a comfy graph to study their "secret" workflows just as easily. It is possible to strip the metadata out before posting... but then Civit makes you add it all in manually for every R+ rated image, and it's a real chore. Add double-posting everything on DA so you're ready when one of their users steals it to make a quick buck and... suddenly that chore is now an ordeal. And of course none of that stops people just literally taking a screenshot and using that. So include "adding a watermark and hoping it doesn't turn people off to your image" and the ordeal is now a minor trauma... PER image post.
To say nothing of the endless civit bugs, breaks, outages, overnight changes and "get out of our sight" .red domain changes shuffling NSFW creators into a back room where they can die quietly.
So what's the point in trying at all?
Well, that depends on who you ask. For me, it is the joy and healing that comes from being able to share what I love with others and even have them sometimes enjoy it and leave me a reaction, tip, or kind comment encouraging me to create more. But at the same time, let's be real, we're all hurting in this suicidal gut-the-poor-to-grease-the-rich world economy, and every penny, or even simple view, that is taken from an artist is something less they have, when most of us don't have a lot to start with and are literally giving our efforts away just trying to share and receive a little love.
I don't have the time, energy, or money to double-post everything here on DA (and elsewhere) just so it won't be sold by someone else, nor do I have the strength to randomly type my character's names into an e(lectronic)Bay search bar to see which of the images I made of them is being sold by a bot today only to report it to a system that is designed to ignore me. Just stripping the image metadata and manually adding it here for every upload is already a chore and drain on my free time I could be lying on my bed in the dark and putting these images to good use, if you follow my meaning. So I am going the unfortunate route of adding watermarks now, in the hopes they will discourage merely copy-pasting my hard work into someone else's profile, gallery, or store.
And yes, there are AI "watermark removers"... but they aren't very good, and most thieves are lazy, so I hope this works. I also hope tacky watermarks don't make my images boring and cause people to skip over them in favor of other artists who think they're "too small to be a target", because trust me, the bots do not look at how many followers you have- they just take everything. So I have to do something. And I'd rather not give up sharing entirely.
Yet.
But that is for the future to decide, if I can grow this profile any while also protecting my hard work and staying at least partly true to my own tastes... Until then, well, good luck, and stay freaky!
Yours,
LuluBelle ദ്ദി（• ˕ •マ.ᐟ