The landscape of Illustration has changed drastically

2024 has been a difficult year already for illustrators and artists, a *lot* of us had our work stolen and dumped into Generative AI image generators without our consent or compensation.

And now a lot of us are competing with our own work.

It’s now more imperative than ever that folks who want to continue seeing human made art, don’t fall to the temptation of using Generative AI, no matter how small an author/creator/business you are, it affects every single one of us negatively. And is an absolute guarantee that it won’t (and has not) stopped at Artists being exploited.

Scams that target the vulnerable and not-so-tech-inclined are more insidious and difficult to spot than they’ve ever been. Parents are getting calls from their children begging for financial help, only for it to turn out to be a generative AI scam.

Authors are having their entire living library of work scraped and regurgitated for cheap imitations of their work, which however low quality they may be, there is still profit to be made and people who will buy it, whether they’re unaware of it being generated and not human made, or simply don’t care.

It’s no mystery how actual professional artists feel about generative AI profiting from their work. Credit to: (art) Veronika Kozlova: https://www.artstation.com/sleeping_bird (tweet) StopAI: https://twitter.com/StopAI_Info

But using GenAI can’t be harming artists that bad, right?

Once cherished art platform, now disgraced cesspit of algorithm images, DeviantArt reported that one of their users – who’s work is entirely algorithm made – raked in over a whopping $25,000 mass selling the labour of others.

Deviantart is now utterly unusable and joins Artstation in another platform plagued by machine generated images competing against living, working artists.

Has it affected me? (Rachel George)

In Short: Yes.
There has been a noticeable, tangible drop in inquiries for my work, despite me posting and sharing my art now more than ever (I’m active on Twitter/X, Bluesky and Tumblr more than I have been in the last few years) I’ve sent out more portfolio drops and applications than I have before, and as a result I’ve had to pivot my entire business module to ensure I make ends meet.

Maybe I’m just not that good at my job?

Well, I guess one could use this excuse. But the fact is I’ve both improved artistically this year – my work hasn’t changed in any drastic way, just improved in speed and skill – I’ve been more visible and active and if that were the case; Why was I getting work just fine before now? Before generative AI became so mainstream that every other indie publisher, author and TTRPG company is now spewing it out there’s reports of the general public getting sick of seeing it, and consider “important for an image to be authentic”

But enough of this, here’s some human made art.

The Blood Bride: Written by Rae D. Magdon
Cover art & design by me (Rachel George), a human.
If you want to work together and make something real and human, feel free to send me an email, or catch me on any of the social media platforms.