💛#PortfolioDay News - Issue #12

Happy (almost) New Year! The next #PortfolioDay fast approaches.

Hail and well met wonderful newsletter subscriber! I hope you have been having a warm holiday season cuddled up with your favorite seasonal beverage. The end of the year is the perfect time to sit and reflect on the year behind us and plan for the one ahead! Let’s take some time to do that together. But first…

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The next #PortfolioDay is two weeks away on Tuesday, January 9th! Whether you are a creative professional looking for your next gig, or someone who hires creatives, #PortfolioDay is the tag for you! Watch this to learn more:

And one for Instagram as well:

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2023 was a challenging year for creative professionals. Mergers and cutbacks in the entertainment sector have had an outsized impact on creative jobs. Some animated series in production were scrapped entirely while others already completed were wiped off of streaming services altogether. Game workers continue to feel the crushing impact of exploitation and low wages while fat cats in C-suites rake in all the benefits of the multi billion dollar industry. Couple that with the ongoing drama of large language models pillaging and scraping the entire internet for content, it’s safe to say it’s been a rough one. Even the social media platforms that many of us have become reliant on to run our businesses are selling us out to pasture. Bafflingly, even Adobe—whose userbase consists of creative professionals— is integrating and pushing image generation in their programs.

Despite it all, there is a lot of cause for hope. Workers in creative fields are unionizing at a rapid pace, spurred on by unionization and strikes in other sectors. AI-aided images continue to lose at the U.S Copyright office and in court. “Model collapse” is still a big possibility too meaning the problem may eventually take care of itself. And enormously, the LAION-5B machine learning dataset was removed just this month after a Stanford study found that the dataset contained abuse material (big child abuse TW for the preceding link).

Groups advocating for regulation of scraped datasets and LLMs are working all around the world to make sure that the voices of artists are being heard by legislators. Here are a select few to look into, please consider lending them your support:
Human Artistry Campaign
Concept Art Association - USA and beyond
Arte es Ética - Latin America and Spain
European Guild for Artificial Intelligence Regulation (EGAIR) - Europe

I hope sharing some of this news has given you hope, I know it has done so for me. If you have more good news or hope to share, please do so liberally in the comment section of this post!

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Now then, with 2024 coming in less than a week and #PortfolioDay following soon after, it’s a great time to kick off new habits and leave less than desirable ones behind.

Speaking for myself, I found that prolonged social media use has been having negative impacts on me. There are many reasons why I started and continue to run #PortfolioDay. One of the main reasons is that I needed to find an excuse to interact with these platforms less. Being an artist, it can feel like you become invisible to your community and to potential jobs if you are not constantly interacting online. This tag allows me to make an appearance when I need to find work and still have my post be searchable by clients! I know this approach will not work for everyone’s situation, but if this resonates with you, I encourage you to put the following #PortfolioDay dates in your calendar and delete the apps off of your phone (you can create your posts from any browser and you can always download the apps again when you need to).

2024 #PortfolioDay Dates:
January 9th
April 9th
July 9th
October 8th

Another habit I will be incorporating is running every image that I upload to the internet through Glaze! And as soon as it is ready, hooooo boy am I using the heck out of Nightshade. Nightshade is a data poisoning tool being developed by the same folks who created Glaze. While Glaze bamboozles LLMs into being unable to discern what your image is, Nightshade purports to be able to derail the existing training set given enough poisoned samples. Read a much better explanation of what it is and how it works here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/

Download Glaze here: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/downloads.html
OR
Learn how to access WebGlaze: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/webinvite.html

And finally, if you are looking to hone new or existing creative skills in the new year, we have some resources for you. To reward you for sticking through this LONG edition of the newsletter, take a look at this enormous thread of community recommended classes! Enjoy!

What habits are you cultivating in 2024? Share with us in the comments below!

Have a restful end of the year, see you in 2024!
💛Audrey