Image source: Merlina McGovern
I’m not going to lie. This post is going to be shallow. I’ve had a long day of editing baggy manuscripts, and I’m tired. As I stare down this final week of Inktober, my well of creativity is slowly bleeding itself dry. I saw someone post on Threads about taking a stand and not doing Inktober this year since it is such a persistent task hanging over your head for the entire month.
It’s funny, I get nervous when the month starts out because I’m not sure how my sketching and inking skills have handled long bouts of inactivity. As the fall days unfurl and I enter the middle of the challenge, I start to regain my confidence and remember that I can draw what I’m imagining. Every day that I do draw is another day that I improve my skills and add to my visual library. But, toward the end of the challenge, I’m just feeling drained, and the daily task quickly becomes a daily chore. And, of course, since I’ve committed to writing a blog post three days a week, there is also that regular writing task-turned-chore that I have to complete each night as well. Eeek, what have I gotten myself into, I think.
As I flip through my sketchbook, however, I get a sense of satisfaction looking at the amount of drawing that I’ve been able to accomplish over the past few weeks. And, as I look at my sketchbooks from years past, I can also see the progress that my drawing skills have made over time, something that fills me with deep satisfaction.
So, I tell myself, it’s OK to feel tired. It’s OK to want to skip a day. But it’s also OK to just sit at my desk for five minutes and pick up my pencil. Five minutes, that’s all I need. And it’s OK to not be clever with the prompts. It’s OK to grab a reference photo from Pexels or Unsplash (free stock photo sites*) and just do a quick study.
And, just like that, I’ve completed my sketch for the day, and I’m nearly done with my daily blog post.
*A quick note on stock photos. I will never use AI-generated images in my Medium posts. I don’t believe in supporting technology that has stolen (and continues to steal) from artists. I also truly despise the dark and soulless outputs from these technologies; they add nothing to your post and tell you nothing about the author of that post.
I recently saw a technology that claims to be fighting back against these AI companies sucking up and stealing massive amounts of artists’ work to train their technologies. The MIT Technology Review has an article outlining this “poisoning tool.” It’s actually quite brilliant. The technology messes with the pixels in uploaded artwork so that AI tools like Stable Diffusion will confuse the images. So, think of it as an artist uploading an image of a cat, but putting pixels on top of that cat that look similar to a dog or that give it a third eye. From the article, “With 300 poisoned samples, an attacker can manipulate Stable Diffusion to generate images of dogs to look like cats.” I like this idea of fighting these thieving companies. It also makes me wonder if people will start to create bots and tools to upload deliberately misleading data to do the same thing to tools like ChatGPT. It makes you think that this will only make the floods of misinformation swamping us even more disjointed and harder to trust. And that is a thought that is far from shallow.
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