“ai is making it so everyone can make art” Everyone can make art dipshit it came free with your fucking humanity
Oh gee, you’re right! Why didn’t the people who can’t even move their arms think of just making a painting? /s
And before anyone starts spouting some “art is more than just painting” spiel, you don’t know what kind of art someone might need to make in order to express their vision. An artist may have a very specific idea in mind to create the perfect piece of graphic art, and using music, performance, etc. just won’t cut it for them. AI is a tool that can help the disabled in so many ways. Not even just with art. Get off your high horse and accept that disabled people have different needs and, guess what, ABILITIES than you do. Fuck you, asshole.
you are a tar pit.
and you are ableist.
you’re fighting against a tool that makes art more accessible, and actively dismissing the notion that it could even possibly be doing that. this IS ableist. YOU are the tar pit in this situation.
L+Ratio+It doesn’t+i slept w your mom
Hi I’m disabled I’m crippled I have a disorder that makes my fingers suddenly dislocate while I’m holding my pencil I have a spinal issue that makes it hard for me to bend over a desk half of the time I have leg issues that make it difficult for me to get around etc etc etc. I also have a bunch of other issues I don’t want to tell you about.
I’m also in art college. And even if I wasn’t, I’ve been doing art for almost a decade now. I’ve been disabled the whole bloody time.
AI, isn’t art.
There are many disabled artists and we have adapted our own ways of dealing with how we create. Fuck you, we have been doing this forever.
Vincent Van Gogh had temporal lobe epilepsy; Henri Matisse became a wheelchair user after surgery for cancer; Michelangelo had osteoarthritis, limiting mobility and causing pain in his hands and feet.
Paul Smith had a severe case of cerebral palsy and created art using typewriters.
Peter Longstaff has no arms due to Thalidomide, and paints with his feet.
Frida Kahlo not only had polio that disabled her as a child, but of course as we all know was injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems.
Fuck, you want a personal annecdote? I knew a girl (we have lost touch since) who was paralysed from the neck down and she painted with her mouth and there are other artists who do so too! And with eye tracking technology I’m sure disabled artists will be getting more and more tools as the years pass. But we do NOT condone AI art. All that does is put us, real disabled artists, who exist and need support, out of jobs and commissions.
Fuck you.
hi, another disabled person here for more personal anecdotes! here is an art piece i made entirely with my non dominant hand 1 week before my most recent shoulder surgery on that same arm. i also wear splint rings to keep my fingers from dislocating while painting (or playing bass guitar cause i do that too). i make most of my income off hand painted art despite having hand tremors, frequent wrist dislocations/subluxations, and migraines.
my friend and her wife also make their incomes off wig making, leatherwork, and digital collage prints. both have chronic pain as well.
our lines arent perfect because we have shaky hands but thats ok, make it a feature not a flaw in your art. fuck AI.
Anyone who thinks physically disabled people need to use art stealing AI to make our own art is the ableist, actually.
Mine isn’t as drastic (yet) but I’ve been having to wear wrist braces and finger splints since childhood off and on because using my hands in a repetitive motions causes them to be in pretty excruciating pain.
What is my art medium of choice? Knitting. You know, that thing where you have to do a repetitive motion over and over again. I hold my needles a bit strange, I knit through the pain, I sometimes have to give up working on it for weeks at a time. But I will not stop because it’s what makes my heart sing.
Disabled artists don’t need your pity, we’ve been getting by, doing what makes us happy despite the pain and hardships for thousands of years, probably longer, I bet there were neolithic disabled artists.
No actual real artist wants or uses AI, including disabled artists. AI is for losers who are scared of the extremely important phase in art where you suck and want to skip it by stealing and not even in a cool “I’m emulating your style because I wanna learn from it” way.
Go suck at art for a couple years like the rest of us and stop talking over disabled artists.
As a physically disabled artist, I couldn’t agree more with this post, and I couldn’t yell that last part loud enough:
“ Disabled artists don’t need your pity, we’ve been getting by, doing what makes us happy despite the pain and hardships for thousands of years, probably longer, I bet there were neolithic disabled artists.
No actual real artist wants or uses AI, including disabled artists. AI is for losers who are scared of the extremely important phase in art where you suck and want to skip it by stealing and not even in a cool "I’m emulating your style because I wanna learn from it” way.
Go suck at art for a couple years like the rest of us and stop talking over disabled artists.“
I’m another disabled artist. Disability changes how I work and I need accommodations, but AI is not an accommodation. It is making my job harder because now I need to complete with robots who never have to take time off because they’re sick or in pain. If my 20 year art career comes to an end because AI is cheaper than hiring a real artist, I can’t just go get another job. I’m too disabled for labor jobs.
I’ve never heard a disabled artist advocate for AI involvement in art. It’s always able bodied people talking over us.
I don't get seasonal depression, I just get slightly sleepier and more irritable and mopey when I don’t get any sunlight, but when I said this to my doctor she was like “you should still get a lightbox” and I did and now I have way more energy.
The moral of the story is, if you spend time thinking to yourself “well I don’t actually have [diagnosable problem], I have [milder version that I can just ignore]”, you could instead of just ignoring it get the accommodation for the problem and see if it improves your life. I do not expect to remember this next time I “don’t actually have the real problem”, but maybe eventually I will learn.
We treat accommodations like something that you can only have if you’re really really desperately suffering and cannot function at all without them, but that’s… really really not the case. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Not to uuuhhh highjack this post, but I have some experience with this. Not only does it corroborate the above but I have found that even you don’t have any need for whatever accommodation that also shouldn’t bar you from getting one if you just…
want it
see years ago my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, and as happens with progressing cancer her mobility was drastically reduced. To help combat this and allow her to retain independence at home Papa (my grandfather) got a shower chair. This is about as self-descriptive as it can get, it is a chair made of metal and plastic that sits in your shower or bathtub. I’m sure those with physical disabilities are already quite familiar with them, for those of you that aren’t just google it.
Eventually my grandmother passed. A couple years after my dad had to stay at Papa’s house for a couple weeks, for his own medical reasons. While there he discovered that Papa had kept the chair. And while Papa was old he was hardly infirm, he didn’t use a cane or have any severe mobility issues. Certainly none that would have affected his ability to stand in the shower. The conversation went more or less as such:
Dad: Why they hell did you keep the shower chair, dad? You don’t need it
Papa: Kevin, you wait until you use it. Then you’ll know why I kept it.
My dad was disbelieving tbh, to him chairs in showers when you don’t need them was a thing that like. Lazy rich people had. wtf could be so great about being able to sit in the shower? Why would an able-bodied person even need to? it’s a fucking shower? wash urself and then get out. Then he used the chair, and according to him it was like he’d had a proper religious revelation. Shortly after his return home (tbh the amount of time it took for him to take a shower sans chair) my dad went out and bought a shower chair.
The ensuing conversation with my mother went as such:
Mom: Kevin why did you buy that? We don’t need it!
Dad: Just use it once, this will change your life.
And it did. After using the chair for the first time my mom straight up wanted to know why they had never thought to get a chair for the shower before. Ever since we have had a chair in the shower.
It has proven itself invaluable.
Exhausted but covered in grime from yardwork so you HAVE to wash before doing anything else? shower chair
Don’t have the spoons to stand in the shower? shower chair
Leg/hip/back injury slowly getting worse over time making standing for long periods a difficult matter? shower chair
Home from work and just want to shower but your feet are killing you? shower chair
can’t keep your balance when masturbating in the shower? shower chair
want to write fic in ur head without your feet starting to hurt because you maybe spent a little too long standing there in spray? shower chair
disassociating? shower chair
gotta shave your legs? shower chair
crying because you’ve now realized how much easier being able to sit down and prop up a leg makes shaving while in the shower? shower chair
I have no current mobility issues, and yet if I had to move house tomorrow a shower chair of my own would be one of the first things I purchase for my own home.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “this could make my life easier but do I really need it?” And y’know what maybe you don’t need it. Maybe you don’t need that accommodation, but maybe it would make your life easier anyway. When it comes to things that you keep in your home for personal use does it really matter? Besides there is always the very real chance that buying it now, when you don't’ need it but can afford it, will save your ass down the line when you suddenly do desperately need it.
I would also like to point out: if able-bodied people start using things that were originally designed as disability accommodations, they become normalised. They become acceptable. And then all of a sudden they’re widely available, they usually become cheaper, and disabled people don’t get shit for needing them.
Buy the damn shower chair. Get a JarKey so you don’t need gorilla strength to open the pickled onions. Install soft-touch taps. Revel in your newly comfortable life while also making the world a slightly more disability-friendly place.
So a couple days ago, some folks braved my long-dormant
social media accounts to make sure I’d seen this tweet:
And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response,
I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.
So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and
costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi
convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had
been honing their craft for years. These
were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your
journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing. They
had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t
share it. It’s not just that they
weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up
tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material
they used, they would refuse to tell you.
Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge
literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of
their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a
door slammed in your face. Now, that’s a
generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful
old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea
of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t
much of a thing. And then what information
did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do
things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks,
or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc. NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.
Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime
and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime
conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises
(notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the
theatres. What those brought into the
convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a
lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie
franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to
its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and
above all, overwhelmingly female. I
think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime
of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal
with yet another one. They looked at the
old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be
unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO. If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to
share it with everyone. Those old-school
costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those
old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding
with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered. I was
one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side
of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but
there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own
hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas
and sharing, sharing, sharing.
I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble
knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all. I’m saying that a group of people, individually
and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole. That wasn’t
necessarily an easy decision to make, either.
I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that
armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me
an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge
for a year, or two, or three. And I
thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again,
there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen
for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and
I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and
gave their creativity to the world.
And it changed the face of costuming. People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries. And then the next wave of younger costumers
took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and
the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with
Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to
books, and I am just so, so proud.
So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I
figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just
scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a
springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart. This is our legacy, and a legacy the current
group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.
(Oh, and for anyone wondering: yes, I’m over 40 now, and
yes, I’m still making costumes. And that armor is still in great shape after 17
years in a hot attic!)
