Week 12/2024
Happy New Year, I guess.
I just realized that it's been three years since last time I told anything here and I'm afraid I know why.
I love writing in my blog because it allows me to put my ideas in order and sharing my art with the people who really cares for me, but Social Media is faster and they trap me with their algorithms, and I lose time and concentration, and all is wrong.
Other of the reasons, I mean, the main one, is the paralyzing fear of uploading images and texts that end up feeding the AI machines, what I do is going to be used against me and I feel there's nothin I can do about that.
If you are reading this I guess that you understand that AIs are not a "another tool for artists", they're the very death of art, but it's been only a few days ago that I've realized the scale of it. I knew that there was something called web scraping that's "It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis", until now this technique was used tor indexing content or analyzing that content by researchers. But now that technology is being used to extract that data and feed with them the Large Language Models (LLMs), or by their comercial name AI. Researching I've found that the AI companies are making data scraping of all the web, the scale of it is astonishing. We have known that the image generating models have been fed with everything, including pedophilic content.
As you can guess, all that has me paralyzed, I don't want to share my work knowing that it's going to be stollen, and not stolen by someone who apreciates it but by a machine that doesn't care, it only wants volume of data.
That's why I've started using an App called Nightshade that "poisons" the datasets it's included in. All images in this entry are in its original look and in its glazed look, it's weird but I'm afraid we must get used.
I also must say that my obsession with this has made me study a lot and I'm beginning to be the person the media calls to speak about this. It all started with this post:
I saw the cover of a book by a huge Spanish publisher and just noted where you could see that's AI generated… and I went viral.
Speaking of other topics. On Tuesday 19th the people of comics in Zaragoza will gather in Taj Mahal, the oldest comic book store in Spain, and we will remember the figure of Akira Toriyama, one of the most influential mangakas ever. To celebrate we will be making a set of postcards that we will give away on the event.
We also had the second edition of Fanzimad in Madrid, but unfortunately we didn't have time to finish out fanzine, Raro 2, I don't know what will we do with the material finally.
I didn't want to travel a lot this year but it's been impossible, on Friday 22nd I'm going to be speaking about super-heroines in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and the day after I will be signing books all day long at La Comic-Sería.
Este año me había propuesto cundir menos, ir a menos saraos y al final ya me he liado, el viernes 22 estaré en Santa Cruz de Tenerife hablando de superheroínas.
April 30th and 31st I will be in Paris for the Comic Con France.
I don't want to forget that I collaborated with Mikelodigas, Mik Remacha and Marina Vidal for some fancy Magic-compatible-tokens they made for the GRAF.
Also, we've also been doing Streaming de Dibujantes videos so, don't worry, I'm still alive and doing stuff, what I don't do is speak about it!