So you've probably heard about the Piporete thing. Years after the fact, moderation happened on a bunch of their gallery, and they got very upset about it. The rules have existed from the beginning, so despite the slowness to act, it was a fair ruling. So why are people so upset?
Let me give you a little insight on what it's like to be an artist. We make something that everybody wants, but few people truly value. The perception continues that drawing is an "easy" job despite it being one of the most mentally intensive tasks you can take on. You know how your graphics card is always making loud sounds when you play games because it's rendering things in 3D space? We do that with our brains, and it takes a shocking amount of calories and emotional labor to do it. Having grown up on a farm doing hard labor, I can tell you right now that I could work longer outside than I can on a canvas. You can stretch muscles and make them stronger, but your ability to make your brain have more capacity is severely limited.
So people think what you do is easy. What this means in practice is that even if you're very popular and successful, you'll have to work far beneath your worth, for effectively poverty wages, and survive by having roommates or some other accommodation. Don't believe me? Do a simple math problem next time you have the chance. Look at how many images your average artist manages to make in a month. Now think of how much you'd reasonably pay for each. Now add those up and imagine surviving on that for a month.
Yeah.
And that's all just if you become successful in the first place! Ever wonder why artists are superstitious and believe all kinds of things about algorithms? Because being noticed depends entirely on luck. You might just never end up getting somebody else's eye. You might upload at a bad time. You might get swept away by social media posts. The only way to make it is to network with other artists and do free work for years just to get noticed and build up a fanbase– something it is incredibly hard to do by itself, but especially if you're already struggling.
Everything I just said is also only looking at the issue from the strictly business-minded side of things. If you actually enjoy people engaging with and experiencing your work, get ready for a new emotional rollercoaster because this thing you worked on and are making yourself emotionally vulnerable by sharing is at the mercy of random people on the internet. And they don't even have to be meanspirited; otherwise innocent statements like "this reminds me of [more popular thing]" or someone going on an autistic diatribe about a relatively unrelated topic will leave you feeling cold, desperate for any kind of engagement with the thing you actually worked on but being talked past by people who don't know or really care what you need. That's if anybody comments at all, which is increasingly rare.
What's worse is that even if you succeed and manage to gain traction, the dopamine hit of Metrics will eventually stop doing anything for you. Like a drug that stops working, you'll get less and less out of something Doing Numbers because your brain gets used to it, and if you aren't self-aware enough to understand that, then you'll find yourself getting frustrated, not knowing why you're getting less and less out of it. Similarly, as you improve, your ability to see problems improves at a different rate than your actual ability to draw, so you will go through a ton of phases where everything you draw looks like shit and you have no idea why. Then you might snap out of a six-month dead period by being The Most Inspired You've Ever Been, randomly, for reasons you can't imagine. Being an artist is a lot like being a cultist for an extremely capricious Lovecraftian god, praying and beseeching to some unknown force to fill you with the ability to do wondrous things that fill your life with meaning.
Then there's the other side of the business. You, a statistically introverted person with limited emotional intelligence, must be your own accountant, administrator, PR agent and community manager, and you have probably less than no experience doing any of those things, meaning any of them could blow up in your face at any time. You are at the mercy of services that are cheap or free, because of being broke, and if you're a NSFW artist, just about every platform is just waiting to drop you as soon as they can because payment processors are run by puritanical maniacs. You have to run your own community, and problem actors can come out of the woodwork to ruin the vibe at any time. You should kick them out, but in the back of your mind you worry: "Am I being too harsh? Will people side with them?" And before you know it, their caustic behavior drove off all the people you actually liked interacting with. You kick them, finally, even though it's too late. Or maybe you choose to appoint friends to mod positions! Then you have to hope that people you chose entirely because of their relationship to you, also have the talent to make even-handed decisions while working for you, for free.
So. To recap, you're broke, mentally exhausted, the public thinks you're lazy even though you work more hours than they do, you need others to survive so you feel co-dependent on them, your job is precarious in at least a dozen different ways, asking for commissions during an emergency feels half like asking for charity, and every platform you use is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to you eking out this meager existence, trying to do a little bit of the work that made you want to make art in the first place in between making other people's fantasies come true– a discipline that took you years to cultivate. All this, and random people on these websites ask you all the time for free art; and worse, when you don't give it to them, they call you greedy! GREEDY. It's almost funny, you think, drinking watered down soda out of a plastic cup. You understand, emotionally, the truth of this world: It wants what you can do, but it makes it as hard as humanly possible for you to survive doing it.
And then someone comes along and invents AI Art.
You're panicked. You're confused. You're FURIOUS. AI art?? Really?? They automated THIS before, you don't know, insurance agents??? But yes. Sure enough, some jagoff made a program that steals the aesthetics of artists who render better than you ever will, and everyone around you is ecstatic with the possibilities. Everyone... but you. And when you dare to speak out about it, the defenders come rushing forth. "You don't understand how it works, actually." It works by stealing. "It's not stealing, it's just like how you learn." You kinda think you don't need to see 8,000 pictures of a baseball to draw a baseball. But you don't need to argue the details; behind their post-facto justifications, you can feel exactly what they think:
"We only ever tolerated you because you were the only way to get this. Now we can get it without you in the equation at all, and we're going to progress toward a better future, one without you in it."
So if you've ever wondered why artists seem neurotic and aggrieved and overly emotional? Why we guard our stuff so jealously and feel like everyone's trying to get something from us?
That's why.
