atomicfiredoll

I literally can't make out what you're trying to allude to.

Mastodon isn't the entirety of the Fediverse and is decentralized, so artists can just start create their own instance if they really need to. But, there are actually already multiple art related instances, like mastodon.art.

Ah, thank you! I thought I must be doing something wrong, and even clicked the contributor link at the bottom, but couldn't find it. Oddly, I seem to see a different bio and no links on the page.

> "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here". "Always Raining Here" is a Canadian slice of life romance published in 2025 by First Second books and is now available in bookstores across Canada. Hazel and Bell have been working together since 2011, with a focus on telling stories set in their home province of British Columbia."

I wonder if it's something region specific.

But, in the comic it says "We still have our website" and the address in the panel is electricraccoon.com, but I think that if I open that site it says:

> La tienda en línea ha sido suspendida momentáneamente

> Si es tuya y quieres reactivarla, entra a tu Administrador Nube.

> ---

> The online store has been momentarily suspended

> If it's yours and you want to reactivate it, go to your Cloud Manager.

Edit: I'm assuming they were using some kind of site builder with ecommerce functionality, I know that some small creators use their site at least in part for merch, sometimes entirely.

That's my thought too. As the comic illustrates, artists have had to community hop before. It feels like there's some potential for a good match, despite occasional technical challenges like instances winding down.

Am I misunderstanding this? Has their website also been suspended?

I was initially going to check and see if they had any presence on the Fediverse. While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues at the moment, I think web comics could find an audience there with less threat of censorship, albeit a smaller one.

iirc when I was dealing with reviewing traffic and AI scraping bots recently, I noticed something about Meta's: When a user links to a page, the bots that grab oembed data to generate the link preview are using the same User Agent string as the Meta AI crawlers that scrape content.

For context, oembed data about your page could be seen as information you're basically happy to share, so other sites can create things like previews.

That's not necessary, there are other companies that just use different UA strings for the different tasks. They appear to deliberately make it so that if you have nothing to do with Meta and block their content scrapers, you also break basic functionality for people who happen to share a link to your site in their products.

Traditionally, one example is software that supports theming. Site owners who wanted to customize the look of something without getting their hands too dirty writing a whole new theme may duplicate and heavily modify the CSS from an existing one.

For applications people spend a expected to spend a lot of time in, the user may even be able to select the theme.

But, things like CSS custom properties have eaten into some of the basic use cases like palette swaps, assuming they're supported in the default theme.

I use AI all the time and do some paid work as an artist. Although I don't use AI directly in my own work, I am very familiar with the workflows in 2D, 3D, and video.

> you didn't create anything in this case. Not the images at least. Which then casts doubt on the rest of the writing in said blog post.

The topic is "AI-generated images" in blog posts. Which, no, most of those aren't being generated with any of the more sophisticated techniques you're listing. And if they are, they're less likely to be the images people are complaining about and that are being discussed here.

People are complaining that search engines are overwhelmed by AI-generated writing and images. Several people in this thread are stating that they click-off when they see it. It may be developing similar to banner ad blindness, where people saw the pattern of spam and low quality output and developed a reflexively mental filter and stronger dislike of them. What number of potential readers is an acceptable loss? Most blogs are small, so probably not many. But even worse, as many have said here, it also harms their perception of the blog.

Outside of the many outright spam blogs generating tons of images, a lot of people creating the "AI-looking" art that people say looks "bad" or "obvious" are actually also putting time and energy into it too. Those things don't automatically equal quality or trust. In some cases they consider themselves the serious AI artists. These creators don't always know that their images "look like AI," which is part of why it's becoming a perceived quality signal. They'll say it doesn't, but people mistake some of my pieces (not AI) as AI. Art is in the eye of the beholder. (Incidentally, if you're reading this, ensure you're actually getting meaningful, critical critique and feedback. That's something that's an important cultural component in many creative communities.)

I take issue with how poorly phrased the comment's arguments are. Saying that people "didn't create anything if they used Photoshop", they didn't create with whatever "synth" is supposed to be, or that scientific research isn't real because of calculators are bad comparisons and inaccurate.

The author may be trying to make a point similar to the photography one mentioned elsewhere or something like "Well if AI generated art isn't art, art must not exist?" I'm literally confused by the post and honestly can't make out the point with how hyperbolic and outright wrong it is. It just reads as mud-slinging to me.

> What about the synth example

Does "synth" mean synthesized music? What about it? A synthesizer is generally deterministic and the musician is making a decision about exactly what nodes are being played. The use of something like an arpeggiator is predictable and deliberate choice (I'm not going to go into the artistic integrity tier list of every synthesizer module.) Text prompt-based generation is a much higher level of abstraction which often makes several compositional and stylistic decisions for the user, even with advanced prompting.

Comparisons like these are unconvincing, which is part of why the other comment isn't good.

For some group of users, images they perceive as "AI" now carry a spam association. So, is your music actually rising above the cacophony? Do people even see your banner ad? Do they instantly get a bad taste in their mouth?

Go ahead and use AI-images in your blog post, I'm not gatekeeping or going to stop you. If they're so great, use a bunch of them everywhere. But, I (and people in this thread or that I know) will assume it's blogspam and click away. And, if it's commercial setting and I'm your competitor, I'm going to view that as potential opening for differentiation.

If that dog is wearing Matrix style sunglasses... maybe a cute dog hoodie, I'm even more interested.

What guys?

You're just putting words in their mouth. They didn't say any of that. Re-read their comment.

> Pictures speak a thousand words and serve as a great intro to a blog post.

If pictures are so important, why would "nobody... take the time to hand draw a piece of art" or find a one of the many free stock photos? When I was actively blogging, I would doodle quick images to include all the time for this precise reason.