Just testing the waters of this community

[Lunatique]

I used to be regular poster at CA.org though less known one. Eventually I ended up getting job in games industry (I mostly worked on mobile games). I come back to this forum once every few months and even post something recently but sadly I started to question the idea of having something like public sketchbook thread in the age of AI scraping. Maybe AI just changed my views on sharing images on the internet in general.

I was curious of the origins of this forum and I came across this post on Dave Rapoza blog from 2014:

http://daverapoza.blogspot.com/2014/10/g...arren.html

It started as tight community of around 10 highly motivated people that learned and pushed each other together to do better work. They ended up being successful enough that their careers took off and they focused in the end on their jobs. They left off forum and this initial energy was lost. Where I am going with this?
I think in terms of art communities focused on learning there is some life cycle and also there need to be small amount of right people with common goal. Maybe forum formula is good but nowdays it would work better as something more private, small and while ability to archive is good in the end all that information is just used for the time of learning. After that people move on.

PS. To be honest I am thinking once in a while about starting my own forum style community but it's easier said than done. Maybe some day...

I wouldn't let AI alter how you choose to interact with the world as an artist. It's going to scrape what it can find no matter what, and it's already got more than enough resources to do whatever it wants--the rest is just how the developers improve the machine learning capabilities so the AI can use the resources it already has even better. Even if every person on the planet stopped posting stuff on the web for AI to steal, it's already far too late and the AI already has more than enough of what it needs. 

The fact all the original members who started this forum moved on after they went pro is interesting. For some folks, once they start working in the industry, they start to rely on co-workers and friends in the industry instead of forums. Also, those intense few years before becoming good enough to go pro required all of their time and energy, and once they start to make a living at it, some would begin to feel like they want to spend their time off-work on other things like hobbies and other creative passions, instead of continuing to put all their time and energy into art. 

I remember in the last couple of years of my time in the game industry as art director, I pretty much spent all my off-work time moonlighting as a composer for film/games, since music is actually a bigger passion of mine compared to art. I did a little bit of volunteer work as concept artist on Black Mesa only because I loved the idea the team wanted to remake Half-Life with updated graphics and tech, and that was the only art I did in those two years outside of work. If I was still working in game or animation or film, I'm pretty sure outside of work, I would not be doing any art at all, save a portrait or two here and there, and the rest of my free time will be spent on writing novels and making music, as compared to them, doing art is more like just a job--at least the kind of work entertainment industries require. 

Even now, I find myself wanting to take some time to work on the portraits I haven't finished, but my novels and music takes up all of my free time so the unfinished work just sits on my hard drive.