There's at least one bot, scraping Neocities for visual art that someone is using in a cryptocurrency scheme. AGAIN. I thought we were done with this when NFTs died and got buried, but it turns out crypto was just taking an extended vacation with all the money it stole from people who bought into the pump-and-dump schemes.
I have this sort of rant post that I made in 2020 in my Drafts folder on Tumblr, where I talk about how audio artists have no chance of notoriety on social media because of the commitments required to experience it. Basically, I was getting tired of people ignoring my original music while visual art was getting 20.000 notes. I observed at the time that visual art is easy to consume, because it's impossible to ignore. If it passes by your field of vision, you've seen it, and you'll remember it; whereas, it takes 3 commitments to consume audio. 1) stop scrolling, 2) click play, 3) resist the urge to scroll until the file has played to the end. At the time, Tumblr didn't undock the audio player when you scrolled beyond its embedded post, so you had to stop scrolling in order to hear more than a second or two of the audio file. I was resentful of the fact that visual art could be fully consumed in the 1.5 seconds it took to scroll past it.
It turns out, the corporate feudal state approaches visual art in the same way. The reason it's still in my drafts is because I realised that content is consumed. Art is enjoyed. No one enjoys anything on social media, where everything is approached as content. Consumable goods that keep you distracted during coffee breaks at work. Content is what made NFTs, fast fashion, and 5-minute crafts possible, and is the reason why AI art exists. The point of content is to keep you distracted with a constant stream of unique visuals so that you don't have to sit there waiting for something to happen on your dashboard, and social media has conditioned us to accept this. The content doesn't have to be good, it just has to attract your eye for a fraction of a second; more basically, content is the gentrification of the internet.
I talked a couple days ago about the most transphobic cookie I ever ate; it was also the worst-tasting cookie I've ever had. The reason was gentrification: the bakery I got it from was established by one of the original cottagecore authors, using gluten-free, sugar-free, and dairy-free alternatives to more sustainable ingredients, because even though most people don't have an intolerance to gluten, sugar, or dairy, it's fashionable to insist upon it. Fashion has always been the content of the physical plane. Gentrification has conditioned reasonably well-off people into accepting mediocrity because it's fashionable. These horribly unsuitable ingredients were thrown together into an imitation chocolate-chip cookie because of fashion. These incredibly mediocre AI-generated pictures were thrown onto your dashboard because of content.
This crypto-mining scheme isn't the first time someone has tried to commodify non-AI art. I spoke of NFTs earlier, but even before that there was a bot that listened to Twitter comments for the statement, "I wish I could get this on a shirt", and then offered the underlying image on a graphic teeshirt from Redbubble or somewhere. Oh, sure, eventually people got wise to the scheme and started putting the trigger statement onto copyrighted material, causing the bot's creator to be sued mightily by Nintendo and Disney. The point is the commodification of art WILL HAPPEN whether you want it to or not. It's really sad when you think about it: a visual artist spends 19 days in Krita or something, drawing a piece from a reference sketch on paper which, itself, took a day to finish; they're so proud of it that they post a scaled-down preview on their social media accounts, and then it gets ripped off by several different bots; one makes posters, one makes graphic tees, one trains Midjourney; and downloaded by 50 different people, 12 of whom repost it elsewhere without appropriate credits. And this is supposed to be an accepted fact of life for visual artists, getting their shit ripped off by people who only want to use the image for content engagement so they can make ad revenue.
Anyway, that's why you can't get into my Gallery page at the moment. I may not have the best visual art, but I want to preserve what little of it I do have.