Meta is going to train their AI on all the artwork posted on Instagram. I have not deleted my entire Instagram account yet but I have already removed all my art. I realize that there is really no place on the internet where you can possibly hope to be safe from these monsters but I don’t have to literally put my head in their mouth. I heard that it’s possible to mail them and request that they not use your work to build their artist killing AI. How about fuck you instead? I’m not going to beg the creature devouring me to be more gentle, I’m just going to leave.
It sucks to know that any art I post online these days will just be used as grist by billionaires to destroy me and other artists. I’m not ready to delete the entire archive just yet but I’m also thinking about a shack in the woods a lot more. My adventures with sticker making have rekindled a love of physical art in me that I have not felt since the 90’s. In fact I recently discovered an artifact from that era that you might find interesting.
One of the first projects Jerry and I ever worked on together was a comic called Sand. This was the story we eventually reworked for the site back in 2010. We made the first Sand comic back in 1996 the year after I graduated from High School. This copy I found was the original one that I cut out and assembled by hand with glue. I took this to Kinkos (it was a store where you paid to make copies on big Xerox machines.) and made probably fifty copies of the book. We then left little stacks of them at Gorilla Bob’s our local comic book store and I put some in the comic spinner at our grocery store Rosauers. We just hoped someone would pick up a copy and like it! It’s a little emberassing but here you go!
Two years later we would make the first Penny Arcade and the rest is history. We’ve spent 26 years making comics on the internet and for a long time it was a pretty cool place to do your job. Today I would describe it as a hostile work environment and there is no HR. Microsoft wants to record everything I do, Adobe wants to own everything I make, Google thinks the internet should just be Google, and Meta wants to use everything I post to make an evil version of me that they own. All of it makes me want to go back to black and white comics I print off on a xerox machine again.
For now I’m just going to keep making stickers. The June pack for Club PA members should drop soon. Here’s what you’ll get inside this month:
PA Kart Sticker Sheet
Summer Fun Gabe
We started Gabe’s Sticker Shoppe back in January with the goal of doing a pack a month. We just hit our halfway point and I love being able to look back through my sticker book at all the art I’ve made this year. For now it’s just stickers but who knows, maybe a Penny Arcade zine could be on the way.
-Gabe Out
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