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Notes -
Hm.
In terms of total throughput and market velocity, there's not a lot of good formal metrics, and a combination of small events (eg, the owner of FurAffinity recently passed away), normal cyclical behavior (the start of college/end of grant season tends to slow the markets down a bit), and weird stuff (a bunch of Brazilian artists were on Twitter and have fled, SF tech sector is being more aware of their finances) make the few informal ones I do have insight on kinda unreliable. My gut feeling's that total commissions are not hugely far from historic trends either up or down, but I don't know that I'd notice a 25% change.
At the very least, I have to scroll pretty far down the list of furry artists I know before any are struggling to fill commission slots, and their prices haven't had to go down much if at all. Mainstream (fan)artists look similar at first glance, but I'll admit I've got a much more shallow reference pool there. Neither furry nor anime conventions have been struggling to get visitors or sellers; weirdest thing there has mostly been a (perceived?) increase in group booth buys and (in anime spaces) reseller booths.
Online direct sales have had a few payment processor crisises, mostly over fees. Nothing too noteworthy. I don’t have good metrics on Patreon-style subscription or Kickstarter-style funding, outside of new rules on outre content, so no real clue how businesses focused there have gone.
There's a lot of talk about a slump in mainstream 'gallery' art, and that is something artists in my circles are at least tense about. That said, I don't really interact with even the more consumerist side of that market, and I don't think the market pressures there are the same as in any space I do maneuver (even KendricTonn-style stuff, cw: artistic human nudes, sells a different way, though his experience going from galleria artist to social media artist is increasingly common). And I do think there's been a small slump among 'creative filler' sort of stuff, like in-ttrpg illustrations or logo and photography work, either in favor of aigen or in favor of minimalism.
Aigen remains controversial. Most furry-specific reputable sites (FurAffinity, Weasyl, SoFurry) ban it; those that allow it tend to be general-purpose or allow even more controversial stuff, most conventions ban it or require labeling, and some segments of the conventional market are working toward blacklists. Mainstream sites permit it more, but haven't found a good solution to the spam problem: DeviantArt and ArtStation aren't as slop as Facebook, but it's still got a lot of stuff that seems more scam than interesting. Pinterest has gone absolutely tango uniform with it, which I'd normally find entertainingly deserved if there weren't occasional honest folk on the site before hand. Community-focused spaces built for AI have handled it better, but in turn it's mostly prompters trading tips there, with (relatively) no one to scam.
Tumblr-style fandom of everything, or at least the part of it I see, is in a bit of a lull. The last big memeable character stuff was Delicious in Dungeon, and while it remains pretty popular, it's also been a while. Not the first major period with no big characters taking the site by storm, but usually end of summer has a couple. Not sure if it's a result of fewer universal bits of culture, or just the big movie drops being unpleasant (eg The Boy and the Heron) or more often sucking. Still a lot of original-like fan art, and fan-other-media. Princess : The Hopeful Crystal Edition has got a few Rule Zero issues in a mixed game, but an extremely strong thematic approach and clever in a few decent ways. The lead writer's an absolute putz, but Eat God is looking pretty fun.
I've heard second-hand that some of the East Coast Ren Faire art environments have been very feast-or-famine, even compared to their normal standards, with a lot of reseller or laser cutter-grade stuff on one hand and fewer artists getting run dry of stock, but no clue how significant, or even if it's more the normal flow as the season crosses.
Not sure if that covers what you're looking for, and I'll admit I've got pretty low confidence for most of this.
That was pretty much exactly what I was looking for.
the question was prompted by seeing an advert for a self-published book, with cover-art in a very eye-catching watercolor style which immediately triggered my "that's AI" sense, and it made me curious about the state of the market these days. I've had several experiences of what I suppose you could describe as AI paranoia, the creeping suspicion that the bots are getting past my personal filter. I figure the best way to tell where the tide is would be to see where peoples' boats currently are.
It's definitely showing up pretty often in those adjacent spheres like covers, advertising, and illustrations, especially among the level of self-published writer that previously would have gone with pretty minimalist art, or where artist availability was never great, or where business models made it appealing. Places like RoyalRoad it's getting increasingly difficult to tell, and some of the episodic work will start with aigen and move to commissioned art later that it gets tricky to highlight specific examples.
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