thinking about the popularity of "redraw trends" and plagiarism of compositions by all sorts of artists (it comes up often for gposing but 2D artists do it too), i have to sum up my discomfort with it as follows:

whether it’s intended or not, you are internalizing the same lens an algorithm/social media feed has when looking at art as mere data and content, and letting it guide your creativity. you start to view your peers’ work as a self-promotional opportunity. the inherent lack of citation or provenance given to the source of these trends becomes something convenient: if you wave off any concerns about sourcing by saying you forgot where it came from, or found it from some random pinterest moodboard, you can treat artwork as raw material.

Screenshot of the “Twins at the Carousel” Backrooms fan animation by mushuuno

The photo/sculpture source for the “face under broken mask” redrawings by dolikart, which is itself inspired by a drawing by jeauyce

Marina Choy’s photograph from her series “Road Trip to Mars,” 2017 which was the source for the “shadow hand bra” redraw trend

it’s just the natural progression of the algorithmic big data era, isn’t it? the raw image—like a person staring at a hallucinated bright carousel of cartoonish figures, or a woman’s hands forming a bra-like shadow—is your prompt. the world reiterates upon the distilled average of the idea, stripped of any association with its creator, to maximize self-satisfaction.

soon enough, you can’t tell where a style or composition or idea came from. it just floats in front of your eyes, and when people go “ooh pretty!” it’s milked for as long as the trend lasts and then discarded as sourceless inspiration. one might call that source merely training data.

while i was aware of mushuuno’s account being the source of the “Twins at the Carousel” trend, i had to dig through know your meme articles and comments to learn that the broken mask trend started with a black and white drawing (i had only ever seen dolikart’s photo rendition) and had never seen marina choy’s portfolio showing the photoshoot/context around the shadow hand bra image.

99% of the people scrolling and seeing random artists they follow making their own versions of these images will never bother to check what the source of an ungrounded trend manifesting on their feeds was. that is just how most folks treat images on social media.

everyone knows that picasso quote that “good artists copy, great artists steal”! so what is the harm in taking the basic composition and concept of something you saw online and being inspired by it, especially when your fanwork isn’t being monetized? people redraw and remix famous pieces of art like klimt’s “The Kiss” or michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” all the time—

sure. i’ve done master studies and pieces inspired by old masters too. i write cringe fanfiction, for the love of god. but there is an inherent difference between recreating art that is so clearly famous that it is recognized and credited as the source of a work immediately, and using art from another artist/creative person like you, working in the present, whose identity is cut off from their art in pursuit of these trends.

katsuhiro otomo’s name and work is not going to suffer from lack of recognition from the legions of people redrawing the akira bike slide. when people see a bike slide redraw, they go “that’s cool, it’s like that scene from akira!”

when people see a shadow hand bra redraw, they go “that’s cool, it’s the shadow hand bra trend!” no one says “it’s like marina choy’s photograph from the road trip to mars photoshoot!” no one cares that her vision made that photo possible. there isn’t a person for a trend to be connected to.

the consequence of all this is the conceit that creativity and ideas come from nowhere in particular. they are floating in some collective bank as free material. when there is nothing to cite or credit, there isn’t a human creator to get to know or understand. there isn’t anyone to be grateful to for the art that you appreciate. they don’t even get the usual nonsense payment of “exposure” that so many artists are used to being bribed with. a complete disconnection results.

that disconnection is similar in nature to the generation of AI imagery—an ungrounded model that’s meant to obscure any direct connection to the source material or the world around it, for fear that perhaps the source of said creativity will object or have some selfish reaction that contradicts the use of the data.

i know that comparing human creators making their own art to the activity of an algorithm or AI generation of images may seem uncharitable, or even absurd. but if someone cannot do the bare minimum of crediting and relinking back to the source of an art trend, or preferably asking the original artist if it’s alright to recreate a homage to their work first, then they are taking ideas for selfish gain in the same way that LLMs operate. the offense and use of data being less egregious in this case does not make it cool and inoffensive.

the argument that the genie is out of the bottle when a redrawn artwork becomes trendy, and therefore mass uncredited plagiarism is fine, is about as absurd to me as arguing that stealing a penny from a guy who’s been mugged for a thousand bucks is acceptable because he’s already lost enough money for the penny’s absence to not be noticed.

if you like someone’s idea, have some damned standards for your own creative process. note what you like, or even do a study/analysis, but create and post something that is uniquely yours. if you love it enough that you just can’t get the idea out of your head, it won’t hurt you to politely ask the original artist if you could redraw it.