Poison a beloved classic character – for their own good!

... or else what? Remove at-risk characters from the web entirely?

We Pictoplasmanians don’t want that ending – our entire origin story is one of scouting the internet’s outer edges for creative and curious characters and creators (like the above Pikachu turned Freakachu, saved by the great @tokymegz).

And what’s more, we can’t help but worry about the fates of beloved characters from the pre-AI era who can't evaporate from online spaces: all those pioneering pixel, vector, 3D and hand-crafted anthropomorphic Boomers, Gen Xs and Millennials – Popeye, Papa Smurf, Pacman, Pittiplatsch, Pikachu, et al. – too recognizable to retreat, too influential to be ignored, too retro to react, and thus too magnetic to machine learning misuse?

Inspired by the Nightshade initiative˟, we invite all human artists to help save character art by manifesting freakish fanart – taking a favorite famous character, disfiguring it with artistic love and careful consideration, and sending it out into the www void, ready to confuse all non-human computers/machines/clones.

˟WHAT'S NIGHTSHADE?

Researchers at The University of Chicago are currently exploring technology to protect human creations against invasive uses of generative artificial intelligence (or at least cause some friction for the perpetrators).
While some tools like Glaze exist for defense, Nightshade takes an offensive Trojan Horse approach by “poisoning” images so they can confuse data model training and annoy those stealing images without consent.

(Is technology to prevent technology the perfect or permanent protective solution? Probably not. But that’s where you come in...)

Pictoplasma asks you to save characters from the machines – with human efficiency!