====== Avatar theft and a path forward ====== Since the internet graduated from BBSes to forums in the 2000s, most internet platforms have held two core adornments for users to express their personality and identity on websites: the username and the profile picture. And almost as soon as the profile picture was introduced, people were stealing photos to use as profile pictures. In many ways, the internet has tolerated this non-serious copyright infringement for nearly two decades. There are few sites that care about enforcement of copyright on images, and [[https://x.com/hy3wayz_/status/1119597146574151681|prolific social media owners]] will sometimes engage in piracy of profile pictures. In many ways, copyright can be enforced the same way as anyone might enforce any copyright on the internet, using the DMCA. But in practice, few people ever exercise these rights on profile pictures. For large copyrights like films and TV shows, users adopting their works as profile pictures can serve as advertising. For community members, it serves as an "in-group marker" -- you know that someone is in your group when they share profile pictures from a property your group enjoys. For artists, probably the most exploited group of people, theft of profile pictures has been tolerated, but not enjoyed. I have, at times, of course, used what could be charitably called "stolen" profile pictures of characters from anime and manga that I've enjoyed. But as I became friends with more artists and aware of how impactful this was, I started to get away from this practice. ---- In 2019, Gwern Branwen launched [[https://gwern.net/twdne|This Waifu Does Not Exist]], one of (if not the) first attempts to generate anime profile pictures based on neural networks using StyleGAN. At the time, TWDNE was trained on [[https://gwern.net/danbooru2021|danbooru's dataset/collection of anime images]]. This dataset is trained on mass tagged anime images in one of the internet's most popular aggregators (danbooru). From there, I began to explore creating avatars using StyleGAN-derived tools. When DALL-E launched, I made similar attempts to generate anime profile pictures using it. ---- Of course, when TWDNE came out, the community reaction was mostly positive and critical/intrigued. StyleGAN outputs had obvious errors in most places, so using any of the images for any practical purposes required cleanup in photoshop or similar. At this time, I don't think people were **particularly** keen on the images, but I felt more capable of using these images rather than ones that were directly stolen from other artists and properties. When DALL-E **initially** launched, I also adopted the same thought process. However, as of 2026, I think the ship on generative art has sailed, and the community verdict is in: generative art for profile pictures is not acceptable in any online art community, and is decreasing in acceptance in any online community. It is simply too easy to create style and likeness copies from other artworks, and too easy to make images that are "sufficiently" unidentifiable as AI-generated that every image is now looked up on with distrust. It is too easy to mass produce "similar-ish" profile pictures that look authentic, and then flood online platforms with spam or LLM salad. Coincidentally, in 2026, I learned about [[https://pipipen.com/|pipipen]], an international commission marketplace for making it easier to commission general artwork. Broadly speaking, before pipipen, commissioning was done either through bespoke means on Ko-Fi, on language-locked platforms, or specific marketplaces like skeb and vgen. Both skeb and vgen are very good, but skeb is fundamentally a "no communication" platform, and use for anything other than having an artist draw a sketch is essentially frowned upon. Vgen is geared almost exclusively to vtubers. In contrast, pipipen is general-purpose, unifies multiple languages (e.g., commission a Chinese speaking artist in English), and offers a clear payment and timeline mechanism. From there, I started to [[commissions|commission works]], and as of now, I've fully transitioned my profile pictures to works that I, at a minimum, have the legal right to use. It took a while to get here((The primary barrier to entry is that I've wanted to have an original design from scratch. Many artists I've looked at in the past would draw something with a reference, but few would work without a reference. Operationally, finding an artist who can work with me on character design essentially required waiting for a service that bridged this gap.)), but I'm finally satisfied that I have works that I can be proud of, that represent me.