This week, a few artists on Twitter asked their fans to tweet their designs. They then expected a lot of comments like “I want that on a shirt!”
There have been a lot of comments from fans who are very excited and want new art after printing in all of these threads. The artists do not want to sell their original works, though. Bots can use social media to take artists’ designs, sell them on corporate markets, and put pressure on the artists’ businesses from outside sources. This is what the meme is all about.
For these artists, it is not in their own online stores when a piece of art shared on Twitter gets a certain number of responses. This is because retailers made bots to do that. This means that artists can quickly download the picture and add it to their own web stores. The marketplace usually takes the text from the tweet and turns it into search engine-friendly links that people might be looking for.
On Twitter, everyone in the art world knows this to be true. This new joke puts the idea to the test. While I was having trouble with that, I found a simple way to test the idea. Not long after the tweet was sent, it was sold online as a shirt.
Bots would share the work of independent artists without their permission if certain words or phrases were used on Twitter. It did not matter how harmful the content was. After that, some artists decided to go even further. The next thing they did was try to teach the bots to steal ideas from Disney, Nintendo, and other big companies.
The Mickey Mouse face and words next to it make this shirt easy to find. It has also been sold in an online store. The decision to put Walt Disney’s figure on a bot shirt is even more stupid when you think about how long Disney has been fighting copyright and protecting its own ideas. The business will lose the right to use Mickey in 2023 if the rule does not change.
When people heard about this trend, open markets were filled with clothes that were stolen from other people.
It is not clear how businesses will stop people from shitposting, but one thing is for sure: there is still a lot of supply and demand. There were artists who made Baby Yoda plush toys before you could even pre-order the real ones.
It is annoying when people steal your art and sell it without telling you. This method is now being used against these artists, though. We do not know yet if these big names will solve the problem. But it is tough for solo artists to get rid of art that has been stolen.
