Today is November 15th, 2024 in Japan, and it marks the ushering in of new rules on Twitter (X). While it may contain other changes to the terms of service (I didn’t fully read them—as most people don’t), the two big ones are as follows:
・ The block feature is being neutered to the point where the only way you can prevent certain people from seeing your tweets is to fully lock your account.
・ You can no longer opt out of your tweets—both text and images—being accessed and processed by Twitter’s AI tool, Grok.
This has made huge waves across the entirety of Twitter, for good reason. The block feature exists to protect yourself against people you don’t want to interact with, from small threats like trolls to more serious threats like stalkers, but if those people can still see your tweets—even if they can’t interact with them—they can still use your words to start hate campaigns, use your tweets to find your location and dox you, etc.
Not only that, but JP users in particular use the block feature to cultivate their online space to their preferences. From people whose art or opinions or ships they don’t like to fandom shit-stirrers, the block feature has generally been preferred over features like mute, since mute is only a one-way feature and many don’t want people they don’t like seeing their tweets at all. So the block feature being diluted to still having to see other people’s stuff and having them see yours (just not being able to interact with it) makes it a pretty much useless feature.
In our circle of the universe over here at Renta!, however, the second change to Twitter’s terms is much more massive: anything posted to Twitter can be used to train AI. As I’m sure anyone who works in artistic fields know well (see: the current voice actor strike asking for protections against AI), AI is seen as a massive threat—not necessarily just because “it will replace our jobs” (trust me, after being told for years and years and years that AI translation will replace real translators, and seeing the current state of AI translation… well… I won’t be put out of a job in my lifetime, that’s for certain) but because of the massive theft of other people’s hard work and intellectual property to train these models.
Because of this, a lot of artists have been incredibly anxious about AI training. They’ve spent years and years—decades, even—of their lives practicing and crafting their personal style only for some tech bro to claim it as fair game “just because” they had the audacity to share it publicly. So, with the ability to opt out of training these AI models removed entirely, what are artists to do?
Publishers, as well, are incredibly concerned about their IP being used wholesale to train a product that benefits them in no way. We’ve been contacted by multiple partners asking what guardrails we have in place to make sure that—when we post to Twitter going forward—we will prevent their property from being stolen. Some have even gone so far as to say they don’t want us sharing any of their images on Twitter until they’ve figured out how to prevent it from being used.
People who’re active on Japanese BL Twitter may have also seen many publishers releasing statements like these:
The above tweet is from the publisher B-boy (Libre), but you can actually find numerous examples from publishers stating they’ll be using software to edit their images and make them harder for AI to read—and apologizing that it might make them harder to see and enjoy for their readers, but that these are the necessary steps they have to take. Some have even gone so far as to consider asking fans to not even post images of the covers and inside art online; you can see a reference to this type of discussion in this thread by artist Megane:
In the thread they say it had been floated that perhaps even fans should be dissuaded from sharing their thoughts using images on Twitter, but that the fandom ecosystem is too important and would be too massive a loss to not get to hear fans’ thoughts and opinions. They mention that hearing directly from fans serves as a great source of motivation, too.
But as you can see, this is really weighing on the minds of the entire manga industry. For years and years, Twitter has been the main outreach tool. Publishers have used it for advertising and growth. Artists have used it to connect with fans and fellow mangaka. Fans have used it to find great new series and artists to follow, and discuss the manga they already love with fellow fans. So suddenly having that entire community turned into a tool to fuel the AI is jarring. This one change in Twitter’s rules is essentially disrupting an industry’s marketing infrastructure.
As for what we’ll be doing at Renta!: we’ll be continuing to work hard to share BL far and wide while also respecting the wishes of the artists and publishers we partner with. Since this means there will be some images we’ll no longer be able to share to Twitter, we’ll be working hard to also boost our presence on other platforms like Bluesky, on which our follower count has more than doubled in the last 24 hours. Thank you so much to everyone who’s been willing to add us over there, and here’s to continuing to build amazing, manga-loving communities no matter what happens.
rentaBLog 