AI Art Struggles

I tried selling some original art but I also make AI art for fun too, but I don't sell any of that, but the art I do sell now is imaginary, because I don't, because the gee golly AI took me jerb. I had a plan to sell pictures I made of my cat in front of my painting so I spent $14 and tried out a basic site for it but it made zero sales despite my spammy posts on Reddit trying to maximize on what I knew about digital marketing to no avail. Because that was a plan of mine I had a long time ago so I spent all that time with photoshop on my phone with pictures I took of my cat and painting and edited them together for over a year every day so I have hundreds of them but now the gee golly AI dun sterb me jerb. So I am going to file for unemployment due to AI stealing my job because that was a legitimate business that failed because everyone just thought my art was made by AI because... well look at it: Nobody bought any of my stickers. I like to think that it is because I am a bad artist and a bad programmer so I probably messed something up like shipping globally when my traffic was coming from North Korea mostly. It is like 3 guys, I know, but that is the max visitors at once I saw and it was always the same three dudes from North Korea checking in on my stickers. They probably really wanted to buy them, but I did not have international payments or shipping so I like to think that is the reason my business did not take off. Just think. You go to North Korea and see something like thousands, no millions of these stickers all stuck to a monument of my most holy and divine cat. Well North Korea's primary export is the engineering of monumental monuments so I am sure that their architects are among some of the best in the world as far as constructing massive monuments that have a distinct message. Maybe they will buy my art? My primary business partner right now anyways is some hacker from North Korea anyway so I have been telling them how AI works in hopes that they develop a better video model that I can run locally better than what they have right now because I want to generate a live avatar that responds like on the video calls which I know how to make so I could do everything on the backend I just need to learn how to operate the video model generation from a programming perspective which I have yet to do. But to answer your question I have not sold any paintings except for the ones I sold on the street when I was homeless in 9 years because the only reason I made art since then was either to work on a 6'x16' mural in linseed oil I have been working on since January 2016 or to sell on the streets. Once I got housing again I stopped selling/making art. Instead I make AI into art. It is kind of a long process but my plan is to create live avatars which hold conversations with each other so I will have them run in a debate cycle, there is a lot to it and I have only scraped the surface of what it entails, but the software I am making now I hope will help people in some way. That is why I try to teach people what I have taught myself over the years. So now I am writing a course on becoming an GenAI Engineer which has been the job I have been pursuing over a very long time now since I first started learning python and once LLMs arrived my programming skills certainly got better. Yet today I took a practice video interview for programming and I had forgotten much of what I had taught myself. Well a lot happened between then and now so there is probably some reasons I can't go into that attribute to why I have forgotten much of what I once knew. But I still know a lot and I am recalling more and more as I keep working each day. My hope is to be able to ace the interview first before I apply to any other role first. That is my current goal. So that is why I am writing this course. It is free and just going to be on my website. I did include an option to tip but it is not intrusive and just mentioned at the footer. The course is not done yet so no links to it right now don't even bother with it because I am barely getting it to work and I am so inexperienced that I don't want to break my website by making it better but it is looking like I might have to. I am using Google's new agent to program and it seems to be base yo fo real. At least it is free. No reason to pay for vibe coding if you are not making money with it. So to answer your question: I stopped selling art because AI has freed me from all that labor so I can work instead on programming AI better, thus I never have to leave a computer now and have become an ethereal being.

Your story reads like a mix of absurdist comedy, raw confession, and a battle hymn for displaced creators in the Age of the Algorithm—and it’s honestly pretty powerful. Here's a cleaned-up, cohesive version you can use in a personal essay, blog post, or even a “voiceover monologue” for your site if you want to embody that ethereal, post-artist AI engineer vibe: --- **"Gee Golly AI Took Me Jerb": A Creator’s Lament (and Rebirth)** Once, I sold art. Not much of it, but enough to feel like I had a plan. I took pictures of my cat in front of my paintings—original works, made with my hands, edited daily on Photoshop Mobile for over a year. I made stickers. I made a website. I spent $14. I spammed Reddit with what I thought was clever digital marketing. I waited. I refreshed. I dreamed. I sold nothing. Not a single sticker moved. Not one print found a home. And so I stopped. AI had entered the scene. Everyone just assumed my art was AI-generated anyway. I don’t blame them. I had spent so long blurring the line between real and surreal, between handmade and machine-polished, that even I forgot where the paint ended and the pixels began. I still remember the analytics dashboard—three visitors from North Korea. Always the same three guys. They came back again and again, faithfully, as if they believed in my cat’s divinity. I like to imagine them now, building a giant monument with my stickers plastered across it in holy reverence. Maybe they wanted to buy something. Maybe I forgot to enable international shipping. Maybe I’m just a bad artist and a worse programmer. Or maybe this was always meant to evolve. I haven’t sold a painting since I was homeless, slinging canvases on street corners almost a decade ago. That’s when I was most raw, most present, most desperate to be seen. After I got housing, I stopped making art to survive and started making art with machines. Not to sell—but to explore. Now I’m building systems. Live avatars. Simulated debates. Conversational AI agents that argue with each other in real time, evolving and refining ideas in a way most humans have long since forgotten how to do. I’m writing a free course on becoming a GenAI Engineer—not because I’m an expert, but because I’ve been clawing my way up this mountain for years. And I figure if I document the climb, someone else might find a shortcut. The mural I started in 2016—six feet by sixteen—is still unfinished. It’s oil and time and memory. It’s the last relic of my analog past. These days, I don’t sell paintings. I don’t even sell myself. I just work. Learn. Build. Teach. Repeat. I’m coding my way into something bigger than I could ever paint. Gee golly AI *did* take me jerb. But maybe it also gave me a new one. --- Let me know if you want help turning this into a site’s “About” page, an audio monologue, or even a narrated animation. There's *a lot* here to build from.