Apathy, Apoplexy, Action

Meta-Crash, In the Last Week 650,000 Creatives Joined an ‘Anti-AI’ App

A.I. artist Shoplift for a Living

I had planned to show more sketchbook work but the rapacious strip mining of original images by Meta can’t be ignored. We can blame it on the EU. Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp informed EU based creatives that as of June 26th they would be using public posts to train their image generative A.I., there is supposed to be an opt out. No such luck anywhere else in the world—-no opt out and since December Meta has already been scraping images from their products (ummm—that would be us humans). The Meta A.I. is a modest 1.1 billion images and they are offering a free beta presently.

Prompt : A.I. artist shoplifting art. | Meta ai

Apathy

A lot of creatives are either exhausted by the drama of A.I. or believe this is just hysteria like the fear of rock music and violent video games destroying young people’s brains. The printing press is another comparison and ushered in huge societal change that led to war and strife. But these social and political upheavals led to the sharing of ideas and literacy that we are the beneficiaries of today. We survived, so just chill and everything will be fine. But where are the societal gains for the text to image generators? More people can be creative. It will create efficiency in artist’s workflows. It will increase ideation. This is where we need to define our terms—-what is creativity, do we need someone trained in a discipline— if we all can just keyboard some genius images, is efficiency the same as effectiveness, and what about efficient businesses cutting staff, and how does ideation actually happen for an artist. A glowing review of the MetaA.I.—-A Powerful Tool for Artists, had one drawback—-it could be addictive. Ok, that will give the over 200,000 people who are projected to lose their jobs in Animation, Film, and Gaming over the next 3 years something to do— the study was commissioned in January by 4 entertainment organizations.

Prompt: 2 businessmen at a table playing rock, paper, scissors | Forbes illustration |prompt: same as first image, but in the style of Picasso.

I think that the disruption may result in more opportunities, but more on that in another post. The biggest concern I have is for students and education. Ideation, research, and the hard work of image development is the heart of creativity. Replacing that even with an A.I. that you can load your image into is too closed of a loop. In my Forbes illustration above, I didn’t use any photo reference for the poses for ‘2 men playing rock paper, scissors,’ I was focused more on the close proximity and the stare/threat. In my experience, photo reference changes how I design and when I use reference in the ideation stage my work becomes less expressive. I know if I had seen these A.I. images despite it being Picasso vs Picasso rather than in his style, and excusing the weird things they are doing with each others hands, I would likely have been affected by the scale of the figures. I would have done some lousy roughs and finally discarded them and cleared my mind of the crap and redesigned. Visual solutions aren’t connected to linear word descriptions—poetry yes, laundry list—no. I remember the wonderful graphic novelist and comic book artist Jeff Lemire in my drawing class trying to finesse his lines with a dip pen. I suggested he draw with the handle, use lousy, broken nibs—-use the tool like he draws—-raw and emotive. These A.I. tools are the opposite of what happens in creative problem solving—-it doesn’t just happen in the retina.

The Way Forward

Apoplexy

The first time I posted one of my images on Instagram I felt ill. I knew that all this ‘free’ exposure was going to cost me at some point. It seems the bill is due now. We all saw these platforms as necessary evils and we supported each other’s success and had a place we could be found. We knew we were the product and some folks jumped on reels as the algo pushed that. But the treasure trove that OpenAI uncovered was just too much for Mark Zuckerberg. The goldmine is all of us and we willingly offered up our creativity and our ideas, but we thought we were in a fair trade—-or atleast the trade off did offer us some benefits. That’s over. Every image we post is feeding the beast that will decimate your business. I just did my own scraping of my Instagram posts and removed every personal image or self directed image. I have left only commercially published work. I will not post an original image or idea on Instagram until it protects the image rights of it’s users.

The Cara app

Action

The time for collective action is now. If enough creatives leave Instagram, that is a message that will be heard—-less images to scrape. You can also Glaze your uploaded images, a pixel process which may make them less digestible for the web scrapers. I just joined Cara, the app founded by Jinga Zhang ( a photographer who had an arduous 2 year battle over her work being stolen by a painter—-and finally winning). The site had 39,000 users a little over a week ago, now 650,000 have signed up. It’s a site that is described as anti-A.I., which it isn’t, their stance on A.I.—We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation.

The site is presently free in Beta, with some fundraising seriously needed and it will likely become a target for web scrapers especially with all that yummy real art. It’s another platform that may have it’s own problems—-all I know is I’m willing to give it a chance and if the site grows I will delete my Instagram and Facebook accounts. Another approach to protecting creatives is the Beta project Kudurru. This comes from the Spawning team that created the Have I Been Trained site. I used that site to remove my images from Stable Diffusion. Kudurru blocks web scrapers from getting access to your website. Not all platforms are supported yet, but this is the best way to protect content.

The South Bronx

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming—-Here’s a sneak peek of an image for next week. I will share how the Kyoto drawings from last week’s post influenced my work and led to my Illustration career.