The Race to Consume Creative Content
Happy first week of June!
There have been a lot of artists saying that they are leaving Instagram over the last few days. Meta said that they were using Instagram posts to train their AI models, and there is little, if any, way to opt out.
The problem is that Meta has ALWAYS been using our data in one way or another. Now they could be using artists images to train generative AI models.
Moving to another platform will not necessarily solve any problems. There are many AI companies scraping data from websites, and they are not facing many legal hurdles at the moment.
Fighting back is possible.
There are tools like Nightshade and Glaze that visual artists can use to poison and confuse the AI training models. These programs would be run on the images before uploading them, which is what I planned to use. The software was developed by Ben Zhao and his team at the University of Chicago. Also check out this article, How to Stop Your Data From Being Used to Train AI, from Wired for more ways to combat AI training models.
All of this drive to consume our data made me think of Phil, Bill Murray’s character, in the movie Groundhog Day. There is a scene where he is sitting in the dinner, and he shoves a whole piece of cake in his mouth. Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, responds with a quote from Sir Walter Scott’s poem ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel.’
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.
The quote is from the opening stanza of Canto 6. It refers to someone who does not respect their homeland and looks out only for themselves. In the case of AI, the companies do not seem to respect humanity and the damage their actions might cause in their race to consume our creativity and data, just to train their AI models. It made me wonder if history will not look back favorably on the damage they cause
Slimer that ghost in Ghostbusters was also a gluten, and he fit in with the Bill Murray reference.
Be kind to yourself on your creative journey.
PS. Here are clips from Groundhog Day and Ghostbusters from the scenes I mentioned above.
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