Lots of stuff going on last week with my nephew graduating High School and one of my best friends getting married. So the past week has been very busy and very social full of evening hangs with family and old friends, backyard parties, reminiscing, catching up, laughs, hugs and even a pause or two to consider how lucky I am.
Now this week, I’m at a bit of a cross-roads with social media and my art. Since TikTok came into the world the ramping up of algorithms to drive engagement on all the big platforms has basically meant the death of the follower. Which has meant a huge drop in engagement and views for artists on social media (including me).
More recently, artists have been under attack from AI as companies are scraping the internet for art and images (without permission) to feed its image making models.
Now it looks like Meta is about to start (already started) scraping Instagram and Facebook to feed its AI models and there are artists now trying to decide if they are going to pull their work down and start over somewhere else. This is a huge deal for a lot of artists who have sunk tons of time and energy into chasing views likes and follows for years (including me).
I’m for sure not a top artist, or even at risk of losing much $$ if I jump ship, but I’m not thrilled about the tech companies using mine or anyone’s creative output to make better replacements of artists. The only real downside for me is I have met a lot of people and made some great connections there and it’s probably the easiest place for my friends and family to see my drawings.
So my options:
- Option 1 – The Nuclear Option – Fuck em. dip out and quit instagram altogether – pull all my posts, delete account, and resume posting/sharing somewhere else – likely here unless some other pre-enshittified platform becomes the new place for artists (Cara seems to be the flavor of the month.)
- Option 2 – “Break up but we’re still friends” – Leave my IG account as is (or remove most of the posts) but just don’t post anymore new content there, and again, post all new stuff somewhere else (see option 1)
- Option 3 – Do nothing. Just keep my head in the sand and stay where I am. I feel like this is the worst option but it’s the easiest and who am I kidding, I’m as close to irrelevant as you can get and they already have likely scraped the best work I’ll ever do into the machine….but honestly – the whole thing is fucked and I guess I don’t really want to keep donating my work to these schmucks…So yeah, fuck option 3.
So…blah….it sucks. I spent a lot of years working on that IG account and I’ll sad to see it go, but it looks like that’s where I am headed.
What would you do? (If you are one of the 5 people reading this then you know I value your opinions.)
Tough call. But I say invest here as much as you are willing. At least attempt to have a thing you own be the best representation of you and your work. Then have feelers on the various social platforms and see if you can direct anyone interested enough back here?
Cara is cool but there have been so many of these that have sprung up and died in the past few years. Would be a shame to invest too much there and then have it not reach critical mass, go away, or take off and then enshit itself.
Great advice. Cara seems cool but it’s super buggy and feels more like a place for artists only. obviously it’s early and things change. But so far it doesn’t feel like non-artists will bother with it just to see a few the renegades that post to the “artists” social-site. The solution always comes back to the idea of the website. I wonder if it’s even possible to prevent AI from scraping these. Probably some small print in the web host that says everything is their property….I guess maybe it’s time to actually read that stuff, lol.