Feeding the Beast That Will Destroy You

Creating in the Age of AI

I’m curious how everyone is thinking about sharing their work on the internet in a time of AI scraping.¹

Independent professional creatives are in a particularly tough spot as they rely on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube for their livelihoods, yet every post they upload feeds the AI beasts that may one day crater demand for the creators’ services.

Tools like Glaze/Nightshade² are a valiant effort to begin to even the playing field so that AI groups actually have to work with creators to use their creations instead of just running over them, but:

1. We don’t know how effective the tools are.

2. They require significant graphical processing power to run, with higher spec’ed Nvidia GPUs specifically, and a lot of artists might not have that (myself included).

So what do you do? Just keep posting like it’s 1999 and hope that a solution is figured out to save the viability (which is doubtful even without AI) of being an independent creative professional? Stop posting and lose connection to your current and potential audience?

Let me know your thoughts! I don’t know what the “right” path is right now as an individual artist.

1. And besides that NYTimes article, if you want some more on the furtive quest for ever more AI training fodder, check out Birgitte Rasine’s piece at The Muse:

Don't trust before you verify

2. Check out an interview with the person leading the team behind these two tools here:

The poison well