Artist Jingna Zhang built Cara, a platform explicitly intended to protect artists from having their art stolen by AI…and yet these people just won’t leave them well enough alone.
Artist Jingna Zhang built Cara, a platform explicitly intended to protect artists from having their art stolen by AI…and yet these people just won’t leave them well enough alone.
Actually. I have a hot take.
Forgive me… But the solution is not to replicate Instagram. Which is what Cara does.
Nor DeviantArt, either.
That’s never going to work, for precisely the above reason, and many others.
This is something that’s bothered me immensely about photography (which I’m getting back into as a hobby). Because, for all the “taking a stand” the community does, what do they do en masse?
Subscribe to Adobe
Live on Instagram
Worship corporate influencers.
Upload stuff to clouds that the privacy policy says will be used to train.
Just to start.
It infuriates me.
I’m all for the anti-slop stands, but the bulk of the community has precisely zero leg to stand on, if they’re just going to fork over cash hand-and-fist to feed the beasts, and spend all their time on those platforms.
So what do we do?
Make prints. Display them! It can be in museums, festivals, meet ups, in your place, on the street, literally anywhere you want. Even if its on digital screens; as long as its in person, and the digital copy is squirreled away.
And that’s if you feel strongly about the training thing. Personally, I’m more inclined to just post stuff under a permissive license places like Wikipedia could use (albeit not on Instagram).
To be clear, I don’t mean to lump everyone into that. There’s tons of photographers outside that bubble.
…But there are a ton in it, and they happen to be the loudest complainers.