Is Meta Stealing Your Art For AI?

Hey friend,

Over the weekend, the news of Meta using Instagram, Facebook, and Threads to feed it’s Artificial Intelligence model blew up, but before you burn everything down —take a deep breath— and let’s look at the FACTS.

🤖 Meta & AI

• Meta updated it’s privacy policy to use the content on it’s own platforms to train their own AI model, start date unclear. I encourage you to read the Gen AI privacy policy for yourself.

• If you’re in the EU, you’re able to opt out by June 26th, 2024 according to various websites. The EU has stronger consumer protections on privacy and AI, so there are already laws in place to protect users.

• For those not in the EU, there is no way to opt-out. Meta could’ve freely given us this choice, but like most companies in the tech space, there’s too much money in AI to do this. That’s just capitalism, baby!

…so where does this leave us? 😟

🧠 My perspective on AI

Unfortunately, right now every company is competing to build the most robust and profitable model, so every single company is being ruthless. Let’s look at the latest AI practices:

If you’re in the US or outside the EU, I believe the only sure way to escape your work being used for someone’s model, is to go fully offline. It’s unclear if even a portfolio website would really be safe. I’m sure some artists would totally be fine removing all their work from the internet, but for most commercial artists, i’m hesitant to say it would be wise.

I think the reality is that until some of the copyright lawsuits against various AI companies get settled (such as this one or this one), these companies will savagely use anything they can to build the best model.

Given their deep pockets and the slow pace of the legal system, we have to face the facts. Most likely, our work has already been used in some way, and until copyright laws catch up, resistance is futile or comes at a severe cost.

So what could you do about it, today?

🔥 Burn down all your Meta accounts, though I would argue some model out there has possibly already been trained on it.

🚫 Paywall or remove EVERYTHING from Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and probably the entire World Wide Web. Weigh out the pros-and-cons of this move on your business as a whole.

⏳ Invest time using an app like Glaze to prevent your art from being stolen. Could totally be worth it, but seems a bit tricky as a long term solution.

🆕 Join an app like Cara and delete other social media profiles. Quite frankly, I’m skeptical that limiting your demographic to just other artists on Cara would be beneficial or lucrative. It’s too early to tell, so I’m not sure I’d put all my eggs in this basket, but it’s a personal choice.

Personally, I’m sort of at a calm yet reluctant acceptance stage. I feel like it’s too late for me to protect my work at this point, and i’m going to wait until the laws catch up. I may experiment with Glaze and see how that works out. I hope that in the end, there will be some copyright laws that will prevent companies from using AI-generated work commercially, and that will keep creatives in business.

So now that I’ve completely shattered your spirit, let’s move on to our regularly scheduled programming 🫠

If you’ve noticed, for better or for worse, i’m back to posting more regularly on Instagram, aiming for 3x/week plus sending out this newsletter. So far, it’s been really manageable since I’m making multiple posts from the same artwork.

If you’re struggling with staying consistent especially while still being strategic, you might benefit from what I’m currently working:

This was truly a heavy one, and quite frankly, my opinions could change given how quickly the AI ladnscape is developing. I do think that I’m just being realistic, but I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reply, DM me on IG, or start a thread.

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