Imagine this scenario:
You spend 20 years working hard to learn a craft. You pour your heart and soul into your creativity, day and night, and develop a unique style. You are proud of this. Because you've EARNED it.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, you start seeing your style being 'mimicked' by others and shared online. It feels as if someone got into your brain, hijacked it, and began creating art 'INSTEAD' of you without giving you credit. There's this fucking creepy sense of violation that strikes at the core of your being. How would you feel?
THEN… you find out how this was done…that everything you've ever posted has been 'trained' WITHOUT your permission by tech companies and the programmers they've hired. For instance, a popular AI model, like a style transfer algorithm, could have been fed with your artwork to learn and replicate your unique style.
THEN… you find out that these companies are PROFITING from your work by selling the training data to other large tech companies.
THEN… ( yes, this keeps getting worse)… you are now out of a job because you're too expensive to hire, and now some talentless hack 'artist' without a shred of skill has taken your job because they know how to 'prompt' images in your style and then claim that they 'made the 'ART'???....what the
ACTUAL FUCK?
This is the state of things concerning today's artists and generative AI. (I'm only speaking to visual artists and my own experiences, but this is affecting ALL creators.)
I've seen jobs, along with entire industries, decimated in the last two years. ( Yes, including some of my own.)
I've seen good friends thrown by the wayside while hacks take over their jobs.
You might say, 'This is just the way of technology,' or, 'Get with the times, you Luddite,' or 'This is the same as when the steam train was invented, or when synthesizers came out,' and you'd be right to say these things. Except that things are exponentially worse than those times combined.
Because it's the 'elite few' who control these large AI companies and have no ethical issues with the outright theft and training of imagery, claiming it's 'fair use.'
And now, every day, other smaller-scale companies and individuals are creating their own AIs (most training on stolen data), hence the exponential shitstorm that is ravaging the creative world.
This problem will only get worse for artists, and very quickly. That is why we must be more vocal about what's happening and spread awareness on the issue….which is massive and just getting started.
Many people I speak to about this have NO idea that this is how AI works.
Well, if you're reading this, now you do.
On a positive note, all of this has allowed me to go deeper into my creativity, realize my true love for making art, and develop a new series titled 'Untrainable.' This series is a response to the AI issue, where I create art that is so wildly abstract that it is ( hopefully) useless for training models. It's my way of reclaiming my art from the clutches of AI…for now.
This new series and all of my other work posted from now on will be 'poisoned.'
I am doing this through the use of Glaze and Nightshade, two free programs that you can download now and run your images through.
This means that even if AI training is used on it, the resulting work will be useless, as it will not be able to replicate the unique aspects of your art.
I'd love to hear your comments below and learn how this new age of AI is affecting you. Also, feel free to ask me any questions about anything I wrote above. Love you guys <3
Alex Ruiz