I’m old enough to remember the infancy of social media, when it was all supplemental to everyone having their own websites - myspace and opendiary were supplemental to your geocities or blogspot or custom domain. You’d spend time. week to week checking in various sites to see if that lady who bought the 6ft tall metal rooster had written a new post, or if the geeky lady had a new review of some etsy shop. It was all a little more time intensive, but also very intentional. And it feels like the internet may soon be making an about face back in that direction.
Meta and IG are scraping all of your images for their datasets - apparently in using the platform you’ve given permission for them to do whatever they want with your images unless you can prove it’s directly harming you. I remember seeing this in the IG terms of use back when I first created an account, but it also seemed very choiceless at the time. Scrolling through a feed is so much easier for an audience than going through your list of links to see who is going to entertain you for 5 seconds - and at the time I was a lot more concerned with being seen than I am now a decade+ later. I’m curious to see if we all go back to individual web preseences, or if artists will attempt to use tech like Nightshade to protect themselves from what is essentially theft. I’m not 100% sure it matters - I don’t know if Meta is able to remove the millions of ai images from the dataset effectively and I have been watching for that moment when that snake starts eating it own tail.
I remember my moment last year(or was it two years ago?) when I had a glint of optimism about what ai was going to do and what people were going to do with it. I’d forgotten that people are human and humans do what humans do - and it’s frequently the least amount of work for the most amount of gain regardless of who it hurts in the process.
In short, I’m going to be purging and deleting my IGs, which is going to take forever to delete each individual image - not that it matters for past content, what’s been scraped had been scraped already. But this venue give me infinitely more control of what is mine, and more reason to use a blog space.
I’d like more intentionality in my life - which includes who views what I make. I’d rather you were here on purpose than a glance in a sea of content.
