Now on Cara
Hi friends,
As some of you may have heard generative AI has now become a rather big thing and it is becoming more and more available and visible in our world and especially on social media.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the companies who have trained their machines to make AI-generated art, have trained it using stolen artwork. Basically, they’ve scraped a whole load of the internet, fed all those images into their databases and now anyone can create generative AI art based on the life’s work of artists.
What does this mean? Yes, you can create an AI artwork that looks like a Van Gogh painting. And you can also create an AI artwork that looks like the style of an artist that is still alive and working today. I don’t think I have to tell you how difficult and challenging this is for artists making a living from their creative endeavours. Not to mention the fact that these companies are basically stealing and breaking copyright law to fuel their own endeavours.
There are legal cases in action at the moment to try and protect artists but the vast majority of us don’t have the wherewithal to take on these huge giants.
Last week Meta (the owner of Facebook and Instagram) decided to announce that it would now use all the data that users of these platforms have provided to feed its AI machines. This is not only a massive issue for artists and creatives, it’s also a huge privacy issue for everyone who uses these accounts. Although they offered an opt-out mechanism, myself and I think most other people don’t trust these companies to have a speck of moral integrity to not actually have already used this data to feed their machines.
My use of AI
When AI first came out, I was an early-adopter because I love exploring new technology. I thought it was amazing and fascinating and even shared some posts about it in my membership. I’ve used it to create blog header images (within the membership) for channeled messages that I did not have an artwork appropriate for using Adobe Firefly - which at the time claimed to only use data from their stock image database where permission had been granted (I believe this has now changed). Where I saw great potential (for my process as an artist) was the ability to craft certain elements that I would otherwise spend hours creating in Photoshop. For example, I tend to use rainbows and sparkles, and glitter to embellish areas of my work - originally these were sourced via free stock image websites or my own photography, and AI proved very helpful in crafting some of these abstract elements that otherwise I’d have to spend hours hacking together from a photograph or simply didn’t exist in the real world - like a rainbow bent into the shape of a five-pointed star.
Interestingly in the last 6 months I’ve found myself less interested in reaching for this means of creating image textures to use in my work and more interested in hand-painting it myself. This I feel is the nature of being an artist, one is always trying out new things, tweaking old processes and exploring!
Anyway - I digress.
The long and short of it is - that whilst platforms like Facebook and Instagram threaten to steal my life’s work to feed their machines I’ve decided to no-longer post new work on there and only share small cropped sections. Oracle decks sadly are another issue since people share images of this artwork all over the world so I have no hope of stopping these images from being in all kinds of data-sets all over the world.
I will be sharing my artwork here on my website and through my newsletter predominantly but you can also follow me on Cara - a new(ish) platform created for artists without all the BS we’ve been forced to swallow over the years (algorithms and such). They have a firm stance on AI (they don’t allow it) and are actively partnered with various research facilities working to protect the artworks of artists online.
You can find me at https://cara.app/jezhawk
