Have you checked your TOS lately

It would appear that most of the Social Networks and big Internet juggernauts have decided to change their terms of service (TOS). Interestingly most indicated the changes started on the 24^th of June! I have no idea why this date matches up. Also the changes all pretty much incorporate similar terms, although written in obscure wording.

To paraphrase the essence is those services offering the ability to upload any information, store it or process it now let it be known that they are allowed to use this to suit their own purposes. Often they will add such as to improve their service. Similar conditions and wording have been in many TOS agreements for such services so they can handle our data, but their "clarifications" have muddied the water. A lot of users are starting to worry that this also means they can use your data in any way they like such as to train AI, modify and republish as they wish.

Needless to say, this has worried several people, particularly artists using such services as Adobe. Supposedly scores of users have tried to abandon Adobe subscriptions, then only to find it is very difficult, for some almost impossible, to leave without incurring significant fees. Similar problems and perceptions are affecting artists on Instagram so I’m not sure of the exact numbers but it seems a great rush that has apparently left Instagram for an alternative, Cara.

I actually do read the terms of service and must admit the changes are a bit hard to follow. However, I do agree they leave the way open for the services to claim ownership of anything you post on their particular offerings. In a few places, they do still say that you own copyright but I assume their lawyers just haven’t seen that clause yet.

Most of these services actually rely on us to supply the content that they then package up and use to convince advertisers to pay them money (often very big money). The problem is they “believe” we are happy having free access to their service, with the public exposure the world wide web can offer and not being paid for our content. Yes, these juggernauts have costs but their profits are larger, massive, even unimaginably disgustingly exorbitant!

So I decided some time ago not to share anything I intended to sell (like finished art work or photos) in a ready copyable form anywhere on the internet. I have still been publishing on the likes of Flickr, Blogger, Instagram and my own website, those things I’m working on, progress updates and just stuff I find interesting. This works for me because I’m not relying on the Internet to sell things my works.

Where does that leave us creatives and what can we do about it? 

I’m probably gonna leave social media to the bots for now and see what happens. Maybe play around a little in Cara.

The Wild West Side of AI

It seems as if a world wide web is adopting the ways of the Wild West, no laws so if you can see something worthwhile you take it, You don’t have to even use gunpoint these days you can just silently scrape it, make a copy which is ever so easy for digital information. Despite the fact that there are actually laws in place that should stop people doing this. The problem is copyright is complex and varies under different jurisdictions, whereas is the web goes everywhere. I think the fact that a lot of these services consider themselves platforms and not publishers is a very weak cop-out even if it may be a little bit legal it’s probably not moral. I cannot believe for instance that X and specifically Elon Musk supposedly champions free speech, letting very dubious characters pedalling hate speech, straight-out lies like spreadsing politically motivated fake news and fanciful log discredited conspiracy theories, and then at the same time fighting a government trying to take down the filming of a teenage terrorist stabbing a priest in the face while the teen posted his actions live online. I believe the Australian government's request to have it taken down was quite morally legitimate. Have they no shame, I guess not.

So don’t expect the big guys on the internet, or many others without a moral compass, to respect your work or loyal support. They will take what they can. Then throw you under the bus. However, I like the idea of sharing what I know and what I have created I just don’t want it reused without reference to me or straight out stolen. 

PS: Can you see the sunglass-wearing laughing face? Is it an example of the Intelligence of generative AI or just another example of when it hallucinates (aka gets it wrong)? Or is it our intelligence to recognise patterns and shapes (eg faces in clouds or bandanas)?

Enjoying the Warmth

When making a stitched panorama, into the sun it is important to keep the exposure constant, to avoid dramatic colour changes in a clear blue sky. I've left in the lens flare artefacts, they add to the "sparkle"

What is the buzz about Cara?

 

A little while ago I noticed a fair few YouTubers, posting about being time to leave Instagram and most are heading for Cara. I totally understood why they wanted to leave, it wasn’t just the threats of AI  “scraping” up their creations, it also had it origins in changes to the algorithm and move to the more tik tok-ish aspects like short distracting video and capturing attention so the viewer stays on the platform but moves on to the next distraction, then the next. As their attention span gets less they move on down the rabbit hole. Good for Instagram to sell the eyeball time but terrible for a creative trying to find traction, if you don’t make it in the first few minutes and/or the first few viewers, your work will disappear from even your friends, fans or collectors. Ok, good hashtags might let a few interested folk find you, but don’t hold your breath.

The result, you just hear crickets perhaps only a few of your closest friends or colleagues ever get to see your posts now. Worse the posts that you like, the ones that show great accomplishment in your art or photography don’t rate, Whereas an embarrassing photo or unfortunate typos might get shared around. Fun and incentives to post has ebbed away.

The perception that Meta was going to start training their AI systems on user data (hate to tell you but I suspect they already do) set off the alarms in many of the Instagram community. Particularly the original creatives, a sub population I aspire to belong to. Like me I think they are looking for something like Instagram was in the days before it was taken over by Meta.

So what is Cara? Its another platform to post your images (artwork & photos) promoting itself as “by artist for artist”. At the moment is a privately run service that doesn’t incorporate any artificial intelligence images and includes access to Glaze. Which claims to poison the use for neural network training on unauthorized “scraped” images by incorporating hidden codes within the digital version of the image that scramble how the image is represented. I’m still to be convinced this is a good long term solution.

So it is time to have a look, a slow and pondering wander around. I’m sure its going to have a few growing pains.

Unlocking Creativity or Daydreaming

 “I’ve been planning a large painting of flamingos for awhile. We artists are mocked for daydreaming but so much of painting is, as I like to call it “internal visualisation” of a finished piece. A large proportion of the planning is not physical work on paper or canvas but turning it over in your mind. Unseen. Definitely not daydreaming.”

from Catherine Ingleby’s article in the upcoming July copy of The Artist magazine

Her article really connects with what I have been absorbed about how creativity strikes. She highlights three things that help her. They start with planning and preparatory work organising everything, which she believes will eventually bring a freshness to your paintings. Secondly, she suggests converting photos of your work into monochrome black or white, if the painting doesn’t work in black and white it’s unlikely to be successful in colour. I fully concur with this observation. Thirdly but quiet important she says try doing your own colour charts just using two or three of your favourite pigments, she suggests you might be very surprised how much you learn.

In the article she also limits herself to only really three tonal ranges light midtone and dark but bounded by black and white. She also limits her palette to two or three colours and things they can mix. I think three or four would still be fine.

Developing a New Self-Portrait for my Website

It was time to change my profile pic on my website my website. Not so much my profile self-portrait that’s the first image you see on my landing page. It’s traditionally been a self-portrait. The previous one was about my eye operation, an abandoned attempt to paint it and photograph the bandages.At the time, I was also slightly overwhelmed by the apparent significant progress in generative AI. Neural network learning applied to graphics and large language models, training on massive data sets scraped from the internet. In the end, I had combined a photo with my style of painting, using my own technique following what is usually called style AI.

My eye is on the mend and it’s time to update my portrait profile picture. Back in the beginning of the Covid lockdowns, I did a short month-long project painting various self-portraits in a variety of formats & styles. It was a lot of fun. One of the self portaits saw me holding up a small square canvas with a stylized version of my face in front of my face as I was photographed. The motivation was thinking about what we can believe as truthful on social media. It was a genuine photograph not photo-manipulated at all. Already people were suspicious that a lot of photos on social media claiming they were “photoshopped”.

Moving ahead a few years, we commonly have generative AI and deep fakes. In most cases, someone familiar with photography or art will still be able to spot inconsistencies usually to do with the lighting on the subject versus the background or perspective. But that’s another story. I was interested in revisiting the issue of what is real on the Internet and this time. I was definitely wanting to use AI, but style AI where I am using my own mark-making to modify my own photo. Just making the photo into line worked quite well. Perhaps disguising the impression of holding up something in front of my face so I simply added a semi-transparent square. 

To be honest the result hasn’t excited me but I have achieved what I was looking to do. I want to show I understand the potential of AI to make something original and creative, but not doing it in a copycat / "likeme" way.

PS: Should have taken my time before I uploaded the new photo. Did not really show what i wanted to say, so I went back to my original self portrait.