Protecting our art is becoming crucial in today's AI-driven digital world. But is image glazing the answer? Here's my experience so far.
Cara, a popular alternate platform to Instagram at the moment, has yet to offer built-in glazing. They suggest using Glaze, a separate software. Sounds simple. Not quite.
Setting up Glaze is a bit of a headache:
- It's free, 👍 but requires downloading large zip files 👎
- You need a hefty amount of disk space 👎
- The process feels outdated and tedious 👎
took ~88 minutes to Glaze
The real kicker? It's slow.👎👎👎 We're talking almost an hour and a half per image for my 9x5 submissions on older hardware. Ouch.
tool ~83 minutes to Glaze
You can batch them 👍 but it's one at a time.👎
But here's the biggest issue: you can't tell if it worked 🤞. The image looks the same, and there's no way to verify if it's actually protecting your style.🤞
So, is it worth it? Excuse me if I'm a little sceptical. The process is time-consuming, and we're essentially trusting a black box.
Can it really save our unique mark-making styles from AI theft?
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 24th 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.
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.
