Photo by Antoni Shkraba on Pexels
I know, I know, I should get used to our AI overlords already. Why should I care that tech titans are stealing (not scraping, not training, stealing) our creative endeavors to enrich ourselves?
After all, I have been willing to let Facebook, Twitter (though I’ve abandoned it after its change to X), Instagram, Google Docs, and Threads mine my data. Because the convenience of using their free services to connect with family, friends, and strangers was of use to me and at a great price point (free), I didn’t mind that these companies were all making billions off of my data, that is, off of my likes, my purchases, my preferences, etc.
Here’s the thing, I wasn’t previously making money off of those things myself. And given that I don’t have a billion-person network, there’s no way that I could make money off of those things about myself. I didn’t mind trading that information that wasn’t useful to me in particular to a company to make money off of in the aggregate in exchange for a free and useful service.
However, AI has crossed useful service/commodification of my data line for me. I do make money off of my editing services. I do make my livelihood off of my creativity. And now, all of these corporations want absolute access to my “services” to train their own services to eventually take over my livelihood. And that is where I have to draw the line. They are no longer providing me with a useful service. Instead, they have made my job harder (creating terrible search experiences and flooding my software with intrusive AI popups that are unnecessary and sometimes flat out wrong). And, on top of that, these companies want to then drive me out of business by stealing my creativity so that it can produce content that resembles what I do (without my unique lived experience or my actual human connection to audiences). No, that is where I draw the line.
And apparently, that is where some other companies draw the line as well. When Adobe announced a vague update to its ToS that appeared to allow it to gain access to any of the content you produce using its software, there was a huge uproar on social media. According to Slate, users encouraged anyone who worked with clients that had NDAs or who worked in health or legal professions, where client information protection is paramount, to drop the product suite if they were using it. In the same article, the news site reported that Adobe immediately shared a blog post saying that it would never use its customers’ data to train its generative AI technology.
With no regulations out there to protect us from the theft of our creative work and no regulations to curtail technology company monopolies in a variety of spaces and industries, this particular technology revolution feels very disheartening. These companies don’t have a very good track record of policing themselves, so I’m not very confident when they make promises anymore.
I’ll keep creating because that is what inspires me and keeps me feeling fulfilled. The urge to create is fundamentally human and our ties to creativity go back tens of thousands of years back to the first cave paintings. AI will never stop people from writing, creating, painting, drawing, etc., although it may just make it harder or impossible to make a living from these things.
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