berserkbrandee

@staff

At this point I'm truly wondering what to do, really. (Glaze your art and so on, sure) But even the words we write, our personal thoughts, asks, everything is getting fed into these fucking machines from any site available. "Make your own page!" - Services like Squarespace, which are what I and most of my peers use, have sneakily added the option to allow third-party crawlers to harvest data. And portfolio websites are not social media. I want to interact and I have to reach clients.

Are we reaching the point where we have to post only previews and send finished art via Newsletters or post behind paywalls? Print it out and send a pigeon to our followers' homes?

I'm so fucking tired. So angry.

I've been an artist through life-threatening depression, through working and studying full time, through moving house and country, through the pandemic.

Especially the point about portfolio sites not being social media. I post to twitter because that's where my professional peers are. It's where you can get approached by potential clients or collaborators. I post to tumblr because it's where my fandom peers live, where I can facilitate a gallery with a semblance of an archival and tagging system, where I've posted my art for over a decade.

If I just wanted to post art with no interaction and no feedback, I could probably do that pretty easily. But that's not why I share my art online.

The continued hostility, commodification and devaluation of artists online is making a lot of us question why we even bother anymore. Platforms that were made successful on the backs of artists are all suddenly turning on their core userbase in order to turn a profit. Like, I get it, websites have to make money and if you don't pay for the product, you are the product, yadda yadda yadda. But I gotta assume there are ventures they could explore other than wholesale theft of their userbase's copyrighted content.

And they all handwave it away by pointing to the TOS as if anyone could've known that by signing a standard agreement to have your content hosted on the site sometime in like fucking 2010 for some of us, you'd be agreeing to having your data scraped by third parties years and years down the line. And I get that TOS can change, but tumblr has no way to effectively purge your content from the platform (that I know of), so it's not like you can do much about it if you've been posting here for a decade.

I’d kill to find a place that captures the magic of posting art on deviantART in the 2010s, but there are so few sites that exist like that anymore. A few have popped up, like inkblot and artfol, but nothing catches.

Hello! Automattic, Tumblr's parent company, will sign a contract with OpenAI and Midjourney so Midjourney can learn off of Tumblr's and WordPress' art and other user data. :) (The full text of this article is copy/pasted in the cut below). You can opt out! but I truly cannot imagine a more idiotic or out of touch decision on the part of Tumblr's CEO.

First thing's first: When/if this goes live, opt out of this immediately. Do this even if you're not an artist. The more people opt out, the less valuable this contract is to Midjourney. in an ideal world, literally all of the active users would opt out, but if we can even get to 50% that's pretty delicious.

Second: Contact Tumblr Support. It's vital that you do this politely. Tumblr staff is not responsible for this decision and the point of doing this is to show the userbase's unwillingness to be involved in this, not harangue Tumblr staff. (Seriously, stop haranguing Tumblr staff). Here's a script:

Hi, I'm writing in to express my disappointment in Automattic's pending contract with OpenAI to sell user data. Midjourney is already embroiled in copyright lawsuits, and it is not possible to train it without compromising copyright, including violating the IP of artists on this site. I strongly protest this contract and will opt out if it goes live. Depending on the privacy terms around what user data is sold to OpenAI and why, it is possible I will leave the platform entirely. Thank you for your time.

Third: Download Glaze and start poisoning them prompts, my friends

Fourth: Stare into the middle distance for a second with me because holy fucking shit? How stupid can one decision be?

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. 

We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.

To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option. 

For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc. 

Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.