Rise of The 'Anti-AI' Movement
And why Microsoft, Open AI and Facebook owe you money!
I'm back! After 5 weeks on the road (some for work, some for fun), and another couple of weeks recovering I'm back with a more manageable weekly instalment of Pro-Human but what's REALLY interesting is what's been happening whilst I've been away. The 'Anti-AI' movement has gained some major momentum as creators and consumers reject what's come to be called 'AI slop'. Let's investigate.
The first I heard that the grumblings of people like me were being turned in to actions by those less cynical and more energetic than I was the explosive growth of Cara, a social media and portfolio platform for artists that “filters out generative AI images so that people who want to find authentic creatives and artwork can do so easily”.
Cara launched in January of 2023 in response to protests against AI generated images on Art Station, a showcase platform for games, film, media & entertainment artists, but sextupled its user-base over a weekend in June because of its clear stance on AI, below:
We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation.
In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI-generated content should always be clearly labeled, because the public should always be able to search for human-made art and media easily.
They have also collaborated with Glaze, a technology from the University of Chicago, that obscures artworks from AI to protect artists from having their style stolen and copied without credit.
Since discovering Cara I seem to see the Anti-AI movement everywhere. For instance, just last week the London premiere of of a movie with an an AI-generated script was cancelled after a backlash as was ‘Reem’ the new AI editor introduced by British lifestyle publication SheerLuxe. In fact, the response to the latter was so severe the team behind it announced they had to take a duvet day!
This movement is not only restricted to artists, filmmakers, writers and other creative types. In April of this year skincare brand Dove, celebrating the 20th anniversary of its ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’, shared a press release claiming that, “One of the biggest threats to the representation of real beauty is Artificial Intelligence." They also committed to “never use AI to represent real women".
So, what does this tell us about the appetite for AI generated content? It tells us that, like with food for our bodies, we distrust artificial ingredients and have a right to know what goes into the food for our minds. That's why I have donated to the Not By AI movement and downloaded one of their badges for my Substack that states 'Not written by AI' on my work and am 100% behind their mission:
“...to encourage more humans to produce original content and help users identify human-generated content. The Ultimate goal is to make sure humanity continues to advance.”
By 2025, it is expected that 90% of the content available on the internet will be produced with the help of artificial intelligence, so it's probably easier to badge what's been made by a human rather than what's been made by a machine.
By why does it matter who made your content and where it comes from? Because if we don't value original human creativity, the A.I. barons certainly will not - in fact they are even admitting as much.
In a recent CNBC interview Microsoft's CTO for AI Mustafa Suleyman made a retroactive declaration that every word, picture and video you have ever contributed to the Internet was always just grist for the AI mill - I'm sure you remember agreeing to that right? Here's what he said:
“I think that with respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content, since the 90s, has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it—that it has been freeware, if you like; that has been the understanding.”
Well, Microsoft 365 is on the web so I suggest we all start copying it, recreating and reproducing it without paying too.
Then there's the CTO of Open AI Mira Murati who simply believes creative jobs shouldn't even exist, claiming during an event at Dartmouth University that:
“Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place."
And what about Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify who basically believes the value of creativity to be almost nothing, even though its what makes him a billionaire...
“Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content.”
And let’s not forget the humanitarians at Meta who launched Llama 3.1 last week trained on…well, can you guess?
These parasitic corporations view your content like their predecessors viewed the Amazon Rainforest or the North Sea oil fields, as free raw materials to be harvested and burned to make billions for themselves. They owe us money; that's literally the only way AI can replace the jobs it takes away - by paying every user who ever contributed a piece of content to the Internet that trained their machines…but we’ll never get. They will continue to convince us that our creativity is valueless and our labour is free so that we will eventually accept the AI slop they serve up to us. Don’t fall for it, support your favourite artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians and publications directly or risk losing them forever.
P.S. Substack offers an option for all its writers to protect their content from AI bots which I, of course, have taken.
Good points! I’m still on the fence about Gen AI. It’s hard to avoid it in my line of work.
This goes all the way back before globalization was the mantra of the day. Corporations replacing expensive human workers with cheaper alternatives from the third World. A perfect example is the IT Industry, importing notably a lot of H1Bs from India. We have now gone full circle, now these cheap workers are being replaced by a 24/7 machine. No more need for workers compensations and the likes. It seems today these parasites are now focusing their attention on creative artists.
Kill the beast before it is too late.