#if you're able to live off of commissions or your art business/freelancing then that is the goal

[lupismaris]

when the worst person you know invokes mary olivers name in an attempt to be both poetic and holier than thou

[magpiemalarkey]

This is depressingly true and part of why I'm not immediately packing my shit and leaving.

However, I do find it extra-scummy when a company agrees to take cash to sell my words and art to a company. We already find it scummy that companies sell a lot of personal data, data that many folks were not aware they were generating, to advertisers. And lots of folks are fighting against that and looking for sites that didn't do that. I think it's valid to want to hope that there is someplace where the scummy behavior isn't apparently baked into the infrastructure.

This attitude of companies viewing site users as some sort of farm for data and content to generate profit by selling it all to other companies who in turn think of site users only as something that needs to be gamed in order to extract the most money out of us is something we can and should protest. Like. Wait a minute. If we're producing all the actual content and raw material in this system, why don't we get a cut of the profits? Or at least a say in this process?

It may feel futile because a lot of extra scummy people are wandering around taking our data and our content no matter where we go, but I still think kicking up a fuss about it over and over again and abandoning sites that treat our information and our words and our pictures as their property is part of the (long, slow) process of making a change for the better and will help in making it possible to legislate against this scummy habit of treating anything on the internet as fair game for people who want to make money off of other people's information and work.

Now, as a freelance artist and writer, I am kinda in rock meets hard place situation, because I need an audience to see my posts and share them and hopefully buy stuff or commission me or hire me because this is my livelihood, but I also need to be able to retain control over my work because often what I am selling is a limited right to use my original work. In uploading to a site like tumblr or cohost, I am granting them permission to publish and share my work on their site, and also granting users here that right but I am not granting them ownership of my work. (Like, literally, the TOS spells out what rights we grant them. This is a contract that we agree to when we use the site. This is why periodically artists will get all up in arms about misunderstanding a TOS or get shouty about an unclearly worded one.) I am pretty sure I did not grant tumblr the right to sell my actual words and art to a third party who also want to make money by using my words and art without paying me or even acknowledging me. And I do not want this practice to become something we shrug at and accept as necessary for being online in the 21st century.

So, yeah, folks who are choosing a lesser evil and moving to sites that are, for now, not apparently participating in this shit have my blessing. Please keep moving and making it clear why you are moving. Make partnering with AI companies seem like a really unprofitable, site-killing business plan. We can't stop what's already happened, but we can discourage other companies from doing it in the future.

Also, this is a devastatingly difficult time to be someone who wants to make a living doing any kind of art. Please come find your favorite artists and writers, etc, on other sites and share our work in ways that don't utterly shaft us! Please tell us where you're going so we can follow you there. I have to be where the people are, and I would so much prefer to be in places where inevitable content theft by outside parties is still viewed as theft and not part of the shitty agreement I have to make in order to have people see my work.

I said this elsewhere but

not to be That Guy but I don't really see the point of moving platforms anymore.

There is no where we can hide on the internet from the silicon valley bros. There just isn't. Patreon is VC-funded and could announce tomorrow that oh of course they've been partnered with Midjourney for months already. Twitter actively scraps everything for AI learning. And even if you trusted the other big players like FB/IG to tell the truth about shit, people are going to use these platforms for datasets anyway. They'll just do it quietly and hope no one notices.

And places like cohost or whatever-- honestly, if it makes you feel safer/better, go for it, but I don't think cohost has the sway or capital to build the type of legal team you need to fight against scrapers. Hell, you wanna retreat into private discords? Discord wants in on AI too.

Everyone big is already dealing in AI, and everyone small doesn't even have a seat at the table. In my opinion, we are all collectively holding out for Brussels or any of the many court cases to do something about this shit, because it's no longer a thing we can just hide from.

I'm going to keep my writing on the AO3 because they are the odd case of having an actual legal team in place for this shit. For artists, I have nothing but sympathy. I suggest glazing and nightshading literally everything you post.

But beyond that, I'm unsure what we can do. This is a matter for legislation. Silicon Valley doesn't care if we all go to cohost, and even less scrupulous data-crawlers will just grab our shit from there too.

So I'll be here.