December 2022: AI Art, Selling a Lifestyle and Fame
I’m an AI-rtist darling
Your Instagram might currently be filled with pictures of snow and canceled flights. But it might look a bit like this:
A trend on Instagram at the moment is to post these hyper stylized portraits of yourself, that paint you in outer space, as a cowboy or even an 18th-century French aristocrat. To take part, upload 10–20 pictures of yourself to a little AI bot. And tadda, unique art featuring your face!
But is it really worth it? To begin with, there’s a mountain of unpaid labor this AI has trained itself on. These computer learning models are scraping publicly available images from all over the internet — Google Images, DeviantArt, Getty Images, Pinterest, and so on. Dozens of artists have spoken out about not getting paid or credited for work that appears in the database.
Often it goes a step beyond simply learning from their art. Often it’s digitally transforming work people have spent hours on, with no credit. It can alter pre-drawn art slightly, to match your face. Legally, our modern day copyright laws are not equipped to deal with this. And even then, the AI won’t even be able to show who to credit it. Meaning this company will continue to profit from the hard labour of artists around the world.
This is before we even get to the privacy concerns. Because what are they doing with the photos you upload? Some terms of use show that they can use the photos you uploaded to train their AI too.
On top it all off, there’s a growing concern at the types of images these AI bots are producing — including Olivia Snow who discovered she was able to generate nude images of herself using her childhood photos.
So this festive season, pay your artist friends to make something fun for you instead of letting an AI make your Christmas cards. If you are an artist, you can upload your art to https://haveibeentrained.com/ to see if your work has made it into the database.
Five Second of Fame
Being a household name used to take years of graft. Now, you could be the villain of the day, a viral soundbite, or simply make a bad typo to become headline news. Especially on TikTok, where fame is fickle, short-lasting and ruthless. Like our Tory leadership. The rise and fall of fame on TikTok is incredibly sharp, with incredible highs quickly leading to…well nothing. This great Vox video explores what happens after a song goes viral and how our idea of what it takes to be famous is rapidly changing.
To mirror this, we have Twitter, where you could become the unexpected main character of the day. Yet due to the the nature of these conversations, these have very few repercussions offline. Fame has become trapped within the confines of a platform. Trying to explain Twitter’s daily stories to someone offline, like the “I drink coffee with my husband before i go to work” — results in you just sounding ludicrous.
Eating your way to the top
This didn’t come out last month, but I read it the past 30 days so it counts. It’s a really well written piece from a food critic on how we package our lives. She speaks about how she changed the way she makes meals, because it will impact what she can post online. We aren’t sharing snapshots of our lives but a lifestyle. It’s not a new thing to explore in 2022, but she approaches it with a freshness that I enjoyed.
Thank you 2022
And finally, Merry December! This year has been quite a whirlwind in our world of digital rights, identity and technology. We have some really exciting things in the pipeline for next year, that we can’t wait to talk to you all about. Thank you for all your support over the past 365 days. We hope you get some time to switch off, have some non-digital cookies and catch you in 2023.
This is totally unrelated. But still great:
- White Lotus ended this month but massive shout out to Porita’s outfits
- The ultimate gift guide from around the world
- The pesto in this recipe rules my world
