Hi, writer here. I’ve been dealing with a ton of emotions around this topic and thinking about it a lot. These are the resolutions I’m settling on:

-Keep making your art. Keep honing your skills and trying new things. If you give up your art, you’re letting the AI exploiters win.

-Keep sharing your art with your fellow humans. If you loathe knowing that AI will train on your work, move to tech that lets you opt out wherever possible, and put up barriers to scraping or defenses that poison AI scrapers’ datasets when you can. But keep making your art visible to humans even when you can’t. People need real art more than ever. If we let AI consume all our creative spaces because we give up on sharing real human creativity, that’s another way of letting the exploiters win.

-Don’t make art for anyone who doesn’t respect the time, thought, effort, and care it takes to do it well. If your paid work had turned into a depressing reverse-centaur shadow of the work you used to put yourself into, get out of the industry. They don’t deserve your mind anymore, and it’s not worth the damage to your spirit. Make your art for yourself and for the people who can genuinely appreciate it, even if that means doing it for no pay and starting a completely unrelated career.

-Remember that nothing is inevitable. The AI companies are in a tremendous amount of debt and selling their services for way below cost. We might see a bubble burst that leads to far more limited AI usage in the near future. Even if we don’t, we can reshape our legal system to better protect data privacy rights, labor rights, and moral rights for creators. And it’s quite possible that anti-AI tech will get better even as AI gets “better.” Our current depressing, exhausting, and exploitative situation won’t necessarily last forever.

That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it!

back in my day the funny numbers were over 9000

I don’t think they will let it go. At the end of the day, people still need to buy stuff, and if they can do it from a phone, that saves them a trip to whichever physical store they would have gone to. Also, sometimes people need highly specific things that they can’t get at nearby stores, or maybe there is a nearby store with the thing but they have to search to find out about it.

If they let it go, it’ll probably be due to an economic crisis in which shipping is too expensive and no one can afford to buy anything other than groceries anyway. It won’t be because people stopped wanting to buy stuff. And at that point, we’ll be screwed because no one will be able to afford to maintain the internet either.

I think if we’re going to get the Library of Alexandria back, we’re going to need to build dedicated corporation-free online spaces where people can share information, and we’ll need to figure out a viable funding model for that. Like, well, libraries.

is “ducking” an actual term now? Come to think of it, ducking doesn’t sound any sillier than googling