Another Reason to Return to Blogging- Meta AI

Ah, the love/hate relationship with social media. But I thought it fair to post that news has come out that will significantly impact how and when I share information on the social media platforms.

I understand that AI is now almost unavoidable if you’re online. However, it has been released that Meta is using public Facebook and Instagram content to train it’s AI models. Not just text- but also visual generators.

The terms of service have long been that any media you upload can be used by them, however, most of us didn’t take it too seriously. The tradeoff for exposure, finding our audience and new friends, and advertising made it worth it. Besides, what were they going to do with a bunch of photos of old patterns and sewing and fashion history?

However, the new visual AI is another ball game. There seems to be many different developers that have already been stealing images from artists in order to grow their bank and create derivative works. But something about them using photos of our faces, our children’s faces (if applicable), fine art, craft, photographs, locations, and more, is unsettling. This doesn’t just affect fine artists. This literally affects everyone (and affecting artists was bad enough).

AI is already starting to creep into sewing pattern markets as well- I know of several pattern sellers (not personally) who are using AI images to generate fashion model images make to it seem they have made physical samples of their sewing patterns at high fashion shoots. Unless you look closely at the hands you may never even realize it is not a photograph but an AI image. Of course, the reviews for the patterns are shady as well- if you can find them.

Let me plead my case to why this affects me and other small makers even though we may base our expertise on historical materials. I have devoted most of my adult life at this point to sourcing, researching, and understanding the technical intricacies of old patterns and historical primary source material. I well research to be SURE they are public domain before doing anything. And even then, the public domain materials are often highly flawed, sometimes requiring near complete redrafting to get them to actually work. It’s preserving a historical source while fixing things that have been wrong for decades (or a century).

Now, doing all that work and researching and investing so long in the study of historical dress and pattern cut from primary sources is much different than taking a computer image that was uploaded to a free platform, and then having that platform train it’s AI to pass off images that aren’t historically accurate as art, or worse, as historical fact. Don’t forget that as long as the public are entertained on Meta’s platform, they generate revenue from advertisement. Instagram no longer pays creators “bonuses”, as of the time I write this.

What it does is pass off a modern generated image as fact. It discounts my work, and the work of other historians that spend massive amounts of time reworking, testing, restoring, and making things from the past understandable and accessible- when often these old items use techniques that are all but forgotten. Whether reworked, or carefully recreated line for line, the work of others in my field is highly useful for historians and vintage enthusiasts to understand how clothing went together, how things were achieved, and how dressmaking evolved over decades (and centuries). I am friends with many other makers of “vintage” patterns, who all have their own approach and put *a ton* of work and effort into their products. Just because something was originally based on a public domain source it does not mean the end result of our efforts is public domain, as many historians in other areas of study very likely understand.

Likewise, with all the primary sources through catalogs and fashion magazines I have accumulated over the years. It takes an incredible amount of time to source, money to buy, time to scan, and knowledge to interpret historical fashion sources. Simply plugging a photo into AI is worlds different than training the mind to comprehend context and time frame through over twenty years of study.

It is frustrating to invest so much time and energy into a platform that seemed to promote finding community, and in the end, the content generated through our own expense and time made money for a large corporations, while eventually making us all feel a little more isolated.

When we all joined we did not know AI was a thing. And now everything is already stored in their databases, I’m sure, whether we chose to delete content or not. The new algorithm means it’s harder than ever to even reach our audiences. Now they are using our publicly posted content to train digital knowledge to generate images that they own. Nothing is ever truly free. I am told at the time of writing that privately posted information is not under the AI umbrella.

In any case, I’m still formulating what I will chose to do with this new information. I may simply do new product announcements (which won’t be many, since we are now on Summer break). In the meantime, I won’t be posting much public content on those platforms. I would hope that those who enjoy what I do can find me on here, on Etsy, and on my website. Just as it was before the move to social media apps.

In a way it’s good. Back to basics. Back to art. Back to a slower, simple life. If you’d like to read more you can find links below.

Sources:

Business Insider

BBC

Cnet- and how to opt out if you’re in Europe (in the USA we can’t)

How-To Geek Which does give options that may help in settings.

Yahoo News Canada

Follow up, one day later with more observations.

After some thought, one possible action could be utilizing a business Facebook page to link to blog posts that include product announcements, links to relevant articles about fashion history elsewhere on the web, etc. Facebook doesn’t have proprietary ownership of the linked content, so each site (including mine) still retains the image and information ownership. However, Meta knows this and purposefully has the algorithm trained to not give those posts much exposure (i.e. you may never see them in your feed).

Of course, I have been blogging enough to remember when other sites would simply “lift” entire articles and photos onto their scam sites or their business blogs. No information posted online is ever going to be free of some degree of that. I’m sure people are still feeding AI images gathered elsewhere online in unethical ways.

Some creators may find the tradeoff for exposure or influencer income through collaborations or partnerships make it worth it for them to continue to use Meta’s platform. At present, I don’t find it worth it to me. Thankfully we can all chose what works best for us as an individual.

It’s the cycle of online life.

Instagram has said it will be labeling images as “Made by AI”, but real life photographers are already having their real photographs being mislabeled, ironically enough, most likely by AI itself. So while they want to harvest your images for AI, your real, human creations may be mislabeled by the harvester. Source

Enough navel gazing. Have a wonderful summer, everyone!

P.S. I found it highly amusing that Instagram offered me a “Spring Bonus” for creating content the very same day I wrote this content, after disabling creator bonuses quite a while ago.