10/03/2024
Do you trust Meta? Read on to see why I ask…
Let’s wrap up our conversation on AI this week! Previously, we covered a bit about how using AI for inspiration and mockups can be great, but for final marketing image - not so great. But of course as a photographer, I’d be on the side of “take real photos.”
But honestly, the one of the biggest problems come up when you look at the laws around using AI. We’re still in the infancy of AI and it means that there’s really no legal direction on how people use AI. It also means you can’t copyright an AI image, which is a huge red flag for brands.
The other big problem comes from the source. Current AI generators work by training on data sets. Images, documents, and everything under the sun can be fed into an AI generator to train it on what people mean when they say “draw me a picture of a banana.” This means that AI companies are taking publicly available works, sometimes without saying so, and definitely without compensation to artists, designers, writers, and just creatives in general.
And this extends to all of us who have posted our work to Instagram and even photos of our personal lives. Mark Zuckerberg was recently quoted as saying, “On Facebook and Instagram there are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos. We estimate [this] is greater than the Common Crawl dataset, and people share large numbers of public text posts in comments across our services as well.” (Source: Gizmodo, see comments). If you’ve posted it, Meta has collected it.
So all of this is just kind of crummy. I’d personally like to opt out, but Meta hasn’t given anyone that option yet. As usual, we have this really neat thing that can be so helpful, but big companies are turning it into a nightmare.
As always, what are your thoughts? Let’s chat in the comments!
