The story that kicked this off is that Cara (at cara.app) got scraped by some pro-AI douchebro who threatened to release all the URLs and such for AI training (but has apparently backed down since).
This gets down to one of the core reasons, hell THE core reason why I hate generative AI so goddamn much. It's exploitative, it doesn't respect consent, and neither do the people who make and support the thing. It was rushed out even though I'm sure someone in the chain said "hey, uh, this could be used to do some really evil shit dude" but because Silicon Valley believes in Zuckerberg's shitty mantra of "move fast and break things", they didn't care. And they never will.
I am an artist. You've maybe seen my art in places. The blurred background for this very site is something I made. The header photo for BlueSCSI.com? Yeah, that's my hand, I made that. I've got skin in this game, which is why when this happens, it deeply, **deeply **pisses me off.
This is why I vehemently disagree with those people who constantly boast that AI is never going away, that AI is something I need to use as an artist, or I'm getting left behind, forever. To my eyes, the legacy of AI is that it is a technology wielded by the alpha loser, the talentless chud who instead of **putting in the goddamn work **that people have done, commission some machine to train itself on material against an artist's consent to copy them, and then claim that they made whatever that machine barfs up.
At best, and I am being really generous here, you *commissioned *a computer to make that "art" for you. Because that's how you commission a human artist, in much the same way! You find someone whose art you like, you request they do a piece for you, and you tell them what you want out of it! Except when you commission an actual artist, actual love and care goes into that piece, and a human--not some megacorp--gets that money.
Generative AI is a technology made by a bunch of talentless chuds who don't want to pay creatives what they're worth, and is only the latest in such an effort. Creatives are notoriously underpaid and have been for many, many years. (In fact, when I went to college for a bit for photography, the instructor told us straight up to drop his class if we were hoping to turn this into a moneymaking career because he alluded to just how *rough it is out there *for creatives. And this was in 2010!)
And because these talentless chuds have never understood the value in a good graphic designer, in a good photographer or musician or any creative field in between, they want to engineer this plagiarism machine to replace them so they no longer have to pay the ""outlandish"" amounts of money these people demand (aka "what they're fucking worth").
Can you even *believe *that no creative worth their shit wants to touch this garbage? Maybe they did at the very beginning, before we truly had grasped just how inherently evil the companies pushing this trash were. But in 2026? Absolutely not. And certainly, *certainly *the talentless chuds hitting artists' DMs saying "lmfao Claude is going to replace you if you don't start adapting, get owned nub" are going to make them change their minds!
sigh
This, this is why the legacy of generative AI will be forever tainted. I don't care what good the technology can do, I haven't cared for a while. There are points where I can see some light shining through, there are efforts that I can actually jive with (like Apple's approach prioritizing on-device rather than, say, resorting to datacenter hell, which hey! Datacenters are another thing getting shoved through without consent, can you believe it?!) but it all just gets overshadowed by the technology being tainted by irredeemably evil techbros.
And even if I can admit AI can be good at some things, that dirty, icky feeling associated with it--that this is the technology of evil--is never going to wash off.