I’ve been on the fence about the whole Ai stuff for a while, but with Meta now scraping all content posted to teach its own machine, I don’t feel comfortable posting on instagram or Facebook. Is this the end of social media? Where do we go from here to grow an audience as a self published cartoonist/author/illustrator? Where do we send people (other than our website and newsletter)? How do we even find an audience now?
@ksfabian you can give substack a look, there is an option to block ai training and it is basically a free newsletter service that has great community building tools.
Not only that, they give you all the analytics you would need to understand your work’s reach
@ksfabian I read somewhere that there is an obfuscation app that prevents AIs from being able to 'read' your images, theoretically protecting them from being used as training data.
@Hector-Sandoval-Ormeño Are you referring to nightshade?
@willicreate there's Nightshade, and I also saw one recently called Glaze
@ChloeGreenbergArt Both tools are from the same engineers and they both work great! 
I am thinking of switching to posting on Pinterest instead of Instagram from now on. Instagram doesn't want you to be seen or succeed without paying them for it. Pinterest and Youtube as well, are still reliable options.
So far I'm seeing artists taking the rout of newsletters and if they still want to post to social media they'll be glazing their images with one of the software's developed for protecting your work.
If your concern is still with AI data scraping… YouTube is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google and they are invested in building their own AI model. Independent operators have been confirmed to scrap Pinterest. Sorry to say, I don’t have a positive spin to end this paragraph.
I’ve just glanced at Pinterest’s business forecast, and they seem interested in turning the platform into a shopping app. Could potentially be the new Esty (good or bad thing for illustrators, iono).
A lot of people have been deleting their images off Meta and using Cara app (https://cara.app/explore), but today, I think their servers have been inundated with new users because a lot of popular concept artists have been vocal about moving to their platform. It's also in its beta form right now. It seems to be for artists as their stance is anti-AI.
As a beginner, it's hard to be hopeful, but I heard recently someone ask, why would someone read something no one bothered to write? (Maybe it was one of the 3PP teachers, forgive me for not remembering!) With that in mind, I really enjoy seeing what you all make because I see that people who are really taking the time to learn to tell great stories through their art are improving and encouraging each other.
@ksfabian My wife and I decided to delete our Instagram accounts today. I am not a professional artist, but we just had a baby and all of the AI training talk feels quite icky to us.
I'm not fundamentally against all things AI or social media, but I really think that Zuckerberg has too tight a grip on our cultural development and information exchange. The thought of shelling out our info to train a mega corporation's cash cow doesn't sit right. Instagram had to die at some point. I may try a new social media forms in the future, but for now I hope to use its absence as an opportunity to consider why I make art and how the need to share it online impacts my creative process.
These are really dark times for artists. If only we could form a union and boycott these companies like what the writers and actors did. Let’s see if they can still make money if all artists just stop producing art. 
one can only dream.
I have opened an account on Cara now, there is no harm in trying it out. If it succeeds , thats great and it will give user that are first out a bit of a head start maybe?
It seems great anyway, and I have found a few artist that I already follow on instagram.
I would urge folks to consider the virtues of Blogging and RSS readers.
They’re old fashioned, but experiencing a resurgence in popularity especially as platforms start to take advantage of the content on their sites and tracking becomes an issue. Some artists are indeed leaving social media entirely, and with RSS one option can be that they simply update their own blogs on their own sites.
Essentially, RSS allows you to “subscribe” to a website's updates, including blogs. Back before social media siloed everything into walled garden platforms like MySpace & Facebook & Twitter, RSS readers were used to subscribe to all the updates of your favorite blogs so you didn’t miss anything. For example, every time an artist made an update with something new they’d created or a project they were working on, they’d do it on their blog on their own website. And all the “subscriber followers" would receive those blog updates through their RSS feed, providing it without ever needing to go to anyone’s specific website.
https://lifehacker.com/tech/the-best-rss-reader-apps-in-2024
https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-an-rss-feed-4684568
https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-rss-feeds/
https://www.wix.com/blog/rss-feed
An RSS reader brings those updates to you and stores all of them into an aggregated format that you can access at any time. Many of the better readers out there have synced apps that allow you access across all your devices. Because I have a Mac, I use Readkit, which I personally really like. But there are many many others out there.
Most website services have automatic RSS feeds built in to the site as a feature already, and you don’t have to do anything. Good reader apps can take a website domain and find it’s RSS feed for you and automatically subscribe you to updates if the site has an RSS feed.
Some readers, like Inoreader, can even create RSS feeds if a site doesn’t have one.
Interestingly, there are some reader apps that allow you to subscribe to Facebook pages. Youtube channels and playlists all have specific RSS feeds already built in. You can even follow your favorite people making Fediverse posts and Bluesky posts without ever having to actually join those platforms—you just need to know their profiles. And you can even get RSS feeds for Twitch channels.
And you may never have to visit those sites. And there are other advantages.
So if you’re looking for the next social media platform to share your work, you might consider creating a good old-fashioned blog on your website. In the past, there was a stigma against having them on your website as people literally even stopped having websites at all in favor of sharing everything on platforms they didn’t own. Somehow it became “less professional” to have one in the face of all the pressure from those platforms that were programming us to stay on their sites at all costs. No one dared travel off their platforms—and some (Instagram for example) literally only allowed ONE link (and thus LinkTree was born…).
So maybe consider your own blog instead of yet again joining yet another platform you don’t control, uploading your best work, and then have it stolen out from under you. Try an RSS reader instead?
Below is a pic of my own Readkit reader that I’m slowly adding subscriptions to. You can see that I follow Jake’s blog, and what it looks like whenever he makes an update.
Children's Illustration Portfolio: https://www.coreyartusillustration.com
Art Portfolio: https://www.coreyartusimagery.com
Mastodon: https://mindly.social/@Coreyartus
Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/Coreyartus
@Coreyartus Great post, thanks!
@Coreyartus It's cool to see things moving back to blogs, and being able to curate what we read and receive. So much of social media has become a giant letterbox filled with junk mail or a crowded room with everyone in it yelling at once.
There's also potential with Substack too, but it has recently tried to include 'social' elements with notes...
@willicreate Pinterest is such a joke now. It used to be a great resource for reference that I used all the time. now whenever I search anything, half the results or more are ai. It's honestly not useful for reference anymore at all outside of references i've already saved pre ai invasion.
If they turn it into a shopping app I hope they will let me keep all my old boards at least...
@Arthur-Campling I started one too. It’s already a better algorithm than IG
i recommend using cara app to post your art, its in beta mode but already theres such a cool vibe there <3. also, mastodon.art and bluesky, these 3 do not allow ai there, cara has glaze integrated into it as well ^^
@irinasavu i like Bluesky quite a bit, It's very polished unlike Cara though it's more of a twitter alternative than instagram alternative.
I’ve been on the fence about the whole Ai stuff for a while, but with Meta now scraping all content posted to teach its own machine, I don’t feel comfortable posting on instagram or Facebook. Is this the end of social media? Where do we go from here to grow an audience as a self published cartoonist/author/illustrator? Where do we send people (other than our website and newsletter)? How do we even find an audience now?
