Can we talk about social media? Can we talk about AI? Can we talk about plagiarism?
A stalwart of the photography community, Stephen Shore, bid a farewell and adieu from Instagram in April 2024. I will add the screen shots and quote what he typed for you here:
“I began posting on Instagram 10 years ago. My project was to photograph every day with my iPhone and with Instagram in mind – the screen size; the nature of the Instagram experience. I would post one a day. (Occasionally I’d post an older image, but these were clearly indicated).
I found a community of Instagrammers with similar aims. Some we’re (sic) friends. Some became Instagram friends. A global visual conversation developed. I’ve had occasion to meet some of my new IG friends. When we saw each other for the first time there was often a sense of recognition. We knew the taste of each other’s perception. I had the image of two Enlightenment scholars, one in Paris and the other in Amsterdam who had never met but who corresponded weekly.
After about 6 years I found my feed beginning to get stale. I felt I was repeating myself. So I took a break from posting regularly. I would still, on occasion, put up an image or announce a new show or book.
Over these years the Instagram experience has changed. Sponsored and suggested posts were introduced. The feed went from chronological to algorithmical. Recently I’ve seen scores of spam accounts following and DM’ing me. And I’ve been simply spending too much time on The Gram.
I’ve decided to disengage from Instagram, although I will miss my IG friends. I’ve also decided to keep my feed up and public to make an archive of this project available.
(If anyone is interested in keeping abreast of my projects, they are welcome to subscribe to my newsletter on my website – link in profile).
A couple of days ago I asked Perplexity, the AI search engine, how to cancel my IG account. After walking me through the various steps it added that people who quit Instagram could “potentially experience positive effects on their mental health and overall well-being”, demonstrating not only Artificial Intelligence, but Artificial Wisdom.”
It’s also interesting that Mr Shore mentioned Artificial Intelligence as just a month or so later Meta (being Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) announced that they were AI scraping across their platforms and all publically available work has been used (AKA plagiarised) to train their AI. Meta offered an opt-out option for those of us in Europe, including the UK, however this seems to have been done after they did the scraping.
What follows is a link to a June 2023 article on the Ars Technica website (note that this pre-dates Meta’s opt-out option):
ARS Technica - Meta's New AI article
The author Benj Edwards closes his article with an almost light hearted “But dare we say it: Generating them can be fun. Of course, depending on your disposition and how you view the pace of AI image synthesis, that fun may be balanced out by an equal level of concern.”
I would argue that it should not be ‘balanced out’ at all, Meta (and all other AI scraping companies) are deliberately plagiarising artists’ work, they are making money off the backs of other people’s hard effort with no financial recompense by return. This takes me back to Instagram and what Stephen Shore has said, I agree with him wholeheartedly.
What was once a wonderful photography platform is no more, Meta have turned it into a full on capitalist enterprise hellscape. Like Mr Shore I too have cut back from posting on Instagram, rounding off my account to show only 16 images whilst I try to get my head around things and my personal IG account has been deleted. At the time of typing this blog I have three absolutely huge photographic projects going on that I am really excited about and REALLY want to show work from yet I am incredibly reluctant to do so.
Let’s spin this another way; I have spent an incredible amount of time and money with which to work on my photography and would rather this work was seen through exhibition settings and with printed media. Only then does the viewer get the true scale of the work and the narratives behind it, and that for me is very important.
It’s a catch 22.
At this point in time I see AI as a scourge, it is not ‘intelligent’ by any stretch of the word, it is a software program being coded by humans to, as said, plagiarise other people’s work for their own financial gain. They’re making easy money off our backs. Because of this I’m very reluctant to put new work onto Instagram, to update my website, to post any of my photography online, it’s a no-win situation.
So, where do I go from here? Well I have invested a little bit of cash in a new start up photography app called ‘Foto’, further information can be found here:
It is currently in beta testing stage and I have to admit it’s looking good. Foto is basically what Instagram was pre-Meta, it’s very clean and tidy, it’s chronological, it has tagging, there are no adverts, no sponsored posts, no video. The owner, also a photographer, is very vocal with what is being developed behind the scenes and it is regularly being updated. Foto is penciled in to go public towards the end of 2024 and I am hoping once it does that it takes off and proves to be sustainable.
Admittedly I also tried the open source fediverse-based ‘Pixelfed’ yet had so many issues with the instance I was using, it wasn’t posting, it kept sticking, it was just a constant hassle to use so sadly I deleted that account too. That’s not to say I won’t venture back in the future, once they have more reliable instances connected to it, let me just see what happens with Foto first.
Regarding my website; I need to delve further behind the scenes with my provider and what they are doing with regards to invasive AI. There is a voice telling me that whatever is posted publicly wherever it is on the internet is fair game to the likes of Google, Microsoft et al.
There are no safe online spaces for us anymore, and because of this I am going back to my roots; I am preparing work for several hard-copy portfolios.
Whether AI stays with us long-term remains to be seen, I am hoping it’s a fad and goes the same way as the push for crypto and NFT’s did.
Until then, well, we’re pretty much fenced in.