Most artists want their work to be seen, but without meaningfully empowering the extraction of the work by machines.
AI systems, scraping bots, and bad actors thrive on things like:
- scale — vast numbers of pages or images available without restriction
- clarity — clean, front-on, high-resolution, easy-to-parse pictures
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repetition — large volumes of similar images over time
Artists, by contrast, thrive on:
- context
- ambiguity
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relationships with real people because our work lives in the real world
Your job isn’t to disappear from view — it’s to design the way your work is encountered so that it matters to people and is less useful as raw training fodder.
Scraping and machine learning is already huge — and growing
Bots and automated data collection aren’t small experiments anymore. They’re a core part of the modern web:
- Tens of millions of web pages are scraped daily by automated crawlers across the internet, and nearly half of all internet traffic comes from bots (good and bad).
So what does this mean for your art?
AI models — especially those trained on images and vision-language pairs — increasingly rely on publicly available scraped data to build representations of the visual world. This includes things like:
- framing
- composition
- object recognition
- stylistic inference
Once scraped and aggregated into a dataset, there’s no practical way to retract that information. Even if you delete your post later, the training effect remains.