Have you seen this Apple advert? Take a moment to watch it. It makes my blood run cold. Surprisingly the tech bros at Apple thought it was a good idea to show this advert which depicts a tower of creative tools and analog items (like paint, trumpets and record players), being crushed into the form of the iPad. It’s a pretty grim vision of the future. It a good visual metaphor for what is happening to creatives right now.
This year has been the toughest year I have experienced as an artist, for a myriad of reasons, and the art market seems to be struggling generally. Yes there’s war in Ukraine and the Middle East (and elsewhere in the world) and “the Cost of Living Crisis” and terrible cold and wet weather in the British Isles hasn’t helped either.
It seems evident that it’s more difficult getting my work seen. I cant help but think that AI and the “enshitification of the internet” is at least partly responsible. I feel a bit like I am being slowly crushed by the Apple crusher. It’s sapping my creative juices. I don’t quite know what to do about it. Cory Doctorow explains how enshittification works “It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.”
This is probably the reason why I can’t find any useful results on google – lots of top ranking website are full of AI nonsense. It’s also why fewer people are seeing my work on the internet. My posts are pretty much hidden on Facebook, Instagram and invisible on X. Images of my paintings do not show up on Google as much as they did say 3 or even 6 months ago. Many other artists report a similar decline in interest from potential customers.
I have started to visit my local library again in search of real books with in- depth facts. The only decent thing on Google these days is Wikipedia. I find that Youtube playlists are so random as to be useless and a search on Pinterest results in either pins I have seen before (in other words I have already saved them) or one unrelated to the search term I just used. Tech companies are burning up the planet with their massive data centres in the hope that one of them will “win” the AI battle and then charge us all for what used to be better quality and free.
What’s this got to do with you? Everything. Doctorow says that enshittification is coming for all industries. “From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.” Think about your printer – a new printer is cheap as chips but the ink costs a fortune and you cant use non-proprietary ink and your printer will know, and refuse to work.
Corry Doctorow’s big hope is that “Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop…if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.” Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that. You’ll have to read his articles to find out what USA and EU are planning to do to break the monopolies of the big tech comapnies.
I just hope that independent artists like me survive the process or else everyone will have to console themselves with souless AI-derived art their ipad/smartphone/tablet device instead.
See below for some scary examples of AI “Art”. It’s a nonsense view of Derry if you didn’t know.
Just in case some of you are saying. It’s Londonderry not Derry. AI is no better at conjuring up a view of Londonderry. Take a look! Although there is a river this time.
How about Three Cliffs Bay? I have painted that many times. Sure AI will do better at ripping me off. Well, no.
Yes, we can laugh at AI’s efforts and say they look nothing like those places or my paintings but it’s all doing damage. AI can never replace human creativity. AI cannot suffer and struggle like humans. It just produces a wierd pastiche of the thing it is meant to be. It’s expensive rubbish. It’s costing us dearly. Emissions from data centers of the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than they let on.
We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. Don’t accept those tracking cookies. Try a different search engine. Stay on the website rather than downloading apps (you can use ad blockers on the website you can’t on the app). Don’t buy everything via Amazon if you can buy it in a real life shop.
We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device. Put down your phone/tablet and read a book or look at a painting made by a real human being. Join artists’ mailing lists so you can still follow their work no matter what the big platforms do to hide their work.
Oh, did I mention I have a 20% off sale on? Starting Sunday until Monday 14th. You have to join my mailing list for the code 20% code but you can unsubscribe at any time.
Read more
Cory Doctorow on Enshittification of the Internet – https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech
These days AI can write novels also. Maybe in a university somewhere AI has written a few theses for some graduates?
I bet the AI novel descend into gibberish. I notice sites on Google result fullnof nonsense, there’s one called Rio to Rome about how to get from a to b with improbable times and costings. Weirdly I just had LinkedIn approach me (and probably a million other people with highr degrees) to apply for a job checking AI text.
I began removing myself from all the techie stuff some time ago…..I don’t answer my phone….only check it a couple of times a day….I definitely read books….
By writing and talking about it Emma – you are helping. Talk about being dumbed down!
Thank you Janet. Sadly some techie stuff is essential to function but I am increasingly aware of how distressing I find social media – I read about sad or horrible stuff that I have little control about. It’s marginally easier when I just listen to the radio/podcasts and even then I prefer talking books. At least I can remember a time before smartphones and have an idea that life was better without most of it.
Thank you Emma. You hit the nail on the head. We are so fortunate to remember a time before all the techie madness. Distressing is the perfect word to describe what we are all experiencing…..Keep painting my friend -. it’s the only way.
My husband would like to ditch his smart phone but we use it the sell art…so caught in a bind.
And the purveyors of technology know this only too well. Like climate change, it will take some major global catastrophe to change things!
If only…
Do you ask google to index your site? I do this with every post I post immediately after I post it. It ensures google crawls your site and your images show in google searches.
No, I don’t Cindy. I didn’t know you could. I will look this up, Thank you for the tip.
I think my site does that automatically but there a lot about wordpress/google/internet mysterious. I set things up and hope I have got them right.
That ad is truly horrific! I guess the enshittification of the internet is partly responsible for the poor sales of my new MG novel – I’m finding it much harder to sell than the ones I published 10 years ago.
I am sorry to hear that. It’s so hard getting seen these days for all the noise out there.
I’m sorry to hear you are struggling Emma, your work is so deserving of notice. I think we are all in the same (sinking) boat. The younger generations don’t even realize how dependent they are on technology and worse, they don’t care! I’m always hopeful things will change for the better. Keep painting because you love it, and we love seeing it. One day sales may pick up again.
Thank you, Pam. It can get very disheartening. It affects my motivation to paint at times. I remember as a teacher (quite a while ago now) the school computers all going down for the day (what a relief no emails demanding information from management) and the younger teachers freaking out because they had never had to teach with textbooks and boards.