Meta’s new business terms + AI scraping... how are you all feeling about this?

My problem is, I can't imagine a marketing landscape without Meta. And yet, I'm doing a lot of research in order to cut the cord. There is no perfect answer yet for those of us who want to grow new interest in our art. Modern art selling is hand-in-glove with Meta's free platform; it's where buyers go to authenticate your business and develop a relationship with you. I look to Art Helper for community, but Meta for growth. In a post-Meta art-selling landscape, my current thinking is that we will be required to go back to the analog methods...what? Print advertising? Mailing postcards to prospects? Interviews. Art shows and fairs, of course. Email, of course. What else? Can we develop a vision together?

Does Arthelper offer copyright protection like the ASF websites do? I have posted plenty of artwork here beyond ASF and knowing that Arthelper is copyright protected would prevent a huge amount of extra work to bring these paintings into ASF simply for the copyright.

Yes, this has concerned me. To the first question, I would say worried. It has made me uncomfortable with staying with these platforms. I have been thinking about not using social media. I like my website and I can send out emails to those who come to my website. So far, my sales have come through my warm market of connections rather than through social media. I am unsure how to protect myself through social media. Since I am still in the developing phase of understanding marketing I can easily step away from Meta and apply what I am learning about marketing through real contacts with people in my area. I haven't decided yet, but I would like to hear from others.

I'm curious if our art is protected if we use art helper to schedule our posts to all things meta. Are protected from scarping of our art or do we need to use Glaze and schedule our posts through somewhere else? Also are our websites with ASF protected from scraping by AI?

Thank you!
PS I'm extremely angry that Meta thinks they have the right to steall our work

Thanks for bringing this up, Indra!

As a Fine Art photographer, I find these proposed changes quite concerning, particularly the possibility of Meta accessing content from independent artists' websites.

There is a significant difference between sharing selected photographs on Instagram or Facebook for marketing purposes and potentially allowing a platform to collect content from an entire art website.

My photography website is where I present and sell my original work. I believe artists should retain control over how their images are used, especially when it comes to AI training.

For now, I don't plan to leave Instagram or Facebook, as both platforms are important for connecting with people who appreciate photography. However, I will be paying much closer attention to Meta's terms and the options available to protect my work.

I'm glad to see that the proposed changes have been postponed and that artists and publishers are speaking up.

It will be interesting to see how Meta responds to these concerns.

Thank you for starting this off, Indra! I really like the way you framed it above.

Two things I want to add quickly. Meta says they are studying the feedback, and they moved the date back, but the date it is supposed to go into effect now is November 20. I remain hopeful the protests and activist actions (proposed Insta blackout for those who can afford to from Oct. 31- Nov. 5 I believe) will have a persuasive effect.

As you say, this only affects Business accounts (Instagram, Pages on FB, and I have heard also, Threads, which is also owned by Meta) which is what most of us have. I also post to the Threads Topic "Photographers of Threads" and there is discussion in those spaces too.

Personal accounts are supposed to be exempt, but I suspect that is coming too, except that the hue and cry would be much louder if they rolled it all out en masse. That said, think about what this means for the New York Times, for instance. I am connected with a lot of journalist and journalism accounts. They are talking about pulling down all news content links from the Meta platforms (sort of like what happens in Canada). Meta's blanket claim to hoover up all linked business sites would include all of the New York Times, with archives going back more than 100 years.

Everybody online finds a lot of wiggle room in their removal of the term, "train," meaning they hoover everything up and nobody really knows what sorts it. I have concerns about facial recognition software being used in surveillance on the Meta platform as well.

Another poster brought up a legal angle in the Meta claim that when you sign up for the account, you sign away your AI-opt-out rights for anything you posted IN THE PAST and IN THE FUTURE. They are claiming the right to have already scanned past things posted.

Since they are able to offer EU and UK opt-out options, people in California, which has a similar law, believe they should also have an opt-out provision.

But the legal angle brought up was specifically for GALLERY OWNERS, who collect and curate the work of any number of artists (I have three other artist collections on my Boese Galleries site). They say Meta should not be able to claim blanket rights of AI-ingestion for all individual artists who are collectively being promoted by a business or gallery.

I will do a second post in this thread with some links to resources I've found in following the discussions about this online. Some things may get a little technical, and I know that not everyone is technical or wants to read about wonky details!

Legal actions challenging this have to be on the table somewhere, so watch for class action suits, as that might be something to become part of.

Unfortunately, the regulations for Ai is not even present right now which gives room for unrestricted developemt. I don't like it one bit. I suggest Artstorefronts, as a marketing business for artist, can put in some kind of petition that if Meta follows through on this new development it will seriously damage the business. I guess the more people and businesses voice their concern it has more chances to be taken serious.

I have heard that Carney wants to develope their own Ai in Canada to restrict the monopoly that the US tech oligarchs have worlwide.

OK, here's a post with some technical details that artists are exploring to combat Meta's over-broad blanket claim to be able to INGEST all business-based user-created visual content (originally to TRAIN, but now more vague) to become part of their frontier AI development. The real overreach also applies to BUSINESS LINKS posted on Meta, claiming that gives permission for their AI crawlers to crawl and ingest all linked business site content.

So the first attempt to stop this is crawler etiquette on web sites you OWN, your property, your domain. This is done in two primary ways. The easiest one is to edit your site's robots.txt file to basically tell crawlers, NOFOLLOW. Kind of like a KEEP OUT sign!

The BEST RESOURCE I found on what to put in your Robots.txt file is a page for Romance Writers! ;-) Check it out!

https://closeddoorromance.com/block-meta-ai-crawler/

She has instructions for finding your robots.txt file on all different platforms too, like WordPress and Shopify. Here's the gist of what she says:

I spent this afternoon adding some protections to my website, and I want to show you how to do the same. It took me about 10 minutes, and that included a couple of wrong turns I’ll warn you about.

These steps aren’t a guarantee that AI companies can never access your content, but they can help limit access by known AI crawlers.

The short version

Meta says you can still keep its AI bot out with a little file called robots.txt. It’s basically a sign on your website’s front door that says which bots are allowed in. The catch is that it’s a polite request, not a lock, and some legal experts think Meta could argue its new terms override it.

So I did two things: I put up the sign, and then where I could, I actually locked the door.

The sign is these two lines:

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

That’s the name of Meta’s AI training bot, and “Disallow: /” means “stay out of everything.” I also blocked a few other big AI training bots while I was in there. If you want to do the same, add these too:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /

Don’t worry, none of these affect Google search. Google-Extended sounds scary, but it only covers Google’s AI training, not whether people can find you on Google.

Now here’s where to put those lines, depending on what your site runs on."

OK, I'll do another post with some more links.