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Member only guide to the Australian book industry.
MIN READ
Illustrator Mimi Purnell shares her perspective on Meta’s new AI rules and the ultimatum they present to Australian illustrators.
When Meta announced that it was going to use public posts from Facebook and Instagram to train its new AI tools, the response from the art community sat somewhere between anger and dismay, but definitely closer to anger.
With no option for Australians to opt out of the new terms – unlike in the EU and UK where there are stricter privacy laws – and already weary from the fear of being replaced by existing generative AI tools, illustrators using Instagram to market their work are given an ultimatum: accept the new terms, or stop using Instagram.
Some artists have already left the platform or just stopped posting new content, but for most of us the decision isn’t a simple one.
It’s difficult for me to overstate the professional opportunities that have come from sharing my illustration work on Instagram. In fact, my entire art career was seeded on the platform. It’s a place for publishers, agents, and authors to find illustrators to hire; it’s a place for artists to sell their work directly to customers; and it’s a place for artists to connect with each other and build community.
My first publisher found me on Instagram, so did my first customer, and so did 168,000 other people.
And now I, like my colleagues, am being forced to decide whether to keep using this social media platform for all of its community benefits but with the thorn in my side of generative AI being trained on everything I produce, or to simply abandon everything I’ve worked so hard to build. Not an easy call to make.
Generative AI has always been a sore point for illustrators because it feels like a direct threat to our skillset and most models seem to be trained on cloudy ethical grounds. It’s certainly not something that we want our art to be fed into without being asked first. On a creative level it feels like the antithesis of everything an illustrator does. We spend years learning how to express our human experience and observations of the world – refining our styles to tell personal stories – so to distil that down to a data model that can instantly reproduce all of our creative skills feels impersonal and deeply unhuman. It removes the spirit from illustration, and most human illustrators don’t like that. Nor, I suspect, do the people who love and value art.
That’s not to say that AI itself is bad; I actually think that generative AI has some incredible uses and huge potential when models are trained in ethical ways. But surely everyone should have the opportunity to opt-out of having their images used in bulk to teach an AI how to replicate what they do.
Data from as far back as 2007 is reportedly being used by Meta to train their AI models, so the hundreds of illustrations that I’ve posted to Instagram have likely been swept up by them already. If I had known when I started posting in 2020 that the privacy policy that applied to those illustrations could be retroactively changed in this way, would I have still made my account? It’s a bit too late to think about that now. If Meta had asked me before they updated their terms if I wanted to contribute to training their AI models, I would have said no, thank you.
I personally haven’t yet decided whether to continue posting on Instagram long-term or not. It’s a huge network for a professional illustrator to give up, and it almost feels pointless to leave now, but it’s hard to continue posting as normal without being very aware that everything I share is available for Meta to use as they wish and is effectively helping them build their business with AI tools, using creative labour they’ve never paid for.
Perhaps it’s easy to forget that what we post on our social media accounts isn’t fully controlled by us, and that posting anything publicly comes with risks and at the mercy of the platforms we use. Professional creatives know that it’s difficult to protect our work from being unfairly used at the best of times, and Meta’s announcement feels like another reminder of that.
I wonder what future there can be for Australian creative careers without adequate protection against big tech platforms using our own work to displace us. Without regulation, it doesn’t feel like a particularly bright path for the budding artist who will be forced to hand over their creative talents to the platforms they need to market themselves.
At the end of the day, illustrators will keep illustrating no matter what happens with generative AI, because AI can’t replace human connection or experience and that is at the very heart of what we do.
Mimi Purnell is an illustrator and content creator with a love for illustrating heartwarming characters and vibrant environments. She has illustrated several Australian picture books including The Love That Grew and Worms Are Our Friends, and is usually illustrating while she travels around Australia and overseas. When she isn’t illustrating books Mimi teaches art to beginner illustrators online.
www.mimimooillustration.com
