When the AI bots scrub your website.

Hey, guess what lovely and amazing things AI is providing for us? Unprecedented ability to litigate against the little guy!

I recently received a copyright infringement notice from a Canadian company for an old blog image from many many moons ago. An honest mistake. Turns out, AI is being used to hunt copyright infringement on any and all images - no matter how long ago. They are accessing all online folders. Even ones that are private. Pulling up the documents and scrubbing them for data. So FUN!

In my case, I thought the image was fair use. I am currently fighting it but warning all small artists and business owners of the relentless and unsavory predatory practices of online usage rights. As an artist, I am keenly aware of copyright law and laughed at the image that is landing me in trouble. It’s of the writers strike and the blog was about fighting the big machines. Oh, the irony. I grabbed it off a royalty free site and turns out the photographer ended up selling it to AP. But because it was so many moons ago. I can not find anything to prove it.

So beware. AI is scrubbing websites and third part companies are targeting small peoples with large threats. Luckily, I have lots of friends who are lawyers and we are on it.

I am all for artists getting money for their work. I am one! But this seems predatory beyond a warning to take something down.

I have deleted all blogs and images that I can not clearly provide rights documents for - for the 7 readers that read them. LOL. Thanks mom and grandma.

That includes anything from Creative Commons and Public Domain. I just don’t want to trouble. It’s hard enough to keep a record of everything in perpetuity. As an artist myself, I’ve always been careful to source images ethically. But it seems silly to now have to carry licenses for websites for a few decades.

This site is for my personal portfolio. A modern requirement of being an artist. It is poorly maintained, has little traffic and mostly gets me lots of spam emails. I never have time to work on myself. Something I am hoping to improve.

So cheers to the bots. Here is my middle finger, I have copyright to use it. Oh, and I took the images below. Just in case you were wondering.