Twitter was considered a necessary app for artists. Tips and tricks for boosting your likeability and followability on Twitter specifically are littered everywhere if you search. For artists, Twitter and Instagram represented an easy way to network and create a digital gallery at the same time. Now, it’s a mess, and artists are advising each other to leave and head somewhere else, even smaller platforms like BlueSky or Mastodon, because the website Twitter turned into is sucha bad deal for artists.
The first and most obvious slight was verification. Under the new checkmark rule, other people can pretend to be basically anyone – someone could dress their account up to look like you, start posting your art as you, and might get stopped… eventually… if X’s overstressed moderation team gets around to looking at the case. People had to fight tooth and nail to get X (which is an official method of communication for the White House, remember!) to do something to make the difference between the real people, politicians, companies, etc. and the fakers obvious, something X only seemed really interested in fixing once Eli Lilly (a large pharmaceuticals company) took a break from posting after having to clarify they wouldn’t be giving away insulin, a bad look for everyone involved.
The second was when Grok (X’s built in generative content maker) started offering to “remix” a posted piece of art with AI, and sometimes even claiming credit (a little tag saying ‘made with AI’ at the bottom of the picture) when it had nothing to do with the creation of the art. Imagine an automated tagging system showing up one day and claiming it personally made the digital painting you’ve been working on for at least five hours, and there’s no way to remove it. That would be insulting to you, right? And might confuse your fans, right?
Why even offer that feature in the first place? It’s one thing to have a program where people can go say, “make me art of a cat drinking milk from a saucer,” for example. The art may be stripped from basically every corner of the internet and then blended together to make a piece of art with the requested features, but the initial request was the requestor’s idea. To have Grok offer this feature on completed works of art and say, “hey you! Remix this please!” is a totally different thing. AI ‘filters’ that change the style of a picture have been around for a minute, yes – they don’t generally walk around and offer to change up any picture you see on your Twitter feed. To slap an unremovable “remix this!” button at the bottom of any piece of art is insulting to the artist, yes, and it’s also just a weird thing to do, an obvious novelty tacked onto a site struggling to pay it’s bills now that the advertisers are reluctant to engage with it. Who asked for this? Who wanted that feature for reasons besides “show off how cool AI is” or “stick it to the snobby artists who don’t want their work remixed without their permission”?
A general lack of advertising, new algorithms for posts, and a site that’s struggling to keep all the plates spinning has made X better for people posting text, but worse for almost everyone else.
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