I was recently ordering food delivery, and a local restaurant replaced most of their image-free menu items with AI generated photos. (Some of their items always had real photos, but most didn’t until the AI photos were added)
I ordered from somewhere else and sent the first restaurant an email that I didn’t order from them due to the AI images of the food.
Also, fuck Thuisbezorgd for adding AI photo generation. I would have not ordered anything but it was already late and the family was hungry.
I’m sorry. I wholeheartedly agree with the article, but this bit:
I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.
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You post something in public, it is public. You post knowing others might do things you don’t like with it; that’s the bargain. Especially on social media.
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Instagrams owns you. They own every ounce, every dimension of your content on the platform; they can do whatever TF they want, and you have zero legal recourse.
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No one made you use Google search instead of one of many alternatives, including alt Google frontends.
The fundamental issue here is that people, apparently even journalists, still see these Big Tech platforms as benevolent public squares where they have rights. And fairness. That is an illusion, and this is kind of thing keeps happening because everyone believes the lie.
And they don’t bother to even look for alternatives.
Are they really gonna keep getting surprised when platforms keep squeezing them, yet the platforms don’t stop because no one will leave anyway?
I don’t agree. Yes, under our current rules, posting things in public means people can do things you might not like with your work. And technically you agreed to Instagram’s BS when you made an account. But for all practical purposes, the rules changed after the fact for most people.
Someone who made their Facebook account in 2009 couldn’t reasonably have guessed that their posts might be used to train misinformation machines that would be forced into everything in 2026. Most people could have conceived of strangers looking at their photos and maybe even photoshopping them, but could never have conceived of gen AI in its current form until it arrived. Bloggers could have conceived of people plagiarizing them or taking their words out of context, but not of having their own past work used to feed tools designed to replace most of their future work opportunities while also spreading hallucinations. And some people might have made very different choices if they’d known, myself included. No one gave informed consent for all that data to be used for LLM training, because no one could have imagined what they were consenting to. Even now that we can, we’re being held hostage in a sense. You can’t meaningfully opt out of AI scraping without giving up participation in society, not when leaked private data and copyrighted works end up being used for AI training too.
As for looking for alternatives, it’s true that you can leave Instagram and use a different search engine. But there are limits. Most people are stuck with whatever software their job or school forces on them, even if they use alternatives in their personal lives. I can’t just tell my boss I’ll no longer be using Google collaboration tools or Microsoft products. I can recommend alternatives, but I don’t have the power to make the entire organization switch, especially when said boss actually likes AI. And almost every other office job in my country will likely require using the same software.
You’re right that we should never have seen big tech as a benevolent public square. You’re right that from a legal perspective, this person has no grounds for complaining about Instagram. But from a human perspective, they do. I think it’s quite reasonable to be upset that anyone who ever posted anything publicly for other humans to appreciate has been effectively forced to contribute to gen AI training. I think it’s reasonable to be frustrated that many of the common collaboration tools most of us are forced to use (for now, at least) have had AI stuffed into them. In a better society, we’d be able to share things publicly with other humans while opting out of tech we find harmful.
brucethemoose described what is wrong about common people, more than what is right about the platforms.
You post something in public, it is public. You post knowing others might do things you don’t like with it; that’s the bargain. Especially on social media.
And people act like I am strange for not wanting my fucking personal ID tied to every online account!
It’s actually a bit infuriating after a decade of tech savvy people screaming that any data given to these corporations was eventually going to be used for something they wouldn’t like. This isn’t some unforseen consequence.
The problem is that we have allowed them to be benevolent monopolies and now that they control practically the entire market in their respective spaces they are not so benevolent any more. Nobody cared to choose a different search engine because google just worked, nobody bought things from a different website because amazon was fast and had everything. Now google search is just a way to sell me an ad for the thing I’m looking for and Amazon is just a way to sell me an ad for the chinese manufacturer who paid them off to push their results to the top or in some cases it’s their own competing product.
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I think all Ai content on the web or on YouTube is trash and has no value. But I use chat gpt daily to ask questions and get answers quickly. That part is good. The rest is awful.
I started asking it for recepies in the last month or so, and it’s been very useful for giving new recepies and making it easier to try new dishes. Before this I used to rotate the same 20 recepies all the time. Got very boring.
You’re gonna get downvoted to hell - but may I suggest use a better search engine and find good websites to bookmark, like we’ve done for 25+ years already, instead of destroying the planet and handing over everything to authoritarian billionaires?
Kagi. Ecosia. Searxng. hell, DDG.
Kagi has an AWESOME recipes feature. Well worth the $5 a month I pay. Kagi honestly improved my life quality way more than I Imagined.
Sure, if you’ve been a normie using chrome with no adblock and google for searching, the gibbity is going to look better to you. Get educated and learn of alternatives and you’ll see how shitty the gibbity is. Not to mention, you have maybe a year or two before you’ll need a subscription for any tokens to get those recipes that gibbity blatantly stole with 0 repercussions, because the compute cost is through the roof. Just don’t.
Thank you for the recommendations