I still remember some idiot who actually followed me, reposting one of my old fashion photos from the mid-2000s and passing it off as their own. Low-res, sure, but undeniably mine. They didn’t even realise I was the one who took it. No snide theft, no calculated heist—just pure, brain-dead oblivion. I didn't blast them. I just dropped a quiet comment. They panicked and deleted their entire account.
It wasn’t a one-off, either. A blog post I wrote once showed up weeks later, almost word-for-word, in a mainstream newspaper under someone else’s fucking byline. After that, I tapped out. I shifted the narrative, pulled back, and made myself a hell of a lot harder to find.
Fast forward to now, and I’m watching the exact same dumpster fire spin again—only louder, faster, and dripping with hysterical rage.
Artists are fleeing from one platform to another, screaming bloody murder about AI theft and exploitation, while simultaneously chucking their latest work straight into the feed without a second thought. Sharing drafts. Sharing poems. Sharing every half-baked idea they have.
The outrage is real, but so is the fucking hypocrisy.
We scream into the void about machines being trained on our work, about tech corporations stealing our style, our tone, and our aesthetic DNA. But does the oversharing stop? No. It’s a compulsive itch. Bluesky, Instagram, Substack—it’s all just a different window in the exact same burning house.
And let’s drop the holy-artisan act for a second: this isn't just Big Tech screwing us. The nastier truth is that artists steal from each other. We always have. The digital age just made it frictionless. No gatekeepers, sure, but no shields either. No pay. No memory. It’s like the last twenty years taught us fuck all.
And still, we keep posting.
This isn't a whiny takedown; it’s a reality check. A reckoning with our own vanity, our hunger, and the slow, pathetic collapse of artistic ownership in an age where everything is algorithmic. It’s about our addiction to validation loops and the steep price of being "seen." It’s about what happens to art when it stops existing to be felt and starts existing merely to be streamed.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s a demand to shut the fuck up and stop.
Stop Performing Your Drafts
We didn’t used to need a fucking audience for every single thought. Not like this. Not for the rough sketches, the dead-end drafts, the scrawled margin notes, or the blurry photos taken out of a train window. Those things used to stay in sketchbooks, darkroom trays, and private hard drives—never intended for anyone else's eyes.
Then came the friend button. Then the fucking like button.
Back in the early days of Facebook—before the algorithms turned it into a digital panopticon—sharing actually felt like something. A nod between people. A bit of mutual curiosity. But it didn't take long for tech lords to code dopamine straight into the bloodstream of the feed.
Every post became a performance.
Every image became a product.
Every hit of engagement became a micro-dose of self-worth.
Creatives are absolute suckers for this. We work alone. We’re riddled with self-doubt. We desperately want resonance. The platforms knew it, exploited it, and engineered an addiction out of it.
Sherry Turkle called it "being alone together." Jaron Lanier pegged it as a marketplace where you are the commodity. Byung-Chul Han laid it out cold: the transparency we thought we wanted just became a tool for self-surveillance. What people call "visibility" now is just naked exposure with a better marketing spin.
What used to be an occasional showcase is now a reflexive twitch. You’re an artist? Cool. Where’s your portfolio, your daily reel, your process shot, your unboxing video, your teaser, your face?
Fuck off. Art takes time. Or at least, it should. Some ideas need years to surface; others should rot quietly in a drawer. But the machine demands instant gratification and high gloss all at once. Be perfect. Be authentic. Be constant.
Every post is an exhausting performance of existence. Every silence is treated as a career failure. No wonder everyone is burnt out.
But worse than the burnout is the erosion. The erosion of instinct, of risk, of letting an idea sit in the dark while you figure out what the fuck it actually is. When you throw a half-finished poem to the crowd for instant validation, is it even yours anymore? Or does it already belong to the algorithm and the silent mob?
We aren't posting for community. We’re posting for the faint chance of being noticed. And if you’re telling yourself you’re "just sharing for yourself"—cut the bullshit. If you were truly doing it for yourself, it wouldn't be on the internet.
The Unpaid Laborers of the Machine Age
Let’s be brutally clear: these platforms aren't neutral pinboards. They don't just host your content; they harvest it.
Every brushstroke, caption, and raw 3 a.m. brain-dump you uploaded thinking nobody cared? It’s all been sucked up. We didn’t just help build the web—we trained the fucking monster that's eating us alive.
Generative AI systems aren't creative. They’re composite parasites. They chop up and remix whatever’s been fed into them. A painting you meant for a gallery ends up mashed into Midjourney. A paragraph written for a tight-knit circle becomes the training data for a chatbot's sarcastic tone. You post a poem, and six months later a synthetic clone of your voice reads a bastardized version of it back to you in an ad.
No consent. No ownership. No credit.
The rage against AI scraping is completely justified, but let’s stop pretending it’s purely a tech issue. It’s a cultural failure. We made ourselves infinitely mineable because we couldn't stop feeding the feed.
Look at the trainwreck over at DeviantArt. People who spent a decade building portfolios woke up to find their style cloned by generative tools in the most grotesque ways imaginable. They put up protest banners, but it was already too late—the model had digested their life's work and wiped its mouth. Reddit closed off its API because LLMs were gorging on human conversation. Tumblr artists panicked and ran. Yet the cycle never changes: protest, migrate, overshare, regret.
Now writers are pouring everything into Substack and Bluesky thinking it’s a cozy, safe haven. It’s an illusion. The content is public. The bots are crawling. Nothing online is "just for your followers."
When OpenAI quietly admitted in 2023 that its training data sucked up publicly available books, blogs, and poetry without licensing, the line between inspiration and ingestion wasn't just blurred—it was erased entirely.
We are unpaid teachers in a classroom we never asked to join, training machines, giant platforms, and shameless peers with bigger followings who know how to turn your leak into their product launch. The system isn't broken. It’s working exactly as designed. And our relentless need for attention is the fuel.
Friendly Fire and the Collapse of the Commons
Theft doesn’t always come with a corporate logo attached. Sometimes it comes with a friendly DM, a follow, and a string of fire emojis. Then, weeks later, your exact visual metaphor or phrasing gets echoed back to you by someone else, stripped of its origins.
This is the theft nobody likes to talk about: peer-to-peer. The ambient, osmotic leeching that makes you question your own sanity. Did I write that? Didn't I post that exact concept last spring?
It’s hard to call out because it’s rarely a planned heist. Someone absorbs your work while doomscrolling, forgets where they saw it, and re-digests it into something that feels "original" to them.
In the analogue days, friction saved us. If you read a zine or saw a local gig, you remembered the source. But in the infinite scroll of the feed, everything is tossed into the same lukewarm soup. Meaning gets flattened. Authorship gets erased. And whoever has the biggest platform automatically becomes the "creator."
I’ve lived it. Beyond the fashion photo I had to chase down, I’ve seen my written work reincarnated in mainstream articles—paragraphs lifted almost verbatim, same argument, different name at the top. It’s not legally actionable; it’s just soul-eroding. There’s no algorithm coming to restore context or hand out justice.
This is the friendly fire of the digital age, built on our stupid assumption of good faith. We wanted to believe in community, but the reality is simple: everyone is fucking starving. Starving for content, for visibility, for a break. And if your work provides a stepping stone for someone else to climb? Too bad. That’s the game.
Influence is fine. Borrowing, remixing, and responding are as old as art itself. But there is a massive line between dialogue and extraction.
The real tragedy here is that we stopped building actual creative commons and settled for algorithmic feeds instead. A commons requires care, respect, and memory. A feed just burns through content for engagement, rewarding whoever posts first and loudest.
Theft doesn't need bad intent anymore. It just needs a lack of discipline, a lot of speed, and an audience that doesn't give a shit who made it first.
— A.N.
