"For years, creatives have been told the same thing: put everything online, post constantly, build a brand, grow an audience.

And then we centralized all of culture onto, like… three websites.

Three massive platforms where artists uploaded their personalities, faces, voices, writing, humor, emotional lives, and intellectual property. Not because we were naïve, but because opting out meant professional invisibility.

And now all of that material has been mass-scraped, automated, repackaged, and fed into systems designed to imitate the very people who were told they had to participate in order to survive.

I think that’s the real tragedy for artists: there was no meaningful way to refuse."

By Tova, taken from "#AI Stole My Face And Made Me A Digital Flesh Puppet" https://cheftova.substack.com/p/ai-stole-my-face-and-made-me-a-digital

I can't wait for our grandkids to be like "wait, you let an advertising company masquerading as a search company run essential services and create a mobile phone OS? Because you thought Microsoft was evil? Dang."

#google

reading: "On Google declaring war on the Web"
https://tante.cc/2026/05/20/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/

and what Google think you'll be willing suffer: "Ad Infini­tum"
https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum

never too late to degoog!