Baby Elon Musk. shrimp Jesus. The Titanic Collides With an iceberg salad. Social media is saturated with AI slop, often ridiculous and sometimes ridiculous disturbing Images, videos or words that were created with generative artificial intelligence.
While a certain AI slop is fake, much is not much. I remember the first time that Ai Hood divided me. It was a striking video that I saw on Instagram from a couple Snowy owls In the Arctic with a brood of six small chicks. I am amazed by the scene and I immediately shared it with my wife. Your answer was: “It can't be real?!”
It wasn't. A brief review of the poster, Yourself -The over 230,000 followers on the platform has revealed that the video was actually generated. I felt deceptive, networked and ultimately suspicious of any other picture that I saw online from this moment.
I used to use Instagram to follow the creator and share my own photos of nature and wild animals – you know, pictures that I took with an actual camera with my actual human hands. But lately scrolling through my feed can be seen less and more to see. This is certainly irritating, but if AI images appear real, you can also cause serious damage.
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All of this forced me to look for an alternative. It turns out that I am not alone.
“The most common feedback we hear is that people feel overwhelmed by ai-generated images, flood the mainstream platforms,” says Jingna Zhang, founder of Cara, a decentralized social media app for artists, to TNW.
Unfortunately, it is a problem that is probably much worse before it gets better.
Meta opens the KI locks
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has hugging AI on his platforms, scrapped FactsAnd even plans to enable bots to open theirs own accounts. And while Meta started lettering AI-generated content in the past year, his algorithms were shown Incorrectly labeled real pictures as a bot-made and vice versa. The platform also made it very easy Deactivate the label.
But the cherry on the shit cake is that Meta uses openly Public contributions to the training of his algorithms. Although Most European users can unsubscribe because they are protected by data protection laws, META automatically decided in all user accounts by default. AI algorithms quickly improves through all this free data – – improves quickly – injured Artist and creator. It is as if you are learning valuable skills from a friend, using these skills to found a company together and then cut them out of the advantages – Ringle all bellsSugar?
Ai Slop, offered accounts, little to no moderation – it is part of what the writer Cory Doctorow has shaped.ENSHITITICATION”Of the Internet. But while many have only accepted the new reality, some creators are looking for refuge in safer corners of the Internet.
Cara was one of the beneficiaries. When Meta announced plans for the training of AI models for user content, the app's user base grew from 40,000 to 650,000 users in a week.
“She [artists] I was looking for a place where you can still have a real connection between humans and people in art and online communities, and so they found Cara, ”says Zhang.
Put artists in the first place
Zhang argues that new rules for online protection are essential.
“We believe that the rampant ethics and data will deal with privacy around them [AI] Data records urgently need to be solved through regulations, and governments should expressly clarify their positions or adopt invoices in order to protect artists and all persons from such an unauthorized use, ”says Zhang.
It is a problem that Zhang, who is an award -winning Singaporian photographer, is only too well white. She won a pioneering appeal procedure In a Luxembourg court last year, a painter who copied one of her photos. She is too To sue Google For alleged use of your photos to train his KI model in the imogen without consent, and in a similar case against Midjourney, Stability AI, Runway AI and Deviantart.
Zhang started Cara in 2023 as a sanctuary for artists who wanted to share and connect them. The voluntary organization has both a website and a mobile app. Like Instagram, users can host a portfolio of work in their profile, publish pictures, deal with others through likes and comments and create a supporter. She You also have a feed in which you can publish updates, similar to X or Bluesky. The platform currently has 1 million users.
However, Cara's large sales argument is his guidelines for AI. By default, all users are automatically stored by AI bot scraping, says the company. Cara also does not organize generative AI content on the platform and uses a combination of automated detection and human moderation to keep the website clean.
For Zhang, bots on the platform is not only about the piracy of the users, but also about the protection of art itself. “What makes art meaningful is to know that a real person has given time from her life to improve a craft, practice, build up skills and express yourself so much that you have created something through art,” she says.
So how is it compared to Instagram? Well, my first impressions are good. The app works smoothly, has a similar layout to other social media that I used and has content that is generally of high quality. Above all, I can relax and take off my bot spotting glasses because I know that all works of art have been created by people.
However, Cara is clearly a place for artists – sketch, painter, graphic designer and the like – not for photographers. For this we tried another app – pixelfed.
Not perfect, but not Instagram
Pixelfed was launched by the Canadian developer Daniel Supernault and is an open, decentralized photo-sharing platform similar to Instagram, but without ads or algorithms. As with Cara, the content of ai-generated content is prohibited.
The server rules of pixelfed when registering
Similar to Instagram, users can share and discover photos and videos with pixelfed fed and send direct messages. However, the feed is chronological – contributions are displayed in the exact order in which they were published. As with Instagram before 2016, when it was converted to an algorithm-based feed, which shows you the content that you consider to be a sight.
Although Pixelfed only has 700,000 users on the platform, Pixelf is already organizing a lot of great photography. It feels raw and uneasy, and the advertising-free, with AI-free experience, enables you to concentrate on the content.
The pixelfed feed
Pixelfed runs on Activitypub, an open protocol for social networks of developed by of Tim Berners-Lee World Wide Web Consortium.
Activitypub also moves other apps such as microblogging site mastodon – founded by the German developer Eugen Rochko – and YouTube alternative peertube. Together they are part of the FediveA decentralized network with which users can pursue, share and interact different apps – similar to the work between Mail and Outlook.
The user base of Pixelfed quickly grew after the publication of his app on iOS and Android in January. It was for a short time after the start most downloaded Social app on Google Play in the USA and France.
With Supernawult, the sole developer and the rise of traffic, there are inevitably some mistakes. On the one hand, the back button on my phone did not work when using the app on Android, which meant that I had to grab the upper left to use the in-app button. The app also feels a little slowly.
Supernault has just collected over 90,000 US dollars via Kickstarter, so that he could help him iron out some of the bugs or maybe even hire one or two other developers.
But as one Reddit The user stops it: “People don't move because it is perfect, but because it is not Instagram (I don't think anyone has to explain at this time). If you stay on Instagram, it will not affect your values[,] Don't take the step. ”
So long, Instagram, I'm gone. Dear friends, will you join me?
