If You Can’t Beat Them, Try Harder?

Remember last year when I said I’d be blogging more and using social media less? Ha, well we see how that panned out so far. But I saw a post this morning that motivated me to blog again, and had me feeling some regret that I hadn’t been more diligent with it.

The post I saw was from WIRED, and shared that META had opted all public profiles in on the option to allow AI generations of posts and reels. I got this sinking feeling imagining AI grabbing the art I’d worked so hard on without my knowing. And then I got another sinking feeling imagining AI grabbing images of ME. And then I read the comments I fully started spiraling. Does toggling that setting really do anything? Is it the same as posting a black square and hoping police brutality will just stop?

This past year I’d taken an, “If you can’t beat them, join them” approach to Instagram. It’s the easiest way to get my work out there, see and communicate with other artists, stay up to date, whatever. Easiest because I’ve had Instagram since college. And yes I have to scroll through a lot of doom and gloom coded misinformation, but there’s also some really funny content. It felt like it was balancing out. But this morning, seeing that post, it just isn’t sitting right with me anymore.

I took my spiral into the bathroom so I could do my morning routine and stare devastatingly at myself in the mirror while having this latest existential crisis. I guess it turned into a sort of pep talk. That’s when the “if you can’t beat them, join them” phrase came to mind. I remembered as a kid I never liked that phrase. I thought it seemed like a cop-out. Like something adults said when they’d given up. I remembered thinking, “they probably didn’t try hard enough to beat them.”

So I’m going to try a little harder. I know I can’t beat social media, but I don’t want to rely on it so much either. Plus I pay for this website so I really should be using it more. Poor thing doesn’t even have all my recent work yet. Ironically I’ll post about THIS on instagram in the hopes that people see it and come read it.