Hey folks! There’s a cool sale at Schoolism right now for this Valentines weekend! Schoolism is an incredible collection of online art courses taught by industry professionals! Its a fantastic learning resource for beginners to professionals! Check out more here 👇 schoolism.com

Tech executives have finally amassed their ultimate, long dreamed-of power: to summarily fire anyone who speaks ill of their desire to have sex with robots

More reports of Gmail turning over email content to ICE are coming out now. techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/g...

Posts from @weratedogs.com continue not to disappoint.

It's my BIRTHDAY~! And in the age honored tradition of social media I humbly request a repost of my artwork~!

A rant. I (Ben) have multiple pending deadlines, but am very frustrated tonight. I need to rant about how awful paywalled magazines/news sites are. Why? Because their paywalls are trivial to break. Paywalls built using javascript actually download the full article, then put up a wall to block it.

Another favor to ask on a research project. We're wrapping up a large project on AI music. We need folks to participate in a short 10 min quiz to test your ability to distinguish between AI music & human music. Especially looking for help from musicians! uchicago.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

No worries. We get offers every day. If we wanted the $$$ we would have taken up one of those offers years ago.

For better or (mostly) for worse, 2025 is almost over. For all the human creatives out there, artists, writers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, and so many more, thank you for your perseverance and courage. Happy to announce: ETCH (Ethnical Technology and Computing for Humanity), a nonprofit.

@holyempresskira.bsky.social Another post from March 2025 trying to remind folks about what img2img is.

Steve isn’t here anymore, but he always posted this picture on Hanukkah so I thought we could carry on his tradition and remember him.

Karla said it so well. I (Ben) was thrilled to testify on the technical side, demonstrating with algorithms, real code and benchmarks on why data privacy is possible at scale. Sharing that room with Danny Lin, Jason George, and so so many talented and skilled creatives was a genuine honor.

Still so excited for everyone who showed up to this yesterday! It was stunning to see a sea of creatives overwhelm that tiny hearing. We had an overflow room of artists and the line for 30 second public commentary literally had to be cut off! You made a huge difference yesterday. Thank you!

Much needed updates. 1. Hemlock was presented at CCS in Oct. We are working on releasing a usable tool in coming weeks. 2. Our next paper is peer-reviewed & accepted by USENIX Security 2026. It is a Model Provenance tool that computes "feature fingerprints" from genAI image models.

SHOW UP TO TESTIFY MONDAY! (12/08/2025) Stanford Paul Brest Hall - 10am RSVP here: bit.ly/44lRMsX #CreateDontScrape #SupportHumanArtists #AB412 #March2Testify

How is AI *really* impacting jobs? Henley Chiu, the CTO of Revealera, a jobs data analysis firm, analyzed 180 million jobs listings in 2024 and 2025, in an effort to find out. Chiu found an: -8% drop in all jobs postings -~30% drop in art, photography, writing jobs -22% drop in journalism jobs

We don’t use generative AI at Strange Scaffold and I can confirm that a *lot* of other studios are not—whether indie or AAA. Get outta here with this normalization bullshit.

My friend @shofcoker.bsky.social and his team just launched a kickstarter for their indie animated film, Crocodile Dance—please pledge or share. This needs to get made!

We rarely post news stories, but this is a significant and impactful story from @alexreisner.bsky.social @ the atlantic, detailing just how Common Crawl is scraping the internet for AI companies and accepting takedown requests but doing nothing: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Heather's new TED talk on AI and human identity, is now online. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJZ...

“I think they are a profoundly antisocial technology that should be rejected in every way possible,” said Gilliard. “Their very existence is toxic to the social fabric.” @hypervisible.blacksky.app www.theverge.com/tech/807834/...

There's been endless talk about an AI bubble, but less about exactly how, why, and how much it's a bubble. So I turned to the framework put forward by scholars Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch, authors of "Bubbles and Crashes," for assessing tech bubbles. Spoiler: On a scale of 1 to 8, AI is an 8

This week I'll be presenting at Lightbox Expo in GenAI/Glaze panel. Come hear about latest tools and ways to protect your work against genAI, recent court case outcomes, and ongoing AI legislation efforts. I also will bring ~500 invites for webglaze for any panel attendees. Friday 2:30PM Ballroom G

So for-profit AI companies have trained on the world's largest collaborative volunteer project and a precious free resource, to make money for their for-profit enterprises. They have crushed traffic to the volunteer project, starving it of donors and volunteers www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

after millions of views and shares of my Portland Frog art. (thank you all🙏🏾) I got requests to highlight priests, and chickens, and Chicagoans, and T-Rexes, and more… all of us who refuse to bend the knee. so this is for US. 𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚕. 𝚆𝚎 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚆𝚒𝚗.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

@samdoesarts.bsky.social has made a video on the forced AI up-scaling that Youtube does on people's shorts and it (not so surprisingly) doesn't translate well when it comes to people's art. #artists #artsky

It’s my birthday! 🎉 May I be so bold as to ask to share my art? Below I’m going to drop some links (ko-fi tip jar, portrait commissions, contact for freelance) as all kinds of support are incredibly appreciated in these trying times! 💖

“Authors have until the end of August to opt out of the licensing agreement. If they do not, their work will be used to help train AI models.”

Folks often ask if we can do anything to protect authors and writers. I have been indeed working on it, and this is recent news on our case. Bartz vs Anthropic is now the first case certified as class action. The ramifications are significant. See below. chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/07/17/a...

Someone just offered to license our entire back catalog of issues for "AI" training. No way in hell. Not gonna happen. No means no. Don't come back. Don't even look this way. Seriously. We don't want you here.

Update thread #3: Lightbox and Comic-con Thanks to a pretty cool friend connected to the art world, I'm going to be attending San Diego comic-con this year. First time in more than a decade. I'll also be participating on a SDCC panel (Owned: Comics Copyright & the Public Domain, Friday 1pm, Rm 11)

Update thread #2. Hemlock One thing we worked on is a different tool to complement Nightshade. We discovered a new attack on diffusion models that is more generalizable than Nightshade. It targets an entirely different part of AI training pipeline, basically making AI models poison themselves.

Hey all. Sorry for a relatively long quiet period. A lot has been going on in 2025 and keeping us busy. Aside from the day job of research, there has been a lot of work with a few legal cases, and in recent months, much work writing and advocating for AI transparency laws. Time for an update.

We gotta get back to calling our representatives tomorrow with 5calls.org, for this and everything else that’s happening right now 💀 Because it cleared hurdles, yes, but support for this is shaky (even for some Republicans) and with enough continued outrage we CAN sink this ridiculous proposal!

🙀Have we reached AGI?? 🙀 💛 Really grateful to @financialtimes.com and the incredible journalist @melissahei.bsky.social, who gave me space to talk about “AGI” (vs AI, vs ML) and where we’re headed. Link here!! www.ft.com/content/7089...

Last month AI crawlers generated 90% of my site's traffic, forcing me to pay penalties Problem solved after moving nameservers to Cloudflare+turning on AI crawler blocking. Site monthly outbound data back to ~40GB per month, down from 800GB (!!) No impact on human visitors

Quick informational update. Webglaze was dealing with some intermittent network issues in the last few days. Yesterday our dept mail server was acting up, and webglaze outgoing emails with results were blocked. I've been told that is now fixed and queued messages should be sent out already.

Saw an interesting article yesterday, reporting on the beginnings of a wave of regret for companies that try to replace human workers with AI. Filed under "No kidding, you don't say!! 🤦" futurism.com/klarna-opena...

[1] Hidden language in @HouseCommerce budget bill would strip states from the ability to regulate AI systems. CA has long led on tech oversight and this would silence our ability to protect people from the technology harms they face every day...

Folks call your Senators now!! A ban on any state laws on GenAi for 10 YEARS is gonna do unthinkable harm! For those of you wondering what to say here are two posts you can use to build your own script (use alt script to cut and paste) Need to find your representatives? Here you go: 5calls.org

Respectfully. If I see any generative AI in a videogame even if it's just one asset, well acclaimed or just getting kickstarted, then unfortunately no, they're not getting my time or my money. Solidarity with creatives means maintaining that integrity no matter what. Our work is not a freeforall

Did you call your US Senators/Congressional Reps yet? The vote is happening this week, if not today. Tell them to kill the AI regulation ban in the Budget Reconciliation Bill. Tell them how this will harm you, it is bigger than just the creative industries, it affects EVERY SINGLE PERSON directly!

Call your representatives! Tell them just yesterday (R) Congressman Guthrie added a new text to the Budget Reconciliation bill to BAN GenAi regulation in the states for 10 years! Hell, point them to the specific section: TITLE IV—ENERGY AND COMMERCE (Part II: AI section, (c) moratorium)

Good lord just what the hell is up today. A potential ban on any regulation for AI for the next 10 years? This includes good bills like AB 412 of legislation protecting folks from Deepfakes! Wtf?! Call your congressmen and women asap to tell them to take this down! www.404media.co/republicans-...

applying for jobs again

Send this to your friends and enemies that use generative AI.

How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia? Before you open this thread, take a guess. Settle on a number and then compare it to what you'll learn in this thread. 🧵

This video is absolutely fantastic, breaks down every single nonsense argument on GenAi made by GenAi advocates, and does so in such a succinct way! Plus its always a joy to watch people work on their craft! Watch asap because it’s spot on! youtu.be/1L3DaREo1sQ?...