I recently entered a lot of knowledge-sharing groups on Facebook, most around the topic of felting, but also a few more generic 'makers' groups. These artists often try to make a modest income from their skills, which isn't an easy thing to do when the same platforms where you're trying to sell your stuff are either upping their fees every year or bombarding you with advertisements on the next big discount on Black Friday, Black Friday day II, Black Friday day III, Cyber Monday...
Recently, someone shared a tweet of Rob Schamberger that said:
PLEASE RT: Never, ever, EVER respond to someone’s art on Twitter saying you want a shirt with that art. Bot accounts will cue into that and then pirate the artwork. This then becomes a nightmare for the artist to get the bootleg merchandise taken down. PLEASE SHARE.
A follow-up tweet said:
- It’s happened to me multiple times. I’m your primary source.
- Artists will tell you if prints and shirts are available. That’s how we earn a living. Sometimes these things take a while to produce, so be patient.
Most people in the makers group on Facebook, including me, were quite shocked to learn that bots were crawling twitter for tweets saying 'I want this on a shirt' - after which these bots would automatically try to find any artwork in the original tweet, stealing the image and upload it to websites that sell shirts for you: once the artwork is uploaded they will process printing and sending, and you, as the uploader of that artwork, receive the money.
Automated stealing! I remember literally thinking: "What can be done about that?" I know several personal friends of mine who have had their art stolen, and as a small maker you're basically helpless.
Luckily, something apparently CAN be done - sort of
This happened one day ago:
And shortly after:
Basically the bot went crawling again, picked up a tweet with 'artwork', except this artwork was basically accusing the bot from stealing - and as a nice bonus it was supposedly sold 28 times :D
It made me laugh. Revenge! Not really, of course, because many makers still lost income because their artwork was sold by someone else, but still, it felt like a tiny win. It made me wonder if bots will ever be able to have humour or execute this kind of creative thinking. I'd like to believe humour and creativity are exclusive to humans, but I'm not sure that will always be the case.
For now, at least: Humans: 1 - Bots: 0.
Return from When humans outsmart stealing bots to Rosanne's Web3 Blog
