Good morning to the over 400 folks who are advocating for the Calgary Library to reconsider their AI "collaborative artist" residency!

   Thank you so much to everyone who signed this petition and shared it with your networks - for this to have an impact with the Library decision-makers we need to prove that this is an issue that does not only affect artists, but has broad moral resistance. 

   Ironically, the hub for the coolest creators, organizations, and arts appreciators is in the Library's own comments section; it has been an immense joy to scan through the 2000 comments and see how deep this anti-AI movement runs. For the first time in years, I am reminded of how social media can facilitate community connection, and I have been doing my best to connect directly with many of the people who shared their comments with the library.

   Only to be ignored.

   We should add that the folks fighting this decision LOVE the Calgary Library. For those who don't know, I was a former Artist in Residence at the Library; when the fear of how AI tech was disrupting creative futures almost caused me to give up art altogether, the Calgary Central Library was the place I went to feel hope. I started going weekly to browse picture books and see their in-person exhibits, hoping to run into current artists-in-residence... It became a place to "touch grass" and recharge. An act of resistance by getting offline and going to a physical repository of truth.

 Online, AI and tech companies are strip-mining artists' work for content and generative images are replacing reality on social media, so the library offered a genuine sanctuary from a virtual world scraping every bit of value from its users. The library was a bastion of research, in-person connection, and a celebration of creative tradition.

   The Library was the anti-thesis of Artificial Intelligence; now they are legitimizing AI without realizing the ways that AI fundamentally undermines the very best of what library spaces represent. It is one thing for private companies like the Calgary Farmer's Market to shill their identity to soulless AI farm animals, but another for a publicly funded institution to promote AI technology before it can demonstrate ethical safeguards.

Yesterday, I had an e-mail exchange with their Residencies Department. I spent hours crafting a reasoned, yet emotional, plea to consider the damage AI adoption is having on the broad arts community. This AI Residency may appeal to a minority of creatives who are excited to embrace new technology, arguing that it is either inevitable or no different than the rise of digital painting. There is no end of people with interests in hyping this technology - if the Library genuinely wanted to facilitate a conversation with the majority of artist, then they would be willing to acknowledge the HARMS and would explore ways to PROTECT artists from them. 

Generative AI runs on non-consensual data-sets that monetize the intellectual property of every artist who has ever posted online, in effect, laundering creative property through a generative predictive algorithm.

There was no opt-in. The cost to workers in the arts industry is immense:

• Displacement of income by AI adoption by employers and retail spaces
• Opportunity costs from no longer sharing new work digitally 
• Competing directly with AI fraud in job markets, competitions, etc
• Lost time and income to protect digital files from scraping
• Failure to produce work while dealing with AI-induced depression

   There is very little artists can do to protect themselves. The University of Chicago has produced softwares that help a) defend visual arts from scraping and b) poison AI datasets. This small team is attempting to provide the "opt out" tool no AI companies provided. The link is below, but to use these resources artists need to invest in expensive RAM upgrades, the process is slow, and these programs leave visual artifacts (from minor to extreme) when you post the result.  

Link to UChicago Downloads of Glaze and Nightshade

To protect our own creative work from being scraped, artists are expected to sacrifice time, money, and quality of their digital presence in order to resist a technology that is using our own work to replace us?    

In all communications with the decision-makers at the Calgary Library, they advocate that the artist they hire is responsible for conduction their AI 'collaboration' as ethically as possible. They have so far failed to understand the ways that the technology of AI is fundamentally an existential threat to the livelihoods and mental health of creatives, writ large. AI technology masquerades as a tool for accessibility, but it actual filters access through wealth (for subscriptions or the VERY expensive tech to run your own private model) and places the weight of fighting it's plagiarism, ingrained output biases, and displacement of funds from local artists to tech magnates... on the backs of society's vulnerable populations.

Like, come-on, it's not like artists were an "elite cabal of the creative class gatekeeping access to art-making." Most of us are choosing between a tube of paint or dinner and want nothing more for children to pick up a crayon and doodle.  

The perfect outcome for this petition:

1. The Calgary Library would acknowledge that AI has is harming human creativity and artists, 
2. They would rescind plans to operated this AI "collaboration" until the local arts community can be consulted on best practices for safeguarding an ethical approach.
3. The Library would facilitate conversations about the impact of mass-AI adoption on creatives, 
4. The library would direct funds to making protection tools like GLAZE and NIGHTSHADE accessible for local artists trying to defend themselves from exploitative tech companies, and implement teaching on ways to "opt-out" from AI data scraping.   

Those outcomes would genuinely help the local artists "understand" AI.

Off with the rose-coloured glasses embracing future tech - sacrificing human creativity isn't worth all the wonky colouring pages or soulless picture books in the world.

Since the Library is failing on providing AI literacy, here's my reading list!

• Blood in the Machine Newsletter
• "Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence" by Kate Crawford
• "Blood in the Machine" by Brian Merchant (history of worker resistance of new tech)
• "The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters" by Tom Nichols
• PBS article: Visual artists fight back against artificial intelligence companies for repurposing their work

Thanks for reading and keep up the pressure!