I'm a designer. I sit in my little corner of the world and I create stuff. That's how I like it. But my work, not client work, my personal work, the projects I create for myself and share online because that's what designers do, that work is now training data. The creative sensibility I've spent 20 years developing is now training data. Did I have a choice in this matter? No, I did not.

Yes, billion-dollar companies are being built on unpaid labor, but underneath those economic concerns, there is something else entirely. Your creative identity. The thing that makes your work distinctively yours, has been extracted and made reproducible. What does that mean? It means your style is now a prompt. Your vibe is now available to anyone. For me? 20 years of development dissolved into weights and parameters for a predictive piece of code.

This isn't labor being exploited, this is creative colonization.

The work I share online isn't created for commercialization, it's to participate in creative culture. To be seen by other artists. To connect and exist as a creative in the world. That openness, that generosity I have given to the internet is what make my work scrapeable. And that doesn't sit right with me.

There are ways to opt out of having your data used now, but these companies have already scraped the web. The data is already in the models. So opting out today protects nothing you've already shared. They already have it. The damage is done.

But the paradox that takes shape is that you have to make yourself visible on the internet to exist culturally, which makes you available for appropriation.

But what does it mean to be a creative person when your creative identity can be extracted, reproduced, and distributed without you?

This goes deeper than economic extraction. This is about whether creative identity can exist as something that belongs to the person who developed it, or if it's just raw material waiting to be processed. And I'm not alone in this. Millions of creatives are sitting with the same reality whether they know it or not.

I don't have an answer to this. I just know that the work I made to express myself, the most personal creative output that I have, is now nothing more than parameters in someone else's model. And I'm supposed to be okay with that because that's just how AI works. But it's not just data. It's identity. And that changes everything about what's being taken.