Poisoning the Well: Why Creators Must Fight Back!

Powerful corporations are training their AI models on our data and creative works. They aren’t developing these tools for the benefit of humanity, they want to get an unpaid workforce. They steal massive amounts of content scraped from the web. That’s the work of writers, developers, musicians, artists, and all independent creatives. Our work is used in training models without permission, without credit, and without compensation.

However we aren’t entirely powerless to stop corporations stealing our work for training models to eventually replace us. We were initially blind-sided by the rapid introduction of these tools however it is our nature to create. We can develop techniques and systems to change this situation.

What Is “Poisoning the Well”?

“Poisoning the well” refers to the deliberate effort to disrupt or degrade the value of data used to train AI models. It’s for content that is harvested without consent. Poisoning the well can take many forms:

• Obfuscating or watermarking content

• Altering data in ways imperceptible to humans but disruptive to AI

• Creating content that looks real but contains traps or distortions

• Withholding fresh, high-quality work from the public web

Poisoning the well of data used to train models on is a powerful way to fight back.

Why Do It?

The current system is rigged solely for the benefit of big tech. It gives creators no choice. We must either lay down and accept that our work will be mined, reused, and monetized without our say and spend all our time hustling and trying to eek out a living on the scraps that are left or we can resist. Not with lawsuits we can’t afford, but with the one tool we do have: our creativity.

Without our work and fresh input the AI data will very rapidly become stale. Without fresh human-made content it will increasingly only be consuming other ai-generated content. It will become like the Ouroboros – the snake eating it’s own tail. There’s an old saying in computer science “Garbage in, garbage out”.

Poisoning the well is not an act of destruction. It’s a form of digital resistance. We can send a message to corporations, i.e. “If you want the value we bring, you need to ask permission, respect our terms, and pay fairly.”

This is a global effort and we need to come together to fight this monster. We don’t need the picket lines and demonstrations that people used in the past but digital resistance to right a digital wrong.

Not Anti-AI but Pro-Creator

It’s not about being anti-AI or a Luddite. I used ChatGPT to help me put my thoughts here into coherent sentences because I’m not a writer. I also used it to generate the image for this post from my idea because I’m also not an artist. I’m an indie developer and I want to use the tools and resources available but not at the huge human cost it will extract in the not too distant future if the development continues down the exploitative path set by big tech.

AI can be a tool to benefit humanity but we need to look closely at the recent past and see how social media and the internet has been used against us to enrich just a few powerful corporations and billionaires. We’re not as naive as we were back in the early days of the internet, we can forge a different path forward with AI as a tool to serve not exploit.

We’re not fighting the technology. We’re fighting the extraction economy that surrounds it. I’d happily allow some of my work to be used in training models if I am paid fairly for it.

Until consent and compensation become the norm, creators must build tools to protect their work, educate each other on resisting exploitation and withhold the human spark that gives AI its edge.

Because without us, the well runs dry.