All this AI garbage is really really annoying, but one thing I can say is to try your best to not let these things suck away your fun too.
As unhinged as Twitter's AI trash is, I'm sure that even if not officially endorsed like them, the AI bots already pretty much do the same exact thing at BlueSky and all art websites, unfortunately there's literally no escape from this garbage.

Which can be seen as a defeatist mindset, but since there's not much we can do to avoid this new fad, do not let it affect your enjoyment of things too
All this inconvenience and sadness we can feel is probably the biggest "win" for these losers, so we should try our best to not let them control our enjoyment either <3

Of course! Those AI bots are going all over the place, so it's impossible to avoid them. I'm not gonna stop posting entirely because of them, and will still enjoy what I post here.

But if a place blatantly says "by posting here, we WILL feed your images to gen-AI & you can't opt-out of it", that seems like a pretty good reason to stop posting images there :P

Also, I'm still planning to retweet others' posts on Twitter as long as I'm there, as well as make my own text posts. So there'll still be lots of fun there <3

I'd manually delete everything, post an explanation as to why, and then lock.

Honestly, I don't trust Bluesky not to do something like this in the future either. AI seems to be the big marketing trend these days and companies that don't even benefit from it are jumping on the bandwagon for the sole purpose of attracting investors.

At the end of the day, though, melac's right. It's ultimately impossible to avoid getting scraped for AI data at this current point in time. You could always use nightshade and glaze... oh wait, those are AI tools as well, they just happen to be a case of fighting fire with fire (they're not really that effective either because any AI developer who knows what they're doing is just going to prune poisoned results anyway).

But I'd still recommend ditching Twitter because it's a shitshow anyway.

I sure hope Bluesky doesn't, yeah. At the least, the devs of it seem like good transparent people who were likely as put-off by Twitter's AI integration as the rest of us.

And I agree, fully avoiding AI scraping is utterly impossible. I'd have to stop posting altogether to avoid it, which would be too much to ask. I just figure it's worthwhile to stop posting image if a site is outright saying "we WILL feed your stuff to our gen-AI and you're not allowed to opt-out". I do wonder what everyone else is going to do... I tend to only post every Tuesday anyway, so there'll be a few days to see how everyone else takes this.

And as for ditching Twitter entirely... it's definitely a consideration. Thing is, even with all the horrendous changes, I've maintained a surprisingly lovely "For You" feed on my TF account (and just stick to my "Following" list on my non-TF account). Plus, believe it or not, I STILL have the "Twitter" app on my phone instead of the "X" app. That's kept a few bad changes away from me.

At this point, I think I'll fully commit to leaving Twitter if one of three things happens.

1) They fully deny access to my "Twitter" app... which they may be doing soon. I've been getting pop-ups in-app for months saying "please update", but about 2 months ago, those messages changed to "this version of the app will be deprecated soon". Considering 80% of my Twitter usage is on mobile, that would just about kill it for me.

2) The changes to the Block feature cause the app/site to be pulled from the App Store.

3) They implement something that makes the app beyond repugnant, on top of everything else that currently does. I've heard rumors of one change that would well and truly kill off any remaining shred of hope Twitter had, but I won't speak it so I don't bring it into reality...

No matter what happens, I'll likely just lock my account in the end & stop using it, instead of deleting my account altogether. No risk of someone hijacking the name for mean purposes that way.

I don't worry too much about so-called AI since it's probably about as good as it's likely to get in its current state (which is relatively useless), and I don't want to waste my time on it. They'll cannibalize themselves within a few years anyhow once they train on their own output for long enough.

That said, I do take precautions against it. Signing everything (and hiding an extra one or two in spots that can't be cropped) is something I've done forever. If nothing else, it means I can track my stuff.

The new thing I'm doing is only uploading low-resolution images to Twitter (resized to be 360 pixels tall). I figure that's big enough to be nice to look at when scrolling but small enough to not be useful for improving a generative model. And if folks want to see higher resolution versions, they can find my other accounts.

I figure that's enough for now, especially since the sorts of folks who'd settle for AI art aren't the kind of people who make good commissioners anyhow. If things change further, I'll change my behavior again.

I sure do hope it cannibalizes itself eventually. I'm just worried since it has indeed fooled me a couple times, in the TF space or otherwise.

I've always loved the way you do your hidden signatures! Also, lowering the resolution manually is an excellent idea. Might need to see if I can do the same with stuff I've commissioned.

And many thanks for giving your input here. Means a lot to have a seasoned artist such as yourself chime in here.