Hey everyone,
I know this email is coming later in the day than usual but I have exciting news.
This little blog has always been my space to write slowly, honestly — one letter at a time. So it feels only right to share a small (but huge!) milestone here with you first:
My first article has just been published — by an actual, real-life publication.
Considering that I’ve been interested in journalism for some time now, this is very cool.
The article is on how AI scraping is affecting creative industries. You can read the full article here (please do!) and a short excerpt below.
This erasing of artists is already visible across many creative industries. Greg Rutkowski, a Polish digital artist, has had users enter his name as a prompt on Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI art generator, over 93,000 times, making him one of the platform’s most common prompts. Artists like Rutkowski are neither credited nor compensated, even though AI models mimic their signature styles without consent.
It’s not just visual artists, either. The generative craze is sweeping up novels to produce fan fiction in an author’s writing style, while AI music models mimic artists’ voices and songwriting. Though some users may enjoy these adapted pieces, the artists inspiring these flash-in-the-pan outputs are paying the price.
Whether you’ve been following this blog since day one or just found it by accident — thank you.
This article (read here) might be my first, but it’s definitely not the last.
Thank you for reading. I would love to continue this conversation in the comments or email me back.
PS. This newsletter grows by word of mouth. If you know someone who’d love it, send them this link or put this in your group chat.
With Love and One Letter At A Time,
Maxine Riike Brigue
Amazing news! So proud of you!
Back to the journalism side