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Don't Be Google's Bitch

AI has turned big tech against the artists. Google has abandoned it’s much-vaunted, but ultimately bullshit, “Don’t Be Evil” motto and, it seems, has replaced it with, “Be Evil if it turns a profit."

Years ago (going all the way back to the mid-2000s), I repeatedly warned artists not to rely upon search engine traffic. And in my company, we practice what we preach. We have built our own service, FASO Artist Websites, so that, as much as possible, we have direct access to our prospects.

We once lost all our Google rankings for about a month and didn’t notice much difference in our business growth. I didn’t start my own company so that I must spend my time working (or providing content) for Google (or Facebook, or Apple, or Amazon). As such, we don’t rely upon search engine traffic as our primary source of leads and I suggest you structure your business the same way.

I’ve always advocated that artists focus on owned channels (email, snail mail, website, podcast) rather than rented ones (Google, Social media, ads).

Way back in 2014, in an article warning artists not to rely on rented channels, and especially, not to rely upon Google I published the following quote by Fred Wilson as it succinctly summed up my thinking:

“Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and Don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch.” — Fred Wilson [source]

For years I was laughed at for discounting search engine traffic, especially by those parties selling artists “search engine optimization” services (mostly a scam by the way, and increasingly irrelevant with the advent of AI).

But it turns out, sadly, that I am now “getting” the “last laugh.” Not only has search engine traffic always been a poor channel for visual artists to procure leads, today, even the traffic artists might have garnered from search is rapidly going away, due to AI.

Consider the following, excerpted from Ted Gioia’s excellent article, Why is the Washington Post Talking to Substack?:

Many media outlets have lost half of their search traffic since the launch of AI—but it will get even worse. An editor at The Atlantic recently told staff that they should expect visitors from Google will “drop toward zero.”

And it’s not just media. Check out these alarming trends:

I know this sounds like hyperbole, but the reality is that Google has turned into a parasite. It increasingly hurts every other business it touches. And it touches almost every other business.

As I’ve written elsewhere, just imagine what would have happened if AT&T had built the telephone network on the Google business model. Every telephone in the world would be a tool of extortion, surveillance, intrusive marketing, and authoritarian domination.

Google has long since abandoned it’s much-vaunted, but ultimately bullshit, “Don’t Be Evil” motto and, it seems, has replaced it with, “Be Evil if it turns a profit.” Most of the other big tech companies have followed suit.

As a related aside, if you claim to care about artists’ copyrights and still support (by using or advertising) Facebook or Instagram, I suggest it’s time to consider the continuity of your position. Facebook has publicly admitted they are using your content to train your replacements through AI accounts that fill the timeline taking engagement from you, and moving it to them.

It’s a cliche but it’s true: If it’s free, you’re the product. Facebook recently trained one of their AI systems on hundreds of thousands of pirated books. They didn’t even pay for the books they were using for training. They have no problems stealing your images for training either. We’ve had to block both Google and Facebook at times because they were attempting to scrape sites so quickly that they threatened to take down our servers. That’s right, we have to defend our users’ websites against cavalier abuse by Google, Facebook, Pinterest and others. We now block their AI bots by default, but, if they are willing to use pirated books, they are willing to use unethical means to get around such blocks. The least we can all do, if we wish to support the rights of independent artists, is not give them our Art willingly.

I’m actually considering blocking Google from even crawling my personal sites going forward (as well as considering eliminating even the small amount of activity our companies still have on Facebook and Instagram). Google is becoming a glorified AI chatbot trainer and I don’t want AI bots trained on my hard work. (Note, FASO sites automatically block all known and all detected AI bots from scraping your art. As of this writing however, we do not block Googlebot which, as I mentioned above, I suspect Google uses to train AI if their AI bots are blocked).

Increasingly, the little guys of the world, like you and me, especially in creative industries, are going to have to stop seeing each other as competitors and we need to stick up for and support one another. I, for one, in my personal life, and through my company, FASO Artist Websites, plan to do just that.

So, please, I’m begging you, going forward, don’t be Google’s bitch, don’t be Facebook’s bitch but instead, be your own bitch.

Creatively,

Clint Watson
BoldBrush/FASO Founder
Creativity Fanatic

PS - One small way I’m attempting to support independent artists, and you may have noticed this over the past few months, is by using human-created art in my personal, and these Boldbrush newsletters instead of AI generated images. We abandoned using AI for that purpose about six months ago, and instead, I’ve been selecting images I find across the web by independent artists and highlighting them in our newsletters, always with proper attribution and with links back to the artist’s website. It may be “only” a small amount of exposure, but even a small amount sometimes helps. If we all did this for each other, it would move the needle. Even Goliath can’t beat a thousand Davids.

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No AI Zone: Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clint “Clintavo” Watson, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. I do not use AI to assist me with writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek.

I only rarely use AI images with my (non-AI) writing. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

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