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I largely agree, but I will say that it isn’t only about a financial safety net. AI corporations are using huge trawling nets to pull in the work of everyone in the world, and then resell it in a convenient box. The fact that the profits will be unevenly distributed is only one negative side effect. Because just like ocean trawling, the other side effect is that it will leave the ecosystem damaged and diminished.
Note that the comic in this case is Penny Arcade. Those guys are part of the first original wave of web-comics. They are pioneers and veterans. Their regular blog posts are a level-headed contemporary commentary of the state of the internet and of games. The website is amusing, but it is also a good historical document. And although their huge success is largely due to luck of their timing, and perseverance; they have used their success to make great contributions well beyond just the comics. (I’m thinking mostly of their charity “Child’s play”, and the various PAX gaming expos.) So that’s the kind of value we risk losing, even if AI profits are shared ‘fairly’.
In the comic, (and in a couple of recent blog posts), they are basically concerned that their work is being used without their permission to train AI to mimic their work, and the work of other artists. Partially this is about money, but it is also about clarity of communication. The comics, and their blog have always been a way of communicating their thoughts and chronicling history. And a flood of low-effort AI replicas can dilute this to a level of pointlessness.
And its a similar situation with all artists, with some artists being far more vulnerable than others. Artists generally are not simply drawing stuff to get paid. They are trying to communicate something about the world. So this isn’t only about getting paid for art. It’s about being able to contribute meaning. With AI being produced at a rate far far higher than human art, the signal-to-noise ratio will drop sharply.
I don’t think its viable to post on Facebook (or whatever). with the goal of getting people to stop using Facebook. People on the site will quickly disregard whatever arguments put forward, because it is very hard to maintain credibility while you are on the site that you are arguing against. And if you do make an effort to maintain your credibility there, then you can end up having the reverse effect - in the sense that you are now a valuable contributor to the platform, and people will like and respect your contributions while staying on the platform.
Criticism one platform is more likely to be taken on-board if posted on a different platform though. For example, a lot of people on Reddit argue against Facebook - and I reckon it probably has an effect the people who read it. But obviously it isn’t the ideal target audience. You really want to arguing against Facebook to people who are actually on Facebook!
I can’t really think of a good way to get people to stop using particular social media en mass. (I’d written a couple of paragraphs about general strategies for changing people’s minds; but I don’t think it was helpful enough to bother reading.) I suppose the best option would be government regulation to undermine the targeted advertisement revenue streams. If these platforms were forbidden from collecting and using personal data for advertising, then the incentive for content-churn would be reduced. Without the money, the corruption would no long be self-sustaining. So political action to support strong privacy laws is probably the best way. Aside from that, probably the best way is to degrade the quality of the platforms. Don’t contribute any content to them. Don’t give them any kind of credibility by linking to them (for any reason, even negative attention). If you feel like being chaotic, I suppose you could create spam bots to just make the place worse, but that’s probably not worth the effort. Actual spam-bots are common enough anyway.