{"id":1277,"date":"2026-10-27T19:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T00:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marjasall.com\/blog\/?p=1277"},"modified":"2026-10-27T19:13:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T00:13:10","slug":"speed-bumps-potholes-and-roadblocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marjasall.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/27\/speed-bumps-potholes-and-roadblocks\/","title":{"rendered":"Speed Bumps, Potholes, and Roadblocks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Social media is changing once again. I only found out about this a day or two ago, but I read that Meta announced at the beginning of October that their terms will change for public business pages and these changes will take effect on October 30th. The changes will affect mainly public business accounts, allowing Meta, or anyone acting for Meta, to use automated scrapers, bots and crawlers to run on web pages and domains linked to a business’s products or services. It can return to these to pull updates. They say they will use the data it collects to develop, improve, research and train its products, one of those products being its AI. If you continue to use Meta products, then basically you opt in and give them the \u201cOK\u201d to use bots, crawlers, spiders, etc., to scrape your pages, your conversations and even your links, such as to your own personal website. Such as the one you are now looking at.

I don’t like the idea of my work or skills, which I’ve spent a lifetime honing, training Meta’s AI, and even if my posts have already been scraped, I still do not approve and do not want to continue supporting a site that does not honor or respect artists’ intellectual properties or ideas. They’re basically mining users for free material and if you stay on the platform then that means you are OK with that and you are giving them permission to do it. But it’s theft, plain and simple. You are training their AI for free, and they are being manipulative in an attempt to achieve this. You are free to go, but they know many won’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I am going to shut down my Facebook page and most likely my Instagram page. At the time I am writing this I have set my Instagram for private until I can figure out if it is still useful to me or not. A private Instagram page does me little good, though, as few people will see it anyway. In addition to that, continuing to use Instagram would be supporting them and what they are doing, even if they weren’t doing it to me personally (which they probably already have). I am not really a content creator anyway. I am just an artist. Although there is some promotion involved in becoming a professional artist, my time should be more spent on drawing and painting. You know \u2013 making art. The algorithm game is exhausting and distracting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started participating in Inktober 2026 on Instagram and Facebook and have gotten three weeks in (and still behind) so I will not finish out Inktober 2026. It’s OK, though. It was only for fun. I did discover that it kept me from doing more meaningful work, plus it was putting on display some of my (probably) poorest work. Having to create an ink drawing every day meant that most of the drawings were sloppy and rushed, in my opinion. Still, it’s a challenging exercise, but maybe not for posting your finest work online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder about some of the Inktober masterpieces I see (amazing work, by the way), and if they were truly started and finished on the day each was assigned, and how consistently some artists can crank out an Inktober masterpiece every single day of the month. Kudos if you truly can do that. That’s impressive. But I imagine nothing else art-wise would get done in the month of October, as I have a hard enough time getting a full week of Inktober drawings done, consistently. There are other art pieces I’d like to work on that would be more meaningful and satisfying to me. So as fun as Inktober can be, I’m okay with missing out on the rest of that. It’s a great exercise and challenge, if you have the time for it. I’d like to get back into some paintings, and some better, more well-executed, ink drawings. I’d like to do more like these below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n