“Everything We Warned You About Came True” is a self-own. The Unsplash License does not explicitly bless model training. Unsplash was acquired by Getty in 2021; the piece never compares pre/post terms, never quotes a single clause, and ignores the obvious irony that Getty is suing Stability AI for scraping while owning a permissive firehose.
Publisher: The Phoblographer
“Everything We Warned You About Came True” is a self-own. It screams prophecy, delivers pundit cosplay, and pats itself on the back for being vaguely upset on schedule.
The hero image is a washed-out, pixelated joke with no alt text and a broken caption link. The site can’t even clear basic editorial hygiene. That’s not a small miss; it’s the calling card of a publisher that peddles panic like artisanal anxiety while letting standards rot.
The technical spine is mush. If you want to claim AI models gorged on Unsplash, you cite a dataset or shut up. LAION-5B’s public samples contain Unsplash URLs; the piece never bothers to look, count, or link. There’s no model card, no dataset manifest, no takedown trail, nothing beyond “it’s inconceivable they didn’t.” Opinion is not evidence.
The legal framing is equally lazy. The Unsplash License historically grants broad, royalty‑free use without attribution, and even warns against compiling photos to clone a competing service. It does not explicitly bless model training. The article doesn’t touch robots.txt, API terms, or contract carve‑outs. It pretends permissive use equals carte blanche for training and then scolds photographers for not “organizing,” which is moralizing without a map.
Unsplash was acquired by Getty in 2021; the piece never compares pre/post terms, never quotes a single clause, and ignores the obvious irony that Getty is suing Stability AI for scraping while owning a permissive firehose. Getty gets waved around like a talisman. If you’re going to insinuate causation, bring receipts. Instead we get rumor by eyebrow raise.
The grand advice-“get really, really weird”-is performative panic masquerading as strategy. It reads like a man whose entire intellectual currency is being offended, lurching from grievance to grievance in search of applause.
Net result: boutique tantrum. An echo chamber of melodrama where the publisher trades credibility for clicks and the author builds a cottage industry of grievance. Do the work, cite something real, or stop preening at the mirror and calling it journalism.
