This AI nonsense is getting out of hand. The other day I had a sudden spike in Instagram followers and traffic to this blog, but I couldn’t figure out why. I wasn’t tagged in anything, and a quick search didn’t show my posts being linked to anything that went viral or reposts by anyone with a large following. Then as I was doing my usual doomscrolling, I came across a Facebook post. And I stopped dead, because the photos in it were MINE.
The post had some AI-generated story about crocheting these little trauma dumplings (original joke is this Bluesky post about an autocorrect error for “trauma dumping”) and some fake story about buying traumatized-looking eyes from a seller. It looks like it might have even scraped some verbiage from my original blog post when I first wrote about these little guys. The Facebook post was getting a LOT of traction (12k+ likes, over a thousand shares), and was doing much better than when I had originally posted the photos on my own social media accounts. The post used my photos without any credit to me or my pattern. The puzzling part is that the poster (most likely a bot) wasn’t selling anything, didn’t link to any dubious/fraudulent shops, and didn’t appear to be stealing my pattern outright. But the post was getting LOTS of engagement, so I’m sure there’s reasons behind that.
The upside is that I got a lot of new followers on Instagram and an uptick in traffic to this blog from people commenting where the find the pattern. The downside is they probably all think I’m this “Stephanie” person/bot. It all feels so gross to me, but I guess I’ll take the wins that I can get out of this situation. I tried leaving comments to let everyone know they were my stolen photos and where to find the pattern, and the post was deleted. I guess “Stephanie” didn’t like that. (I’m Cindy, by the way, I’m happy you’re here!)
At any rate, here’s my original blog post about these lil’ trauma dumplings, and here’s my FREE pattern to make a steamer full of them! I’m just salty that the AI-generated post did better than when I posted the photos myself! Make ALL the little emotional support dumplings, without the AI bots interfering! Humans are chaotic enough as is, no need to have bots add to the mix.
