Hi all. This post is dedicated to one of the challenges we face building, running and growing Jouzt: the “haters”.

Just a reminder that No AI is used in the writing of these posts – you’re hearing from us directly 😊

Since we soft launched Jouzt earlier this year we have mostly had amazing and positive feedback from those who have found our little community. Thank you 🙏

But I just wanted to address some of the discouragement we occasionally receive from a few… less than supportive individuals.

In order to make people aware of the Jouzt platform, we have to market on other platforms, mainly Instagram at the moment.

From time to time, we have someone accuse us of building our platform to “farm” your art for generative AI models. We’ve had a couple of these comments on our boosted posts. For the most part we try to respond to them where they appear and let people make up their own minds as there is nothing wrong with asking questions and making informed decisions about where you interact online – you should!

It’s a strange accusation and kind of funny for the following reasons:

  1. We would be absolutely shooting ourselves in our collective feet to build something as complex as Jouzt while completely misrepresenting the intent. We would definitely be found out, possibly sued, and all our work would be wasted if this was true.
  2. Why? The AI industry is so saturated and monopolised who would we be to compete? All the art on social media is already farmed by people much bigger than us.
  3. Ironically, these accusations come from accounts who willingly share their work on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok etc, where your art is 100% definitely being used to train AI models. Our whole idea is to invest in the opposite – humans.
  4. The above are less important than the main point, which is that we are openly and genuinely disgusted by the greed and market forces that power the AI train and the people who hop on board without any regard for those tied to the tracks (awesome metaphor that AI would never come up with).

This is not meant to be a negative post – haters gonna hate – but more an explanation of where we stand and why these types of views don’t really make any sense. We can’t predict the advancement of AI but will always do our best to protect real human creators from its sinister talons (another amazing human metaphor).

It’s not surprising that people are cynical, and that’s another reason why Jouzt exists. The social media landscape breeds scepticism and conflict. Every view has an opposing view and platforms amplify the polarisation between people – sadly we are conditioned to doubt and hate.

We can’t control human nature but we also don’t wish to exploit it like other platforms. We want to create something safe, human and fun.

Jouzt is for the people, that’s the truth.

TLDR: No we do not, and 100% will not, steal your art or use it for AI training. We even message you to ask your permission before sharing individual posts on our Instagram or other platforms, and make sure to tag you 🙂

Stay real. Stay safe 😊