A DMCA claim, for anyone not dealing with American copyright law on a daily basis, is a kind of digital eviction notice on demand. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows rights holders to request that platforms like Google remove content that violates their copyrights. Sounds reasonable at first. Usually is used reasonably. Just not always.
In my case, an AI decided that an OnlyFans creator appeared on my website. A woman with a K cup who I've never seen in my life, let alone photographed. The model on my website is an entirely different person and has an A cup. A cup and K cup. Let me repeat that: A and K. You really don't need to be an expert in proportions here. Even blindfolded, you'd notice the difference. But the AI apparently saw similarities that only an AI can see.
Google then removed the URLs (probably automatically as well). No inquiry, no contact with me, just gone. I'm imagining two AIs nodding to each other in digital space: "Yep, looks good, let's do it." And just like that, I'm out of the index. As if I never existed, at least as far as these pages are concerned.
You could say, well, it's not that bad, just file a counter-claim. True, I did that. But that's not the point. The point is this: a decision was made about my professional visibility without a single human being thinking to take a quick look. Maybe compare the images.
I'm not one of those "everything was better in the old days" types who rail against AI. But cases like this show where we're currently drifting in a dangerous direction. We're handing over decisions to systems that can't distinguish between probable and actual, between similarity and identity. And then we also give these systems the power to cause real consequences.
The problem isn't AI itself. The problem is that we're assigning it tasks it's simply not suited for. Copyright questions are complex and definitely require common sense. I could prove instantly that I'm the copyright holder of my photos. There's always a contract from the shoot and I also own the RAW files. But I was never asked.
You could laugh about it if it weren't so telling about our approach to automation. We're so in love with efficiency that we forget to ask whether we should even be efficient here. Whether there are areas where humans shouldn't be replaced because the consequences are too severe.
Until then, I'm practicing patience and hoping that at least a human will look at my counter-claim at Google. Someone who understands that a K-cup chest and an A-cup chest perhaps aren't quite interchangeable after all.