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One of the great trivia questions of the 80s and 90s was “what was the first music video shown on MTV”. The answer, of course, is “Video Killed the Radio Star”. It was a bold statement that MTV was about to change the way people consumed music forever. There’s a similar technology revolution happening in the crochet online space, but it remains to be seen whether it will be a net positive.
Somehow, in the past 3 years, AI has become ubiquitous in all our lives, whether we like it or not. How is this affecting crochet? Well, first off, spammers are using AI to generate photos of crochet projects and selling the patterns online – only those pattern files turn out to be a useless jumble of terms, meaninglessly thrown together. You can’t actually follow the pattern, and you certainly can’t make what’s in the AI-generated photo. The flood of nefarious listings on sites like Etsy is making it harder and harder for real designers with real, quality patterns to get seen and make sales.
Another use of AI that is going to decimate the online crochet world is the AI-generated search results that search engines like Google are using. There is a lot of crochet content on the world wide web. While some of it is being put out by people as just a hobby, a lot of that content is coming from bloggers who are trying to earn a living or help support their families. How do they do that with the free patterns they put on their website? Ads and traffic. When you visit a bloggers website, you’ve probably seen advertisements and pop ups. The bloggers are getting paid a nominal amount for that. It’s not a lot per ad, but it can add up (no pun intended). The key to a blogger being able to bring in that money is total traffic. The more visitors, the more they can make, even when those visitors are just looking at a free pattern. But now, when you do an online search, the search-engine likely uses AI to scrape all that data and answer your question directly on the search page. There is no need for you to click on a link and go to a website. So the blogger sites don’t get visits, and the bloggers don’t get paid. While there are many people who love to put out crochet content, there aren’t many who can do it all day every day for no financial compensation. So will we suddenly see blogs drying up? What will happen to the total output of new crochet material? Logic says, there will soon be fewer bloggers releasing fewer free patterns.
This isn’t some doomsday scenario. People are born to create, and they will find a way to create and share that with the world (as long as they also have food on the table). But this is going to be a seismic shift in the crochet industry as designers and bloggers find a way to make up the lost income…or stop producing altogether.
