The digital creative world has spent the last two years running from automated vacuum cleaners disguised as web crawlers. While the tech industry insists that mass scraping a creator’s life’s work without consent is just “the price of progress,” one veteran engineer stepped away from the corporate spotlight to build the antidote. She doesn’t believe in picketing, long arguments or shelving creative plans to avoid theft, she believes in defense and solutions.
Meet Erin LaVaux, software engineer, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), and the sole force behind TNW Creations and Tawaci™ Media.
Over a year ago, among her friends on a sole server as they scurried in concern for their work, LaVaux announced she was working on AI website armor for creatives. Then went dark on a focused sabbatical to wage a solitary, code level campaign against unauthorized web harvesting. Now, she is breaking cover to announce the upcoming pre-release of an all new, privacy, website builder and defensive hosting infrastructure built specifically for creators. The platform’s mission isn’t to declare war on artificial intelligence – it’s to enforce an absolute, nonnegotiable right that Big Tech conveniently forgot: the right to say no.
The Sabbatical, The Sleuthing, and the Scrappy Defense
LaVaux didn’t spend her sabbatical lounging in PJs and sipping coconut water. She spent it in the digital trenches with the independent gaming and creative community.
While architecting the platform’s core engines, LaVaux stepped up as a quiet cyber sleuth for fellow indie developers and creators – running deep dive forensics to track down unauthorized asset ingestion, catch leaks, and trace where copyrighted visual novels, sprite sheets, voices, voice acting, and other creative works were being sucked into third-party datasets without Permission.
Her motivation hit close to home. LaVaux isn’t an ivory tower tech executive lecturing creators on adaptability (though she has spent time speaking to Google Developer Groups at Universities such as Wayne State University). She lives in a creative household where she handles the defensive and offensive engineering, her husband works in graphic design and translation, and both their children take commissions as independent digital creators. When a scraper hits a portfolio of private work for one of their own, it isn’t an abstract data – it’s her family’s studio.
“I’m not Anti-AI,” LaVaux emphasizes, “Technology evolves. But creators have an absolute right to opt out, lock their gates, and decide how their work is used. If platforms won’t give creators a seat at the table, we’ll build our own room – and we’ll lock the doors from the inside. Not so we hide away from the public because that just nullifies all our hard work, no, we lock out the AI vampires sucking away at data that isn’t theirs. If a creator wants to opt in, they simply need to invite the vampire in. We all know how it works. But for most creatives, that’s not the case and assault on IP is not okay. No means no. And I’ve built a way to say no.”
A Fortress for Your Portfolio: What’s Under the Hood
Standard website builders are built to look pretty on a screen; under the hood, their open directories are practically gift-wrapped for automated bot scrapers. LaVaux took an offensive penetration tester’s playbook and flipped it into a perimeter shield.
Currently heading toward its public rollout, the upcoming platform delivers defensive muscle rarely seen in creator hosting:
- Dynamic Anti – Scraping Defenses: Custom application firewalls and active bot-challenge systems that identify and stop automated scraping crawlers dead in their tracks before they can clone entire portfolios.
- Asset Forensics & AI Leak Tracking: Built-in investigative tools allowing creators to hunt down copyright leaks, sniff out unauthorized mirrors, and trace where their original work has slipped into unauthorized datasets.
- Anti-Theft Asset Shielding: Hardened anti-hotlinking protocols, protected image serving, and asset guardrails built to keep high – res files, manuscripts, game sprites, and voice reels in the hands of the people who made them.
- Clean, Sovereign Servers: Hosted on green, renewable energy grids (wind and solar) so creators can ditch parasitic mega platforms and retain 100% legal, uncompromised sovereignty over their digital footprint.
Backed by Industry Trust, Dev Acclaim, and Rare Pedigree
When LaVaux talks code and creative rights, the indie scene listens because she’s walked the walk in both worlds for years.
- Beloved in the Indie Scene: Revered across indie dev spaces for her localization direction, writing and editing, game and pen testing, audio work, and voice talent – including standout contributions to indie visual novels like Our Life: Beginnings & Always, Cante and others. Devs routinely credit her as the rare triple threat, a Batman watching out for them or a Maverick fearlessly grinning and tackling a mess to come out victorious. A rock solid mentor and expressive creator across voices and voice acting, and a cybersecurity shark who has their backs. Creators have been looking forward to this unveiling for some time.
- Bleeding – Edge Roots: Decades of engineering experience, including early hardware dev testing on cutting-edge platforms like the Microsoft HoloLens and Xbox Kinect.
- Trailblazing Leadership: The first Native American Google Women Techmakers Ambassador (2022) and founder of a Veteran Owned Small Business that Clutch ranked among the top cybersecurity teams in Austin, Texas as well as France.
- Cultural Architect & Author: Preserved indigenous heritage as a Lakota linguistic consultant – work documented by National Geographic, Encarta, and the S.A.I.V.U.S. Fellowship – alongside authoring more than 14 technical and fiction books under Tashna Erin LaVaux.
The Gates Are Opening Soon
Creators have spent years being told to hold up cardboard signs against a tidal wave of automated harvesting bots. With the upcoming rollout of LaVaux’s website builder, they finally get to wield an iron gate to protect their work whether it’s programming, indie dev gaming, voice acting, art, music or other creative works.
Stay tuned as TNW Creations and Tawaci™ Media prepare to roll out private access and launch timelines in the coming months. The era of treating creative works as free scrap is officially on notice.
