I don't think it is an arms race; that implies if you keep plpaying you're really just buying time and raising the stakes until one side ultimately wins all in a zero-sum game. SPOILER: the image classifiers will not only win in the end, all that defense you played is now fuel to make them even better.

I think a better notion is that of sunk cost. We have lost any approach that fights AI head-on. We should stop chasing this path and switch tactics, like changing online behaviours, education about privacy or, since developers love technical solutions, pursue technology solutions that leverage AI against this sort of cause. Example: what if we all switched to a morphing, deep-fake enabled visual representation? The better image identification got the more intense the msitakes would be.