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I grew up loving technology and computers. At least in my little world, there was an optimism and an excitement about the possibilities that were being made accessible with the internet and cheaper/more powerful devices. For example, I could make a dumb little video with my friends with a camcorder, edit it together on my computer, throw in some shitty special effects, and share it with the world all in a matter of days. Hell, hours if we’d wanted.
But as time has passed, that excitement has more or less been replaced with disappointment and frustration. I’m not gonna say the tech companies were ever paragons of morality or anything like that, but it feels like something changed along the way.
It’s like somebody handed the reins of these companies to insatiably greedy gamblers who, through theft and exploitation, packaged legitimately interesting technology into half-baked products and forced them into everyone’s lives, hoping to build enough user dependency to eventually monetize.
Just like they did with social media.
Just like they did with streaming.
Just like they tried to do with the blockchain/NFT/crypto/web3 shit.
Get onboard or get left behind! You wouldn’t want to get left behind, would you?! The number must go up at all costs!!!
Fuckin’ hell, man. It didn’t use to be this way. Or if it was, at least it wasn’t this goddamn obvious.
So to make a long story short, I was already growing disillusioned with the tech industry before generative AI went mainstream and poured gasoline on the situation. But I’ve tried to keep myself informed, as best I can, about what exactly this thing is that is flipping the world upside down.
And that learning has really only strengthened the view that the current execution of generative AI technology has serious ethical and moral problems. These issues include but are not limited to (in no particular order)…
But even if the technology were somehow made perfect—with every moral or ethical problem solved, like no technology before it—I still think it generally doesn’t belong in creative work or art.
As an appreciator of media, it was hard to find art that really connected before—when it was all human-made—but now, you have to wade through so much more crap to get to the good stuff. And all the secrecy and deception and anger regarding genAI has made people (artist and audience alike) so hypervigilant about anything that might possibly be perceived as a genAI tell (e.g. the em-dashes above).
And as an artist, it’s downright disheartening. Especially for someone who has spent years developing his artistic craft(s) but has struggled to publish or maintain productivity because of mental health issues.
Over the years, I’ve gotten to feel the satisfaction of watching the quality of my output improve because I chose to not give up. I’ve felt the excitement of solving creative problems or working around limitations in ways that made the end result feel more unique to me and my tastes.
But I’ve also felt the disappointment of making things that fell far short of how I’d imagined them. The embarrassment of showing something I’d made to someone else, only to hear, “Well, that’s… interesting.”
In that context, a magic “do it for me” button can feel seductive. It removes the pain and friction from the process, but it does so at the cost of removing the humanity. And without that humanity, what’s even the point anymore? (More output! More productivity! More efficiency! Faster, faster, faster! Infinite growth at all costs!!!)
The best art is this beautiful blend of skill, point of view, and taste, all of which come from the person or people on the other side. People who made a million little decisions informed by their life experiences, their limitations, their aesthetic preferences, their opinions and feelings, and their knowledge.
And while I don’t think those elements lose their value if they represent only a portion of a project otherwise surrounded by genAI, each portion of the creative process surrendered to genAI is an abandoned opportunity to infuse the output with humanity. To make something meaningful, not just disposable slop meant to stimulate the most primal of urges and then be forgotten ten seconds later.
I just don’t give two shits about what gets crapped out of a generative AI slot machine, even if there’s a human curating the output and deciding that option 3 is better than the others.
So I can choose not to use generative AI in my own art, but these bodies of ours are wired to spend as little effort as possible. Just knowing that it exists means I have to spend extra energy to deny the siren call of painless, effortless (meaningless) output.
And I imagine things are going to get so much worse before they start to get better. (Get on board the AI revolution or get left behind, bitches! To the moon!!!)
All that being said (and still setting aside the aforementioned moral and ethical concerns), I do think there are a few areas where generative AI technology could… might… possibly… be used in creative work with little negative impact on the humanity of the piece. Specifically, I’m thinking about things like AI noise removal to clean up audio, AI background separation and object selection for video, or AI upscaling in video games.
In the cases of noise removal, background separation, and object selection, this is an area where (with some exceptions) the need is often more technical than it is creative. “I just need to hear the main person talking above the crowd noise” or “I just need to get rid of the green screen behind the person.” Basically, something has been captured but just needs to be cleaned up. That’s not saying there aren’t creative choices that could be made there, but in a world of limited time and energy, I could spend x amount of time doing it by hand, or use an AI tool to clean it up in 5 minutes and get it most of the way there and then spend the rest of the time elsewhere.
And while I don’t think AI up-scaling should replace proper game optimization on the part of the devs, it can allow people to play games with better performance at better resolutions than their hardware would otherwise traditionally allow, which I think can be worth the cost of every frame being “technically correct.”
Unfortunately, the more recent versions of this technology (i.e., DLSS 5) have incorporated more problematic uses of the generative technology. They can’t leave a good thing alone, can they?
I also do think that—now or in the future—somebody will probably be able to combine their deep knowledge of both art and software development to make a generative AI something that will be truly creative and deeply human. But at least from my perspective, I just don’t think I’ve seen that yet.
So what the fuck can anybody do about it?
Broadly? Hell if I know. This affects basically everyone, and we probably won’t know how right or wrong we are as a species until we look back with tremendous hindsight.
For me—short of completely cutting myself off from the modern world and living off-grid—I don’t really see a cut-and-dry line. They’ve shoved that shit into everything now whether I want to use it or not. It’s all but inescapable.
And while I broadly think this is for the worse, I do think there are a few cases where there’s positive value to be found. Not enough to outweigh the bad, sure, but it still exists.
I also don’t think the foundational technology shouldn’t be studied or developed, if for no other reason than learning what can be done. I just wish it was being done with substantially more care and intentionality regarding the moral and ethical ramifications and hadn’t been co-opted by insatiable greed.
All that being said, if it all disappeared tomorrow, I’d probably be pretty relieved and happy.
But until that happens, I think there’s value in taking a stand where I can, which brings me to the whole damn point of this document. Specifically, I’ve come to really appreciate the publishing of generative AI usage disclosures and policies. They allow people to be informed consumers, and they can help build trust in an era where trust is increasingly lacking. (And they piss off the right people, which is probably reason enough to use them, heh.)
I also think they’re especially necessary for people like me who—because of the aforementioned mental health struggles—don’t have a pre-AI online art footprint to point at to say, “see, I’m human!”
So the question I get to ask myself is where am I going to draw my line? And you get to decide if that line is enough for you or not. This is what I’ve come to.
Now, it’s worth mentioning that this line has solidified for me over time, through learning, experience, and self-reflection. This means that I have used generative AI over the last few years in ways that I would not use now (i.e. not just messing with it to see how it works).
Now, I recognize that for some people, my policy may not go far enough, and my past usage is too much for them to feel comfortable. For others, the policy may appear unnecessarily strict and the previous usage a non-issue. But that’s where I’m at (at least as of October 2026), and that’s where I’ve been. Take it or leave it.
Regardless, I appreciate you spending the time to read this! And while I don’t imagine things will change substantially anytime in the near future, I’ll make sure to update this document if something does.