This is a hot button topic, and I want to be crystal clear on my stance on using it in my art, both in literary and imagery works.

I am very much a believer in the mantra: Mean what you say, and say what you mean. No one is perfect, especially not me. But we do the best we can at the time, we learn, we grow, we do better. So please read this with kindness, understanding, and patience. I have very middle-ground stance on AI in general, and that stance has adjusted quite a bit since I began messing around with it and as I’ve learned more about it.

Quick summary: I DO NOT USE GENERATIVE AI IN MY ART. I use it ZERO amount in my writing (I don’t use it for outlines, story ideas, editing fixes, blurb writing, summary writing, ad content, none of it). I do use ChatGPT in a very small way in my cover design: to help me come up with placeholder titles for my premade cover designs. And I also use it to help name the colors in the color palettes I make. But neither of those things is generative AI. It’s basically just a fancy name generator. 

First of all, I am absolutely horrified by the witch hunting that is happening about AI and suspected AI in both digital art and creative writing. The second someone suspects a pretty picture on Instagram may have some AI in it, the hateful comments begin. Artists (including myself) have gotten some pretty awful comments from complete strangers. It is 100% unnecessary.

If you believe an image is AI, and you disagree with the use of AI in art, then all you have to do is unfollow that artist. There is no need to start a witch hunt.

If someone makes a comment in support of generative AI, respond to it in a calm, fact-based way. Or keep scrolling. There is no need to resort to name calling or hate. Neither will result in a person deciding AI is bad. It will just make them think you’re mean.

And let me be very clear. Those people who knowingly use AI to create their art and novels, they don’t care if you don’t like it. They are aware of the moral arguments. And they know there are plenty of consumers out there who 1. Can’t spot AI with a microscope and 2. Don’t care if AI was used anyway. Those people are not worth your time. And they certainly aren’t worth any negative feelings. Take care of yourself. Do your advocating in a productive way, with calm, fact-based discussions and by voting for lawmakers who you believe will further your cause.

I do not think AI is as big and scary as a lot of people like to yell about on Facebook.

I’m sorry. I know that will probably ruffle a few feathers, but again, I mean what I say and say what I mean. This is just how I feel.

I do recognize that creatives are losing work to generative AI. I do know that people are basically stealing art styles by using prompts “in the style of XYZ artist.” I DO NOT AGREE WITH THE USE OF GENERATIVE AI IN ANY CREATIVE ENDEAVOR. (More on this below, because I do have a couple of teeny tiny caveats)

I think it’s bad, both for working artists, for society in general, and for people who COULD be artists, but instead are letting AI do all the work for them. I think the art coming out of AI is pretty damn shitty and is kind of making our cultural average worse in general. I think it’s creepy and weird that robots are creating our culture for us. I think AI is derivative by design. It literally cannot innovate, because it can only copy things that have come before. I hate that the works of other artists are used to create AI without permission or compensation.

HOWEVER I don’t think it steals in the way most people think. And there is a lot of precedent for it, which no one seems to care about. Google 411 and CAPTCHA used us for free labor in training its language learning software. CAPTCHA also used us to help us correct bad scans of books being digitized.

AI image technology also has some pretty amazing benefits to it. In the medical field, for example, AI is helping read medical scans more accurately, helping to get better, more accurate diagnoses faster.

I also think ChatGPT has its uses, both to entertain (ask my kid, who loves getting dumb jokes out of it), and to assist with grunt work. I have used it to help me create job application cover letters and resumes. It saved me hours of work on something that I really really didn’t want to do. I hate applying for jobs. I hate writing cover letters and customizing them for each position applied for. It sucks. ChatGPT did a great job on it, I polished it myself, and I was saved a ton of time and anxiety.

Listen, I am not an AI expert. But there is one thing I know for sure: Generative AI isn’t going anywhere. It has its upsides and its downsides. There are a ton of kinks to work out. I know I don’t have any interest in using it in my creative pursuits, for many reasons that I will outline in a lower section. I know that if I see a book on a shelf with an AI cover, I won’t buy it. If I know a book has been written or narrated by AI, I won’t buy it. I won’t judge or be mean to the author, but they also won’t be getting any money or attention from me. I think AI makes shitty art, and I don’t want to waste my time consuming that.

I also believe that, like excessive use of CGI in movies, people will get over the novelty of it pretty quickly and will recognize it for what it is: kind of shitty. It think that artists will survive this, just like we survived photography and Photoshop.

I think that nothing and no one will ever stop us from creating.

While I have never used AI in my writing at any point (aside from spell check haha!) I do believe AI has positively affected my own digital arts career… in the very very beginning of my art journey, that is.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve wanted to be able to draw my characters. I wanted it so badly, but I was bad bad bad bad bad at drawing. So bad. I tried. I was BAD at it. I gave up pretty quickly.

Somewhere on some old computer, I have several Sims families that are literally just the characters from my unfinished books and stories, because that was the only way I could make them real and visible.

Later on, after college, after my kids no longer needed every second of my time, I wanted to try again. I wasn’t as bad as I thought, but I was NOT great at drawing. I downloaded Procreate. I did a few tutorials. It was fun. I could take stock photos and trace them and I could DRAW. FINALLY. They weren’t great drawings. I still had a lot to learn. But I was doing it. And then life got in the way, and it fizzled out again. They weren’t great drawings, really. This was HARD.

And then I thought, why not? I’ll give Wombo Dream a try. It’s free. The AI I’m seeing on socials is really pretty. I’ll give it a shot.

I had fun. I spent a few months making images. I made my characters. I posted them. I would make the images, then edit them in Procreate to get the nonsense details to work better. Suddenly, I was producing PRETTY THINGS. And it felt fucking good. It felt really fucking great.

No one cared that it was AI. I got likes. I got traction. I sold a couple of novellas. Unfortunately, one day I made the mistake of commenting, “I get more traction on my posts with AI images than those without.”

Those people were really, really mean. Petty, righteous anger. It fucking sucked. I eventually deleted all of my comments there because I was consistently getting mean, anxiety-inducing hate from strangers for weeks, just for stating a fact that people didn’t seem to care that I was using AI images on my social media. Which was 100% true, btw.

Only one person responded to me in a calm, fact based way. It started a short dialogue. She answered my questions. She made a video explaining things in a reasonable, compassionate way. She was the one who taught me that maybe AI was ethically not-okay. I don’t remember who you were, random TikToker, but thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

That was when I started moving away from AI images. And it coincided with a natural progression in my drawing abilities: I had finally gotten good enough at drawing that I could recognize just how shitty the AI images actually were. I wanted to fix so many things that, pretty soon, it was simpler to just start from scratch.

I do not regret that AI images had a place in my early learning. I never lied about what I was doing, never tried to profit off any of it (just trying to get attention on a couple of novellas, which are 100000000% my own creation). It was a stepping stone.

It kept me motivated to keep going, back when I was still struggling so hard to make images I was proud of. It did the heavy lifting on some things like composition, color theory, etc, while I honed my skills.

I moved passed it. And I have no interest in going back. It would have held me back if I had kept using AI images. A good artist has to try and fail over and over in order to improve. It was true of my writing (Jesus Christ you should see some of the schlock I wrote as a teen!), and it was true of my drawing. I am still learning, still getting better, still honing my style. If I had continued letting AI do that work for me, my learning would have stopped right there.

Plus, I do not want to be the kind of person who uses an ungoverned, unethical, kind of shitty tool to make my art. If I am going to make art, then I AM GOING TO MAKE ART. That’s all there is to it.

While I continue to learn, I still use other, more useful tools to do some of the heavy lifting. I use blank, posable artist models (my favorite is justsketch.me), Daz Studio, and purchased stock photos. I use these to help me get starting sketches, to use as references, and sometimes to directly paint over/edit in Procreate. You can read more about my processes here.

What matters is three very specific things:

1. I am being honest about the fact that generative AI was a short stepping stone in the early part of my efforts to learn how to draw.

2. I learned that generative AI is unethical, unhelpful, and goes against the artist brand I want to create. I am proud of myself for listening, thinking critically, adjusting, and bettering myself.

3. The two ways I learned the above were via a helpful, calm, fact-based discussion with another creative online (and the mean people didn’t do anything to help their cause, aside from making me feel like shit). The other way was by a natural progression of my own artistic skills, which proved I could create better art than AI could anyway.

This is the whole, unedited truth on the matter. For myself, anyway. All I can do is be honest.

NOTE: If you would like to have a constructive discussion about generative AI, I’m all for it. Reach out to me. But any mean or hateful comments will be ignored and deleted. I am a giant ball of anxiety in size 12 shoes. There is no room in here for more shit feelings.