MY STANCE ON A.I.

For months, I’ve delayed uploading my precious images to this website. I couldn’t avoid uploading them to Instagram, and I uploaded a few to other social media platforms, but for some reason, this website felt as if it would be the final nail in the coffin. Not to mention Adobe’s recent changes to their terms of service that are likely reaping my IP from Photoshop as we speak.

I’ve tried using software that can make my images un-copyable, but my computer overheated and it wasn’t able to be done. I finally bit the bullet and started uploading my pictures. Although I’ve uploaded a few now, I haven’t made the jump to uploading the rest of them. I’m trying to decide what I want the purpose of those images to be on this website, and whether I’ll be able to emotionally handle my style being stolen by AI.

I have never used generative AI for any of my writing or art, and I have no plans to. I haven’t used AI editing software, either. I use Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop for all my creative works, but my understanding is that you can avoid utilizing their generative AI applications if you choose to, and I am choosing to do just that. Generative AI software is unethical and built on a model of plagiarism and theft, and my own works will fall prey to it just like the works of all other creatives will. This is a given. I don’t appreciate others who use generative AI for art or writing, and I don’t consider them to be “creatives” unless they come up with ideas, develop their own skills and techniques, and build something out of nothing entirely separately from their work with AI. Given the human tendency to automate work and reduce our own labor, I don’t see that happening for them, since they were lazy in the first place.

I started out my photography journey in high school taking pictures with a very basic digital camera in the year 2008. Below are some of my images from that time. My family was severely house poor, facing impending foreclosure, and my parents would never have been able to afford a DSLR camera for me, not to mention I couldn’t even get a job in fast food due to the economy. The world of professional cameras was something that I had assumed to always be out of my reach. That being said, I was deeply grateful for my digital camera as it had been a Christmas gift, and was a big purchase for my parents at that time.

My college years were defined by severe/worsening PTSD, and later, physical illness, so I have very few photos from that time. I deeply regret not taking any classes in photography, but I had still felt it was out of reach. I choose to be grateful that I finished college (and was even able to attend college, as my family home had been foreclosed eight months prior) with the help of disability accommodations and survived my PTSD rather than live in regret at what I didn’t do, but to this day it still gnaws at me.

During the pandemic, I downloaded a free version of Photoshop CS3 and started making collages with images from the internet for fun during my free time. (Important: anytime I posted the completed works online, I credited/tagged all artists of the original images I used and made it clear that the images were not mine.) Through this, I learned how to use Photoshop. Many of my own original images I’ve posted here were edited using Photoshop CS3. All photos posted on this website, though, are my original IP and belong fully to me. I have not posted any of my early collage work here and do not intend to.

In 2021, I finally got the nerve to try working a camera again. At the time, I only had my cell phone camera, so that is what I used for the below picture.

The above shoot with the milk jar went so well that I felt encouraged to finally save up for a dedicated camera for my photography. I researched DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, and settled on a Fujifilm X-T4 mirrorless camera after reading about how DSLRs are being phased out. It also would have a much shorter learning curve compared to the DSLRs.

The above image was the result of my first shoot using my Fujifilm camera in 2021, and to this day I consider it to be one of my best photos. At the time, I still had Photoshop CS3 and couldn’t upload my RAW (or .RAF in the Fujifilm file format, as you can see in the above snapshot of my library) photo files into Photoshop, so I edited this in JPEG. The great thing about photography is you always have the original files with you, and so you can always go back and do more edits, or edit your photos differently. I’ve made multiple other variations of this photo with different color schemes, and as of fall 2023 I now have a subscription to Adobe Photoshop, so I can edit it again in RAW in the future.

I hope you enjoyed my summarized journey as an artist, as well as hearing about my stance on AI. I want to provide a word of warning to anyone reading this that, as much as we want it to, AI will likely never go away and it will continue operating on a model of plagiarism, as well as have an adverse effect on the environment due to the way it currently functions. That doesn’t mean we should all give in and start using it to create art or writing, but it does mean the future is going to look very different, and I don’t know when or how fast it’s going to happen, or what it will look like when it does.

The true scale of AI goes far beyond art and writing. In a society with economic equality where everyone’s needs would be met as well as respect for fellow human life and the environment had become the norm, AI could revolutionize our lives and move us closer to a world where everyone is free to work towards the common good while pursuing happiness and living healthy, sustainable lives.

However, we do not currently live in that type of society. As I said, I don’t know what the future looks like, but I don’t believe we are prepared for the changes that will take place. Technology is currently used to funnel wealth towards the upper echelons of society rather than to make life better for everyone, and so we’re going to see more changes in that direction as AI solidifies its footing. We’re already seeing it happening right now.