The Only Weapon Against AI is Embarrassment

AI is powerful, but bullying is more powerful.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

When I first started writing on Substack, I used ChatGPT to create my images.

I know, boooo, I’m so evil! This didn’t seem like a problem to me at the time for several reasons:

• I wasn’t pretending I had created them myself, I openly admitted they were ChatGPT

• They didn’t replace the labor of a “real” artist, because I was never planning on hiring an artist to create imagery on extremely short notice for my daily articles

• If I didn’t have access to ChatGPT, I simply wouldn’t have added an image at all

• I didn’t (and still don’t) use ChatGPT for my actual writing, which is the main reason people subscribe

At first, I thought ChatGPT imagery was a really interesting and useful tool that helped me add a visual thumbnail to my written work. To be honest, I still think it was basically fine. But I stopped doing it, because people just kept getting mad at me for it. They’d start by innocently asking if I had a source for where I got such a “cool image.” (Sure, Jan.) Some people would tell me I was directly putting artists out of work and ringing in the AI apocalypse. Other people would tell me that the use of an AI image meant my entire article—none of which was written by AI, despite em dashes such as these—was “slop.”

Eventually, I realized I had access to free stock images via Substack, which was a complete game changer. I don’t know if every account has this feature, but if you do, you should totally use it. Whew, crisis averted. Now I only have to feel guilty about buying from Amazon, buying things I don’t need, going on international flights, and going on my phone all the time.

Obviously, the AI toothpaste is not going back in the tube, but we may be able to keep AI out of art and writing, simply by bullying people who employ it. It worked on me! Moreover, you might not even need to bully. What if AI-generated art and writing is actually genuinely so much worse?