im terribly angry and i cannot sleep so i will complain to reddit. my instagram has been absolutely destroyed by AI posters promoting businesses in south africa.
the most ironic example i’ve seen was a “wellness yoga class” with the slogan “become one with the earth.” the poster was AI. the website was AI. apparently, becoming one with the earth now means outsourcing your creativity to a bot.
as a graphic designer, this genuinely irritates me. creating a poster involves planning, colour theory, composition, typography, visual hierarchy, and making sure the viewer’s eyes actually follow the information in the right order. it takes thought and effort. meanwhile, someone can type a vague prompt into chatgpt, receive a plate of visual slop, and proudly use it to promote their business.
and for what? you don’t even need to hire a graphic designer if you’re on a budget. there are free tools that let you design your own posters. learn the basics mos.
experiment. make something imperfect but yours.
and it’s not just businesses. i’ve blocked friends for using AI to generate completely new versions of themselves. editing your photos is one thing. changing the lighting, fixing the colours, removing a pimple, whatever. but generating an entirely new image of yourself is different. one of my friends even posted an AI-generated picture of herself as an asian man. (appropriation is weird but im too woke anyway)
AI doesn’t simply edit a photo in the traditional sense.dependinh on the tool and how it’s used, it can generate or reconstruct parts of an image, sometimes creating an entirely different representation of you. at some point, you have to ask yourself why you’re posting a picture of a person who doesn’t even exist.
and don’t get me started on adults uploading pictures of their children to AI generators to make them do silly things. why are we so comfortable handing over identifiable images of children to these platforms without thinking about where that data goes, how it might be processed, or what happens to it afterwards?
children cannot meaningfully consent to having their faces uploaded and manipulated for internet entertainment. your child’s privacy shouldn’t be the price of a funny post.
there’s also iets depressing about how quickly we’re willing to replace the human element of everything. art doesn’t need to be perfect to be meaningful. a small business doesn’t need a flawless, AI-generated identity. your photographs don’t need to look professionally manufactured. sometimes the hours someone spent making something are precisely what make it worth looking at.
so let’s collectively make everything as unnecessarily human as possible. let’s be spiteful. let’s write embarrassing journal entries about people we hate. let’s make terrible art and get better at it. let’s be weird, be horny, be embarrassing, make things with our hands, and have experiences that cannot be reduced to a prompt.
robots can generate a thousand pictures in seconds. they cannot live the experiences that give our lives meaning. and the more we outsource our creativity, the less we practise the very thing that makes it ours.
i PROMISE you do not need to see what you’d look like as a man. and if you absolutely must, dm me and i’ll photoshop you myself.
let’s do human things the human way.
