A picture worth nothing

Yesterday I used ChatGPT to generate a dumb parody logo for a post. I was never going to pay an artist to make it. Without AI, there simply would have been no image, no extra joke.

On the other hand, I feel a sort of visceral disgust when I see AI art in online ads or restaurant food pictures or business signs, at least when they use a generic slop style. When deployed thoughtlessly, the outputs tend to have a slightly sickly quality to them. There’s a really weird trend of faux-claymation YouTube ads right now; before that, it was weird, overwrought AI-generated songs over generic, sad-looking slop people.

I am not broadly anti-AI. There are corners of the internet that would dismiss me simply for acknowledging any use of AI in my work. But I also understand why artists are angry. When your livelihood depends on making images, a tool that can produce an unlimited number of them for almost no money is not an abstract philosophical problem.

At the same time, I find myself making a distinction between uses that replace paid work and uses where the realistic alternative was nothing. Like, do I think Freddie deBoer, hardly an AI booster, is committing a grave sin when he sometimes uses AI to make a jokey blog header? He said it works well with his spontaneous writing style, though he checks Getty Images first. For my old newsletter, I used to get header images mainly from free sites like Unsplash or Pexels. So while I was never going to pay anyone, I guess I could be denying an artist exposure or discovery if I turn to an AI-generated image.

I had a thought that this second category could actually create future demand for artists. AI is making custom images ubiquitous in places where they barely existed before. Personal blogs, one-off presentations and random side projects can all have bespoke art now. Maybe this is the WinRAR model: individuals use it for free, get used to it, and some fraction of them eventually end up somewhere with a budget and production-quality needs.

But there is another model for free and ubiquitous things: online news.

The internet did not destroy demand for news. Because of the internet, we consume more news than ever before (for some definition of news). We just got used to getting it for free.

AI is already cannibalizing staff jobs and freelance rates. The problem could get a lot worse if AI fills the world with more images than ever before while teaching us that any particular image is basically worthless. “I was never going to hire an artist anyway” can be completely accurate in any given case while missing the cumulative effect.

Still, I think the counterfactual matters. A company firing its graphic designer while giving some mid-level manager a Midjourney subscription is not doing the same thing as someone making a joke image for a personal blog that doesn’t earn a dime. But what happens if all of these individually harmless uses add up to a new norm? Bespoke images everywhere, instantly, for free.