None of my work – none of these blog posts, my resume, increasingly unhinged cover letters, even my linkedin profile – uses ai. I’m working to put together some sort of official statement on that. Like I have a diversity statement on my homepage that I have gotten multiple positive comments from. I want to be clear – everything you get from me is 100% human made.
However.
This is the part that I get hung up on because I do use ai. There are tools in photoshop that use generative ai to “fix issues” – the difference is they are tools that are an improvement on tools I’ve been using in photoshop for two decades. It just means now I can remove that stray human or trashcan or zit from your image in seconds instead of a couple minutes depending on how big or detailed the area I’m working on is. Not a huge deal, but multiply that by the thousands of photos I edit a year and it adds up. Everything else I do is something I could do in the darkroom. It’s also why I won’t make you taller or thinner – those were darkroom skills I never learned haha. Adjusting lighting and contrast, easy peasy. Some things like focus are done in the camera – you like those cool blurry backgrounds? Not ai. That’s my 85mm prime portrait lens with the 1.8f-stop cranked all the way down. As Mr. Demick said in 11th grade photo science: If you have good negatives you can figure everything else out in the dark room. Want to get that blurry background after you shot with the f-stop open super wide so everything is in focus? We’d literally print a photo, cut out the subject with an exacto knife, line that cut out over a new piece of photo paper and reshoot while making the enlarger out of focus. I can do that in photoshop too, as their edge detection tools have gotten better with ai in the last couple of years. Remember back in the day when touching up a photo was a literal job with an airbush system and paint and an artist physically painted in corrections and painted out flaws?
But what I won’t do? Use generative ai to put your kids portrait on the moon. Or create a lame ass social media ad or poster. Why? First off, that kind of shit is a waste of a human’s creative potential. Second, data centers are absolute shit for the environment. Third? Anything you run through ai allows ai to store and learn and read and reference. I do NOT want your images run through ChatGPT or any other thing. I don’t want ai learning your face. I don’t want ai stealing my images and having them show up halfway across the world in someone else’s ai slop. Likewise, you should be thinking about saving money by using your phone to take pics that you’ll then let ai “photoshop.” Nothing is stopping ai from storing those images and using them somewhere – like a creepy guy in a basement in Siberia asks it for a “nice middle class American family with two kids” and your image is the one it generates for him to get off on. Sorry. This should be a legit fear of everyones. It’s not hyperbole.
In the design world, ai produced images are not copyright-able. That logo chat gpt made your small business (instead of hiring an actual human designer and paying them cash money) isn’t technically yours, not to mention the complexities of how ai cannot produce vector images required for printing and that is a whole other blog post right there.
In the future, I’m going to update my client information/contract to include a clause that you promise not to run my images through ai either. While I’ve always said the digital images, aka the negatives, are yours, they are still also my work. I want to protect that, and you, and your kids.
As a graphic designer, I’ll also be following the bigger and better designers out there who are adding clauses to their contracts that their work is not to be used in ai generated campaigns or whatever. If you want to read up more on the pushback against ai in the creative world, start here, or here, or even here. In the short term, if you need to google something, add, “-ai” to your query to not have that pesky ai overview automatically pop up at the top. Hope you learned something here. I left some spelling errors in and bad grammar just to make sure I can’t be accused of having a prompt write this.