utopia, 08 march 2026

Degenerates

I have one long essay on LLMs, as I think I mentioned, which I can't bring myself to write because I can't make myself spend that much time and effort on something which will be too long to get anyone to read.

What I may not have said is I have another long essay, on generative art and what it did to DeviantArt when DA let it flood in, which I actually wrote, realized it tried to do too many things and was disjoint to the point of being incoherent, and which I sidelined until such time as I could clean it up and focus it. Which I don't want to do, because, time, effort, nobody reads ... you get the idea.

Today I learned that one of the artists whose Studio resources I buy fairly often has produced a kit which is (to his credit, clearly and unmissably) labelled as containing generative content.

OK, that's not what he said. He said it contained AI-generated content. But we do not use 'AI' as a term for these tools in this house. It is a very corrosive lie. There is no intelligence involved, and trying to get you to think there is is the main propaganda tool the Altmans of the world are using to get you to swallow their bullshit, and the reason hapless young men talk to ChatGPT like it's a human being and become even more unfit for society than they already were. Again: Stop calling this stuff AI. I don't know how many times I'm going to have to shout this.

I'm not going to buy a kit from this person that contains generative materials. I've already bought a couple of kits (from a different provider) which snuck in some generative art, using it for posters and the things on video screens within the larger set, and I'm a little peeved about that, especially since a panel with one of those screens showed up in one of my stories and I had to put a disclaimer in about it when I posted the story on DA. (It's somewhere in "Isabelle's Parlor Tales." If you're really bored, you can try to find it.)

Now I'm going to tell you a secret.

If generative art weren't utterly morally indefensible -- if it were somehow freed of its crucial faults and shortcomings -- if it could be used in good conscience, without destroying things -- I would use it in a heartbeat.

I have said it before and I will say it again: I do not like having to do anywhere from two to four weeks of renders just to get out a fucking story. The renders are not the fun part. Well, setting them up is sometimes fun, but most of it is sitting around waiting, and the waiting is just invasive enough, and needs attending often enough, that it makes it difficult to do other things while you wait. Writing the story was the fun part. But by the time I start the renders, the story is effectively already written: Two to three hours of story, then two to three weeks of waiting on the goddamned renders.

So why do them at all? Because no one will read the story if I just present it as a text story, because reading longform text is dead. It was dying even before the general decline in critical thought and reading comprehension. Now it is well and truly dead. The images, as I have said before, are the loss leader to get people to read the story.

I have a fairly high number of people who do still read -- in fact, who read a lot -- among my friends and online acquaintances, and each and every one of them rankles at that characterization. Hey, they shout, I read! Plenty of people read! Yes, plenty of people still do read. Most people do not, and an overwhelming number of people under the age of thirty do not. Because they are not being taught to. I was brought up as a reader, and honestly sometimes I get impatient with my own stuff. I find text to be a much more efficient delivery device than a visual format. I am also the kind of person who watches YouTube clips muted and with subtitles on because I read faster than they talk. I am not representative, and if you're one of the people who gets annoyed by my "people no longer read" stance, neither are you.

Anyway, the point is, if I could use generative art tools without being evil for doing so, that would be great. Those things are fed by prompts. Prompts are words. Words are what I do. I would make the best prompts. I would be so good at prompting these fucking things you can't even imagine. And I would get the pictures done for my stories in two to three days instead of two to three weeks.

But I can't do that at the moment, because:

1. These tools are based on theft and it's not just an abstract thing. I have a lot of independent artist friends struggling to survive, and they're watching these tools take away their work using art they stole from the artists to do it. That is definitionally adding insult to injury, there.

2. These tools do massive amounts of ecological damage, in the thirst for water and power that wrangling their massive databases requires.

They also don't make very good art, but that, unfortunately, is changing rapidly. We'll discuss that some other day when I eventually get around to cleaning up that essay.

Anyway, I can't use these tools, much as I'd like to, because I have a conscience and morals. And that, short story long, is what's pissing me off about these artists -- whose work I have bought, whose work I have sometimes relied upon to get my own work done -- putting generative materials into their kits. Because it's clear they don't have a conscience or morals.

And once again I have to be bitter about "why do the principled people always lose? Why are the cheating, corrupt assholes the only ones who ever get rewarded for anything? Why do the good people constantly have to shoulder the penalties for the conduct of the bad ones?"

I'm not really in a very good mental place these days.

08 March 2026