Issue 5 - My personal AI guidelines.

Hello! This is Issue 5 of Delve, and this time, I want to tell you about the way I responsibly use AI in the work.

Some of you might be wondering:

Why do you, the person who criticises AI images all the time, use it? Sounds hypocritical to me…

The reason I criticise AI-generated images is due to something quite simple: the basically infinite array of free photos on the internet and free editing software (Paint and GIMP are two great examples). Instead of stealing billions of pieces of artwork by generating an image (the models used are trained on massive collections of unlicensed artwork), why don’t you make it yourself or find a free photo online?

The way I use AI is quite different however. In simple terms, this is what I go by: “if no-one was going to get paid/employed for this job, there’s no harm.” As a good example, say I have an error in some code I’m writing and it’s super obscure, so I don’t know how to fix it. I would use AI in that scenario. No-one was going to get paid for that finding that error.

Another scenario I would use AI in is complex background removal. For example, I used to have a personal Ebay store, which I sold my old board games on. I would use tools like Photoroom and remove.bg to get rid of backgrounds. In that scenario, no one was gonna be paid for that job. But, if it was as simple as removing a white background from an image, then I’d just open paint.net and use the magic wand to remove it.

That’s all the ways I do use AI, but I will never use it for:

• Image generation
• Entire website generation
• Writing blogposts/descriptions

If I do use it in any of these ways, call me out straight away. I’ve clearly gone crazy and broken my own guidelines.

Well, see you later!