Read Me

A repentant note about my past usage of AI-generated imagery

I found the image above on Upsplash. It was taken by a wonderful photographer named Maria Teneva. You can find it here. And since Upsplash explicitly offers this image as part of its free-use license, I can paste it here with a clear conscience.

If you look through my Substack, especially during the serialization of my novel, Only by the Grace of the Wind, you will see that I used quite a lot of AI-generated imagery, which I drew almost exclusively from ChatGPT. My reasons were facile—I’m an untalented visual artist and I wanted to burnish my page to attract readers. At the tail end of 2024, I began to learn about AI and its discontents, and it very quickly dawned on me that I had made a terrible error.

Since then, I have been following AI’s ascendancy with horror and thinking about how to redress what I see as a sort of moral failure. I simply didn’t have the information (or, more accurately, I didn’t seek it out while serializing my novel). In an ameliorative effort, I have begun to compile a glossary of critical texts, podcasts, and other media about AI. You can find an index below. The pieces are arranged by subject and theme, and I hope you will find them edifying. In brief, there is little remaining doubt that generative AI is virtually indefensible, and though we are all slowly becoming dragooned into participating in its insidious proliferation, it should be resisted. Lest there be any ambiguity here, I feel ashamed and a bit sheepish that I mindlessly generated images to accompany my written work and did so little reflection in the early months of ChatGPT’s emergence. I hope my readers, whoever they are, will forgive me for my ignorance and oversight.

As for my artistic sin, I have not yanked the images. Maybe I should. But even the thought of doing so feels hollow, and I know the images will persist in some spectral form in the internet’s memory. In any case, I am committed to never again using generative AI for any reason.

Feel free to sound off in the comments (or better yet, link me to something to add to this growing glossary of AI-critical media).

Yours in contrition,

Ben

A (Growing) Compendium of Critical AI Media:

Artistic Theft:

• Molly Crabapple (the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast)

Environmental Devastation:

• The Atlantic

• Newsweek

• The Dallas Morning News

• The New York Times

• Sasha Luccione on Tech Won’t Save Us

Corrosive to Democracy, Progress, and Human Flourishing:

• Ruha Benjamin

• Paris Marx’s “Data Vampires” Podcast Series

• Data Colonialism (Tech Won’t Save Us Podcast)

• Ed Ongweso’s Amazing Substack

• Brian Merchant’s Outstanding Substack

Exploitation of Labour:

• Time Magazine

• Noema Magazine

Militarism:

• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

TESCREAL:

• Emile Torres on Tech Won’t Save Us

Solutions and Thoughtful Debate(s):

• Boston Review

• “Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty”