AI images are quick and easy to make. They look great at first sight, and they quickly replaced the use of stock images. But, like everything cheap and easy, they come with trade-offs. A short critique of the pure AI image.

Where AI differs is its interaction with data and rights. Unlike coding assistants trained on open-source software, most commercial image generation tools are trained on copyrighted work. It’s a non-consensual, extractive practice in an already-precarious industry. It’s always hard to put the tech genie back in the box, but I think this is a case w... See more

It’s been a while since a particular piece of technology has felt as fraught, efficient, and consequential as today’s text-to-image AI art-generation tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney.