03/28/2025
The many artistic & ethical problems with AI imaging stealing from photographers and other artists.
Someone passed my photo through OpenAI's new image model, and no matter their intentions being well-meaning, seeing this as the original artist just makes me feel like s**t.
I did this series when my work wasn't being as accepted and was viewed as neither commercial nor fine art enough for either worlds. So I shot in my apartment, with flowers one of the few props I could afford. And for this shoot I sat with a team and applied petals onto the model, one by one.
The final work is a crystallization of that experience and memory of those times, it's proof of the days l'd lived.
An Al didn't sit there placing petals onto my model, and it feels like an insult to the memory when people go "Al can do this!", like no actually, I did that.
I think this person wanted to show that images with glaze/NS aren’t protected in new models—but this is an img2img, which glaze has always said isn’t what it protects against, and everyone in the space know this. I just don’t need a reminder of how easily people can remove my watermark, try to bypass glaze using models/techniques it wasn’t designed to protect against, or do whatever they want with my work against my wishes.
I can respect how far current gen Al has come from a purely technological point of view—credit to the researchers & scientists, not the marketers, not the prompters—but genuinely, what do we need this so badly for, that it would outweigh all the humanity, stories, and history being stripped away from our lives?
