FAKE

I’ve always enjoyed gifting my close friends personalized drawings, each one carefully designed with small easter eggs that reflect who they are and what makes them special. It’s really satisfying for me to think that every time they look at the drawing they think of the effort I put into it, the love I poured into each pencil stroke. It’s intimate, it’s personal, and it’s entirely handmade.

Now compare that with typing a few words into a prompt box and letting a language model vomit out an image, an image formed by stitching together pixels stolen from thousands of artists who never consented to be part of that data pool. Instructing it to create slop from amalgamating pixels stolen from thousands of people without their consent, I don’t know about you but I would be filled with disgust every time I take a glance at the abomination.

Nothing says love like effort and we seem to be losing that day by day, where are the days of giving something handmade, learning how to make something for the one you love. But we would rather have something instant. The thing about instant gratification, though, is that it’s forgettable. Because without the struggle, without the process, There’s no story. No sauce.

Let’s dive a little deeper. Temporary satisfaction has crept into every corner of our lives. We see it in the food we eat, loaded with preservatives and additives. We feel it when we doomscroll through short-form content, chasing that next micro dopamine hit. It shows up in smoking, drinking, drugs. These are all things we turn to, fully aware they may be detrimental to our health, but still we reach for them, because they make us feel good now. They’re easy. They’re fast. They’re temporary.

Using LLMs to generate art, despite knowing their exploitative nature, comes from the same place (I won’t even discuss their environmental impact as that opens room for deflection). We want that rush of seeing something “created.” We want the satisfaction of feeling productive without having built anything. But that sense of achievement? It’s hollow. It’s fake. The image you get isn’t your work. It’s a vile amalgamation of stolen pixels, pixels which were a part of a beautiful expression of an artist who honed their skills, sought out inspiration and let their art speak for them.