A Declaration Against The Automation Of Creativity

Keep your algorithmic mitts off my work.

I have no objection to machines making images. 

What I object to is the increasingly bizarre cultural fantasy that the appearance of creativity is somehow equivalent to creativity itself—that a machine can manufacture something that looks like the result of human skill and everyone is supposed to politely pretend nothing meaningful has been lost.

Creativity is not a button you push. It is years of practice, failure, obsession, experimentation, taste, judgment, curiosity, muscle memory, and an alarming number of hours spent making things that looked absolutely terrible before they finally looked good.

So no, I’m not particularly interested in watching human beings spend decades developing creative skills only to be told that their greatest contribution to the future is apparently serving as free training data for the machine that will eventually imitate them.

And while we're clearing things up:

All photographs, artwork, jewelry designs, written material, and other original creative content appearing on this website are the intellectual property of the creator.

My work is mine. My creative voice is mine. My labor is mine.

They are not an all-you-can-scrape buffet for someone else's generative AI.

No content may be scraped, copied, reproduced, appropriated, used as training data, or incorporated into generative artificial-intelligence systems without express written permission from the creator.