The Only Generative AI You’ll Ever Need

There’s an amazing new AI tool that delivers superior results to anything else you’ve seen and it also happens to be radically simple to use. It’s called paying the artists.

The following is just a small example of how it works, but the same methodology can easily be scaled to work for any size project. I recently decided that I wanted a new profile picture to use on my social media channels. I wanted my new picture to feel like a comic-book style illustration, but without any of the telltale glitches that plague a lot of generative AI artwork. To get the results I wanted, I just followed three simple steps:

1. I identified an artist whose style I wanted to replicate.
2. I took a couple of photos of myself.
3. I grabbed my credit card and I paid the artist to actually draw a portrait for me.

I should mention that this version of “AI” stands for “Actual Intelligence.” Or, if you want to think of yourself as being a content creator, you can call it “Artistic Integrity.”

You don’t need to download any software. Just pay the artists.

Paying other people for services may seem old fashioned in the age of generative AI, but it’s the only ethical way to do business. If the artist that I commissioned for my profile picture (the wonderful Tara O’Connor) had said that she was not interested in accepting new projects or if I had not been able to afford her asking price, that would not be a valid reason for me to take her old work, use it, and then pay her nothing. That’s called stealing.

Consent and compensation are principles that can be scaled up for any organization. For example, if you want to start a technology company (perhaps one that would publish AI software), you have to actually recruit investors who will consent to giving you venture capital and then you will have to give them something of value in return. Even though that’s not a quick or easy thing to do, you can’t take a shortcut by robbing a bank.

Most people would never even consider robbing a bank, so why are people ethically untroubled by stealing art? Perhaps it’s because they imagine themselves as being so close to being artists themselves. They used to draw all the time back in grade school, so they could probably craft some professional quality illustrations if they wanted to spend a little time on it, right?

If you want to be an artist, you can be an artist. If you need help with the parts that fall outside of your particular skill set, that’s okay. Making art is often a collaborative process. But you need willing collaborators. Otherwise you’re not an artist or even a patron of the arts — you’re more like Annie Wilkes in Misery.

Pay the artists.

I understand the instinct to take short cuts. I can’t draw, but I desperately wish that I could. I write graphic novels and visual satires, so my my words are sometimes worthless without illustrations. It would save me months of time if I used generative AI so I wouldn’t have to recruit artists to collaborate with me on projects, wait for them to have an opening in their schedule, and then wait some more while they complete the rough sketches, the final sketches, and the final polished artwork. But unfortunately for me, I respect artists. I respect their talent. I respect their time.

Pay the artists.

The notion that people ought to pay for goods and services is so obvious that it feels painfully stupid to type the words. Toddlers are taught that they can’t just swipe candy from store shelves. Students are taught that they can’t plagiarize the work of other students. And yet somehow grown ups seem to think that stealing is suddenly not only acceptable, but that it is also a good business practice. My social media feeds are laced with posts and advertisements from companies proudly trumpeting behavior that they should instead be shamefully confessing to. Their messaging regularly pushes the notion that if you’re not using AI at work, then you are somehow falling behind. I would argue that if you are using AI, then you are participating in a crime.

Pay the artists.

Here’s a hard truth — there may come a time in either your personal or professional life where you honestly can’t afford to pay the artists. If you don’t have the budget to cover the amount of work that you need to have done, that does not give you the right to simultaneously steal the intellectual property of thousands of writers or artists by using “generative AI” programs that were “trained” on their work without their consent or compensation. You’ll have to find a way to make due without custom artwork until you can raise the money to pay the artist… but please don’t rob a bank to do it.