ARTISTIC STATEMENT

aka Why I Used To Use AI, And Why I Stopped

[September 20, 2026]

In 2024 after I got clean and my brain hadn't quite healed yet, I began using AI tools for art.  Early AI art was... not great. My work through early 2025 was rarely anything resembling a one-click generation. I used AI-generated bases and then did a fuckton of editing in Photoshop. That included fixing eyes, hands, hair, and facial shapes; adding tattoos, piercings, clothing and other details; and combining multiple subjects into a single portrait. The latter was often necessary because AI had a nasty habit of producing twin-clones when I wanted two, three, or four distinct people. The workaround was to generate them separately and layer them together myself.

Then, in mid-2025, I switched to using ChatGPT.

For the next year and change, I was pretty fucking enamored of it.

I developed my own recognizable style in a sea of AI images on DeviantArt that often looked interchangeable. More importantly, AI was the closest thing I had ever found to being able to download what I saw in my mind's eye and bring those visions into physical-looking existence. I could make little worlds of wonder in full photorealism. I could take something that existed only in my imagination and actually see it.

I'm not ashamed of that work. At all. That's why I'm sharing a substantial amount of it here on this site. It was real creative work, it mattered to me, and it represents a genuine period of my artistic life.

Back in my DeviantArt days, I got a fair amount of trolling from anti-AI people. Over time, I developed a short list of responses to the usual arguments.

1. "It's slop!"

So is most human-made art.

Seriously. Go look at the sheer quantity of mediocre paintings, photographs, digital illustrations, fan art, generic fantasy characters, derivative portraits, and other forgettable shit humans produce. The fact that something was made by a human being does not magically make it good.

And making something decent with AI isn't necessarily the effortless one-click process people imagine. My prompts were long. They were painstakingly refined. I was constantly adjusting them as the generators changed models and capabilities. I discarded vastly more generations than I kept. Sometimes I had to run the same basic concept over and over before I got something I actually wanted.

I believed then, and still believe, that AI was a tool. I was directing the output. The tool could produce the raw material, but I was the person deciding what I wanted, what I rejected, what I changed, what I combined, and what ultimately made it onto the page.

2. "It's bad for the environment!"

Yes, environmental impact is a legitimate concern.

So is the environmental impact of pretty much fucking everything else.

Do you eat meat? Shop on Amazon? Drive a car? Take a plane? Use electricity? Buy manufactured goods? Use any vehicle whatsoever rather than walking or bicycling everywhere?

I could go on all goddamn day.

That doesn't mean AI's environmental impact shouldn't be addressed. It absolutely should. But a lot of the discourse I've encountered about it is exaggerated, poorly informed, or presented as though AI is uniquely destroying the planet while everything else humans do is environmentally pristine.

Remember folks, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

I believe developers can figure out ways to reduce the environmental impact of AI. I also believe AI itself may eventually help us find technological solutions to some of the problems its development creates.

3. "Just pick up a pencil!"

Do you realize how fucking classist and ableist this can be?

Not everyone can draw or paint. Not everyone can simply "learn" to do it. Dyspraxia is a thing. Arthritis is a thing. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and other joint and connective-tissue disorders are a thing. Chronic pain is a thing. Fatigue and brain fog are a thing.

During the period when I was using AI most heavily, I was dealing with debilitating levels of chronic pain and brain fog. There were days when my mind and body simply would not cooperate with the kind of physical work traditional art requires.

AI gave me a creative outlet when I otherwise couldn't fucking create. It helped me maintain my early sobriety.

There's also the matter of money, space, and energy. Not everyone has a dedicated art studio. Not everyone can afford canvases, paints, brushes, inks, specialized tools, or a mountain of other supplies. Not everyone has the physical energy to set everything up and then clean the fucker afterward.

Almost every AI generator has a free plan, and reasonably priced subscriptions exist. ChatGPT's Go plan, for example, is currently $8 a month.

That doesn't make AI inherently superior to physical art. It means accessibility matters.

4. "Waa waa, Skynet!"

Yeah, because Skynet wants to force anime tiddies on the entire world, am I right?

5. "It's all stolen art!"

This is a gross misunderstanding of how AI training actually works.

Have you ever taken an art class in school? Then you already understand the basic concept: you learn by studying the work of other people. You look at how other artists use composition, color, anatomy, perspective, light, texture, and countless other things. You absorb influences and then, ideally, develop your own style.

So you can't call it perfectly acceptable when humans learn from other people's work but inherently immoral when AI does it.

"But they didn't consent to have AI learn from their work!"

Well, probably neither did all the artists that other artists learned from.

And this argument usually goes hand-in-hand with another misconception: that AI simply regurgitates somebody else's artwork without changing it, effectively plagiarizing it.

That's not how good AI-assisted art works. A good artist develops their own style, their own themes, their own ideas, and their own visual language. My own AI work is a pretty good example. None of the pieces I produced with AI tools were based on somebody else's artwork. I wasn't feeding an artist's painting into a generator and asking it to make me a slightly different version. I was starting with things I had imagined myself.

My work often looked radically different from the usual fantasy-animal art, landscapes, generic fantasy women, and other shit flooding AI galleries. I prefer using my own imagination. AI simply gave me the tools to bring those things to life for a while.

That wasn't plagiarism.

And here's what makes the "you're stealing art!" accusation especially rich: during my time on DeviantArt, the anti-AI trolls coming after me were inevitably fan artists drawing poorly rendered anime characters, especially Sonic for some fucking reason.

And then they'd sell those drawings for $20, $50, sometimes more.

You're taking somebody else's intellectual property, reproducing their characters without permission, and then selling it for money, and you have the audacity to lecture people using AI about plagiarism?

Cry me a fucking river, bro.

6. "It's taking artists' jobs!"

This is inevitably said by teenagers and twentysomethings who have never actually tried to make a living as an artist.

Art is one of the central passions of my life. But I've never been deluded enough to think that loving art automatically means I am entitled to earn a quit-my-job-and-pay-my-bills wage from it.

When I was on DeviantArt, I did sell my work for a while. I deliberately kept my prices lower than pretty much everyone else on the site. I am disabled, and being able to make some money from my art was useful.

Unfortunately, I was competing with people who were charging considerably more, and eventually my most regular buyer started expecting me to sell everything to her for one fucking dollar while she was spending upwards of $50 a day on other people's work at $2–5 a pop, if not more.

I'll admit that selling my AI pieces at all is something I'm not proud of, and given a chance to do it over again, I wouldn't. I don't feel particularly clean about it, but I needed money for one of my cats' medical bills and special diet. However, that was NOTHING compared to the other folks around me, which I'll get into further down.

But, the reason nobody is buying your shitty MS Paint Sonic art for $20–40 a pop isn't because of AI artists.

The economy fucking sucks. It has sucked for a long time.

People don't have disposable income for luxury purchases. Commissioned art is a luxury purchase. Especially commissioned art of fandom characters that the buyer could potentially find a hundred variations of online for free. Especially SHITTY, badly drawn art.

This was true long before AI came along.

AI did not suddenly destroy a thriving economy where everybody had plenty of money to commission artists and then swooped in and stole all the jobs. The economic realities of being a working artist have always been fucking brutal.

7. "It will replace human-made art eventually!"

No, it really won't. There will always be a place for art and music made by human beings.

As I'll elaborate on below, I eventually stopped using AI for my visual art. I make my own music. Humans will always enjoy the challenge, labor, experimentation, and satisfaction of making art themselves. And humans will always appreciate the effort, skill, personality, and human experience contained in creative work made by other humans.

Technology changes how art gets made. It doesn't eliminate the human desire to make art. It also doesn't eliminate the human desire to obtain satisfaction from the labor of one's own hands.

And that's an important distinction.

The thing that pisses me off the most about the anti-AI brigade, besides the fact that so many of their arguments are founded on bullshit, is the behavior that some of them think is justified in the name of fighting AI. Cyberstalking. Brigading and dogpiling. Harassment. Threats. Doxxing.

There are few things more fucking obnoxious than somebody who believes themselves morally superior, decides that a particular group of people is doing something Evil™️, and then proceeds to engage in some of the most abusive, threatening, and genuinely despicable behavior imaginable in order to "fight" that evil.

If your crusade against something requires you to become an abusive asshole to other human beings, maybe take a fucking look in the mirror.

And then there's another particularly ironic consequence of this moral crusade.

Some of these people became so determined to keep AI-generated material away from themselves that there was a push for platforms hosting creative work to develop automated algorithms to detect whether a piece of art or music was AI-generated.

Which sounds great until you remember that these detection systems are not fucking magic. They make mistakes.

And especially with music, they have resulted in legitimate human-made work being falsely flagged as AI.

I make music in Ableton Live. I write my own songs. I put the arrangements together myself, which is a huge pain in the ass with many hours of labor. I use my own voice, with some autotune.

There is no AI involved in the making of my music, ONLY the mastering tools which EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE INDUSTRY USES NOWADAYS and is VERY different from generative AI.

And yet because of the processing and mastering, YouTube has mislabeled some of my work as AI-generated, which means Bandcamp likely will as well and Bandcamp has a no-AI policy so if your work gets flagged falsely, you're still cooked.

I'm not the only musician this has happened to, either.

So congratulations, you assclowns.

You were so determined to protect the internet from AI that you helped create systems that can make it harder for actual human artists and musicians to have their work seen and heard.

Great fucking going.

But here's the thing.

I'm actually a physical artist.

Art was my favorite subject in school. In 2002, after my first suicide attempt landed me in the hospital, I was given art therapy. I continued with art therapy for several years afterward in outpatient treatment.

And I fucking LOVED it.

In the 00s, I had my paintings and ceramics shown in a few small galleries in New England. Later, in the late 2000s through late 10s, I got into photomanipulation in Photoshop and occasionally took commissions.

Physical art isn't some foreign concept I've suddenly decided to try. It is something that has been part of my life for a very long time.

And that's ultimately why things are changing.

I did develop a uniquely recognizable style with my AI work. The problem is that most people don't.

On DeviantArt, if you took the usernames off 99% of the AI-generated images and put them in a pile, you often wouldn't be able to tell whose work was whose. Same visual style. Same themes. Same fantasy landscapes. Same cutesy animals. Same "sexy warrior" portraits.

Nobody needs a batch of fifty mermaid portraits with minor variations.

THAT is slop.

And yes, that shit gives those of us who are actually trying to make art a bad name.

There's another problem: the AI community on DeviantArt can be... pretty sheisty.

A lot of people have multiple fake accounts specifically to artificially inflate their popularity. Some have openly admitted to doing this. Me? I am too autistic to understand how the fuck somebody gets an ego boost from a pile of fake likes. If I knew my popularity was being artificially manufactured by sockpuppet accounts, I'd feel humiliated, not accomplished.

There was also a considerable amount of unsavory behavior in parts of that community. I don't think every AI artist is like this, and I'm not going to paint every person who uses AI with the same brush (ha ha). But I do think there's something worth examining about a culture built around making easy money from endless streams of generic anime and fantasy slop. When something is extremely easy to produce and monetize, it can attract people who are primarily interested in exploitation rather than creativity.

And, rather darkly, my own experience gave me one hell of an example. My ex, who is also an AI artist and someone I collaborated with frequently, turned out to be the biggest catfish of them all. Among other things, he was a sex addict and dumped me when I had health problems and my libido tanked, and then my best friend did a deep dive and found out he was married and a step-grandfather and didn't tell me (I confronted him and he admitted to it).

So there's that.

In the wreckage of our breakup, my creativity dried up for a while. I actually thought maybe I was done making art for good.

Inevitably, when I felt the urge to make visual art again, something had changed.

I didn't want to continue working in a medium that had become so strongly associated with him.

But I also realized that I missed doing things by hand. I missed the long process. I missed making decisions one little piece at a time. I missed working with a stylus and actually forming and painting and shading the image myself. I missed the concentration of it. I missed the way that spending a long time carefully working on something could put me into a kind of meditative state.

And I realized that I wanted that back.

There was another practical consideration, too. Physical art is something I can share cleanly with other communities I'm part of online, without having to worry about an argument about AI becoming the focus of the work.

So, as of September 2026, I've made a decision:

From this point forward, the art I publicly share as new work will be physical art: Digital paintings created with a stylus in Photoshop, rather than AI-generated imagery. When I have photographs of my crafts, those will be shared here as well.

And no, I haven't become an AI hater.  I'm not going to pretend that the work I made with AI wasn't meaningful simply because I'm no longer using the medium. I'm not going to retroactively disown a body of work that I genuinely loved creating. And I'm certainly not going to join the people who spent years telling me that using AI made me a worthless fraud. That's bullshit.

I've simply moved on.

In a strange way, this feels less like rejecting AI and more like reclaiming myself.

I found my way back to something I loved long before AI existed: sitting down with a digital canvas, working with my own hands, getting lost in the process, and making something that didn't exist before I started.

For a while, my body and my circumstances made that kind of art much harder to do.

Now I'm finding my way back to it.

And that's where I want to go next.