Blog / 2025 / A Declaration about AI in My Art and on My Blog

Since the end of May, this text appears in the footer of every page of my site:

Gwenn Seemel believes in a world where artists are fairly compensated for their work and protected against technologies that circumvent the ethical and equitable treatment of creative people. For this reason, Gwenn does not use generative AI when making art, videos, or writing.

As statements go, it’s fairly mild.

I don’t emphasize the way that AI is killing our already-vulnerable planet with its outrageous energy consumption. I avoid talking about how it reinforces biases, because it’s been trained on problematic data. And I don’t mention that it lies. (I know the term that tech bros prefer is “hallucinating,” but there’s no reason for us to use their purposefully misleading language.)

Instead, I focus on one of the central messages of my work: that artists deserve to be paid for their labor.

The inspiration for posting my declaration came, unexpectedly, from a fellow artist using AI-generated images to illustrate their newsletter. Until this past spring, I’d only ever heard of creatives using this tech to help them write updates. That bothered me as well, but I couldn’t help but feel for them. I too find it difficult to communicate effectively in words, so I understand how the idea of a shortcut can be tempting.

That said, a visual artist tapping AI to illustrate their newsletter was something else entirely.

Lazy was the word that popped into my mind the moment I saw their image of a sketchbook open on a table. It was a pic that would be easy enough for most artists to snap themselves, but, in that newsletter, it was captioned: “image generated by ChatGPT.”

Unkind is where I went next, reflecting that this person felt like the tech deserved credit for the “work” it had done cobbling together this image, despite the fact that they had no problem ripping off the artists whose sketchbook photos had been used to train the AI to generate the newsletter image.

The more I thought about this artist’s choices, the angrier I got. It was no small task to convince myself that I should not illustrate this blog post with screenshot of their newsletter or provide you with a link to it, and I’m not proud of the fact that there’s still a part of me that would like to shame this person. If I’m sharing the intensity of my reaction with you, it’s only because it helped me clarify my feelings about AI.

In the past three years, I’ve blogged that the tech itself isn’t the problem, instead blaming the people behind AI. I’ve spoken about the betrayal of Milan Art Institute labeling my art as AI-generated and the creepiness of ChatGPT learning my name. I’ve lamented the way this tech strips images of context and makes art boring.

In all that, I’ve never come down strongly as anti-AI, but with this blog post and my footer statement, I am.

Every time you use AI either for play or as a way to do a little less work, you’re harming artists of all kinds, including writers. Please stop feeding this tech with your curiosity. Don’t help it get better at imitating humans. AI needs to be regulated before it can be truly useful, because, at this point, it’s sickeningly lucrative for the billionaires and world-ending for the rest of us.