I’ve been in this hobby for 30+ years now. And since I am an early adopter of the internet I followed some creators for a very long time.

But things are changing fast and some things I cannot tolerate any longer. And that is the use of AI/LLM for creating pictures. [No, you’re not creating art you tell a machine to slop together pixels]

Why can I not tolerate this? For two main reasons (possibly more but I don’t think i need to get into more detail on this)

1. Picture generating AIs are trained on stolen material. Full stop. End of line. If you don’t understand why using stolen goods to your advantage is wrong then I can’t help you.
2. Every generated picture (and I mean every iteration of your prompt slop and not just the one you put into your project or on your video thumbnail) has a massive environmental impact. If you want to read more about it go here.

So what is hurting me? The simple fact that I started to unfollow, unsubscribe and to even block people on the basis of their careless use of AI.

„But I can’t create these pictures myself!“ – have you even tried? And why must your thumbnail be in Studio Ghibli style? Just try it. Learn a new skill. Will it be perfect? Hell no. But it will be yours. Own your art.

AI has it’s use cases and has some pretty interesting fields to be used in. But creating thumbnails for your videos ain’t one.

Most people reading this probably won’t care and that’s fine. Everyone has to draw a line for themselves somewhere. Mine is here.  Thank you for reading.