Use of AI ironic and concerning
LETTER
I wanted to touch base this afternoon to express my concerns over the story that arrived in my inbox this morning about Earth Day activities that contained an AI generated image. As a person who writes and shares my own photography in the pages of the RCP occasionally, it was quite upsetting to see an AI generated image shared without any clarification or attribution. I believe that doing so undermines RCP's credibility as a journalistic endeavor. In this age of constant misinformation and deep fakes we must be vigilant about sharing verified, or better yet real, images with news stories, no matter how important or unimportant they might seem.
Secondly, the irony of the fact that this image accompanied a story about Earth Day activities is just a little too rich for me. Generative AI is a massive energy and water vampire and has as yet unmeasured detrimental effects on the planet. The power of the tool is such that there are certainly uses that might justify such enormous energy and environment costs, but a cute picture in a local newspaper surely doesn't meet that bar. I know that as a contributor to the paper I've never been given guidance on the use of AI generated materials in my work. I'm wondering if RCP has an AI usage framework in place, if we don't, we absolutely should.
Jeff Woodward
I would rather not have used the illustrations supplied by the other community league as they were generic, and kind of not very stylish, but this is what they were using. I have no idea at what point or who generated them but yes, it is very ironic in terms of an earth day piece.
As for energy usage, it is true that the companies that hawk and browser-fy AI want us to be dependant on continuous energy waste and that is negative. But, as user of Midjourney and Adobe products, I do see an end. At this point there is NO need to be generating any more low level content like this, all we have to do is RE-USE the wealth of already generated stock content out there. Very soon, all stock art will probably be AI.
I would suggest for a framework that we generally avoid generating content like the one seen in the article but, if need be for time and budget, we be open to using stock content that is already available whether it done by AI or designer. So I am saying, don't waste energy regenerating something that has probably been generated thousands of times. But, at the same time, don't rule out ever using existing AI material for LOW LEVEL content like an event announcement, as a lot of stock resources are already AI.
What are you thoughts on the use of AI whether imagery or writing?