This blog will have very few pictures. Mostly text. If that’s too much of a slog for you and you don’t care enough to read, you deserve all the flak you’re taking online and I hope you continue to get lots of it.
Now that I’ve made a suitably provocative statement to draw your attention in… HEY FOLKS! It’s been a minute since I had a chance to sit down at the bloghole and make some words, so I thought I’d return with a nice, controversial subject.
Why? Because it pisses me off seeing people infiltrate creative spaces with stolen slop. Because half of you doing it are ignorant as fuck as to why it’s a problem and it’s about time you listened. Because I’m in a pissed off mood and wanna create some positive rage today. I am my art, what can I say?
WARNING: This blog is going to be FULL of sensitive subjects. Please read on with caution. I don’t want to distress any of y’all.
What I’m not going to do in this article is rehash the same sugar-coated arguments about why it’s a problem. I’m not going to be gentle. I’m going to talk about exactly why generative AI needs to get in the bin and why everyone using it and making excuses, seems to be on the global shitlist. If you don’t understand why people are so mad at you for your AI Instagram profile pic, read this article. If you don’t want pandering disguised as nuance, read this article. We’re going to talk dirty truths… and I better get on with it, because this intro is long af.
To make this easy for everyone, whichever side you’re on, I’m going to break it down in to subtopics. That way if there’s a particular part of the debate that you already feel well informed on, you can choose to skip that bit.
Artists, after a day of making art.
Section 1: Theft
Generative AI Art is theft. There’s no ethical use. There’s no middle ground. It’s theft. This is something I, myself, have had to become better educated on, because believe it or not a couple of years ago I was also in the whataboutist camp.
AI is trained by showing it lots of real, human made art, photographs, videos etc. It then copies elements of those that match your prompt and spits out a generated construction that mashes them all up and blends them together in a way that it thinks makes sense. There’s a clue in the name. Generate. Not create. Not MAKE… generate. Like how steam generates electricity. Steam doesn’t MAKE electricity, it powers a machine to spin a thing to do another thing. The components of the machine were MADE, but the electricity was GENERATED. You following?
The catch is that in almost all cases, the artists, videographers, photographers, fuck… even the PEOPLE in the pictures don’t get given a chance to consent to its use. The machine just takes it, analyses it and adds it to its wank bank of things to copy without permission. There’s a good reason you can reliably make “Ghibli style” or “Disney style” images with generative AI… because it has a massive sample pool from which to steal reference material.
Simply put, every single time you generate an image using your favourite clanker, you are stealing from people who work their asses off every day and fight for their lives to stay afloat. You are directly taking food from their table. This includes when you edit a picture (say to make it look like you, but 80’s!), rather than make a new one. The robot still does the same thing.
I don’t want to go in to too much detail here, but this same technology can also be used to create… pdf material (I hope you know what I’m saying), for their enjoyment too. Think about where it learns what kids faces look like for a minute. It literally makes me sick. It should make you sick too.
Section 2: Poverty
Data centres don’t get built in nice neighbourhoods… they get built where people are piss poor and no-one cares if their lives become worse. They drink up enough water to keep them cool, to cause localised droughts. They drink up enough electricity during peak use that localised blackouts are routinely reported in areas near them. The brains that power your favourite clanker are directly ruining the lives of poor people.
Datacentres pump out so much heat that they raise the local temperature in the areas they’re in. When the grid can’t handle the strain, they build more substations… who pays for that? The community, in their electricity bill. Pressure drops in water systems have been reported to be causing taps to deliver brown sludge instead of water.
All sounds rather extreme doesn’t it? Hard to believe… yet it’s all right out there. It’s been studied. It’s been reviewed. universities are publishing papers. These aren’t nebulous statistics or made up musings, they’re well evidenced problems being inflicted on some of the most vulnerable people in society.
A wanky flier that looks like ass isn’t worth a single person suffering this, nevermind a whole community… what are we doing folks?!
Even if you’re a little less poor, but not quite a super rich tech bro… you’re still being shafted! Have you noticed that phones, laptops, PCs and the like have SHOT up in price in recent years? They have… do some comparative shopping and you’ll be shocked at just how much. Even second hand devices are shooting up because demand is so high and no-one can afford new now.
That’s not (entirely) caused by manufacturer greed… it’s almost entirely caused by parts shortages placing a premium on what little is available. And why? Datacentres. We’re already in the middle of a global financial crisis. Wages don’t keep up with inflation. Freelancers are pressed to near breaking. TWO full-time wages can’t buy a house any more (when you could do it handily on ONE, a few decades ago)… and now personal electronics are another added cost. Great!
Section 3: you’re getting dumber
Well maybe not you specifically… but people in general. Especially kids. When so much of our thinking is being outsourced and the answers or outcomes placed in the palm of your hand, you have no need for creativity, discriminative thinking, logic, reason… it’s all useless. So long as you have a phone, tablet or computer nearby, you don’t need to know anything.
When I were a lad, you’d get taken the piss out of if you had to Google the answer to something. But a basic (non-AI helper) Googling is levels above just asking the slop machine. Back then Google would direct you to a website that MIGHT have the answer you needed and leave you to read up and research. There was a non-zero chance it would be a bust and you’d have to keep searching and reading. The very act of needing to know something would force you to learn other things, just to obtain the information you wanted.
Teachers in 2026 are reporting that students are now completely incapable of independent thought. In the States, I’ve seen a few anecdotes (with receipts) of teachers having to record their class in vertical Tik-Tok like format video and let kids watch it on their phones, to get them to pay attention. I watched (with a lump in my throat) a teacher crying in to a camera because one of her students was trying to swipe the page of a physical textbook to see more.
We all love to laugh and take the piss out of the six-seven, skibbidy toilet, on god, no cap bullshit coming out of Gen Z and Gen Alpha mouths… but what chance do the poor fuckers stand? Their language and how inane it sounds to us are a direct product of their environment. They all have phones, they all outsource their every thought to robots and now we, the older generation are lazily doing the same, instead of showing them a better example.
If you look at kids in 2026 and cringe… maybe have a think about what you can do to help them? What we definitely shouldn’t be doing is contributing to the problem.
Section 4: Examples
It’s time to talk about real life now… this section is about ME. What I see in my world, every day. I’m willing to bet it’s probably very similar to what you see too… so lets imagine these scenarios together as I regale you with tales of my actual real life in the AI hellscape.
Wank flyers: I have left almost every single local group and “spotted” group on Facebook recently. Why? I am absolutely sick to my back teeth of every local group, fundraiser, small business and event having the same wanky AI flyer. You know the one. Three to five little circles with an icon in them and a bullet point below. The massive skidmark swipe behind the text. The double stroke outlines on everything. The subject photo that looks like it’s been bukkaked its so shiny.
I even offered in two of my local groups to MAKE flyers for people at stupid cheap prices (£20 a pop). I got plenty of comments supporting the fuck AI movement… but not a single business, group or fundraiser took me up on the offer of a cheap af flyer. These people don’t even WANT human made. Even when it’s the price of a packet of smokes.
Hairdressers and Takeaways: I took a walk around Loughborough a few weeks ago… a uni town in the Midlands. Not a deprived town particularly, but not mega rich either. A pretty average UK town… but again.. A UNI TOWN. A place not only FULL to bursting of creatives… but STUDENT creatives… who would LOVE some gig work for cheap.
I shit you not, almost every single takeaway, food truck and hairdresser in that town has collectively taken the decision to stop showing you their products, and instead show you what a robot thinks their products should look like. Why in the sugar-frosted fuckbags would anyone in their right mind buy a burger from a business that refuses to show them what their actual burger looks like? I don’t want a shiny double stroked burger with a skidmark behind it and cum dripping from the lettuce. I genuinely, unashamedly would rather see your frozen £1 rat patty and stale bun. It’s more appetising.
The entire high street, of one of our countries precious creative and intellectual bastions is peppered with AI logos, pictures and A board signs. Despair is not the word.
And the hairdressers? How in the fuck can I trust you to cut my hair if I have NO IDEA what your haircuts look like? I don’t want to see a shiny plastic boy with a razor perfect parting… I literally just want to see examples of you doing the thing you do for 8 hours a day, every day… it’s not exactly hard for you to find them.
This isn’t isolated to Loughborough either. A trip to Hinckley not long ago was the same. Every little fair and craft show I attend seems to have more and more of it. Fuck the local COUNTRY FAIR… ya know, that celebrations of local hand crafts and the like? Inside the CRAFT tent there was an 18 foot stall literally just jammed end to end with AI images lasered on to coasters and the like.
The WRAP UP
So… why am I making this blog? What’s the actual reason?
I just need to try to help you understand… to be honest. I need to at least know I’ve said my piece. Because every single day, my creative business comes under greater and greater threat from this shit. My ability to feed myself, my partner and our beautiful pets, is being strained.
I think my sense of alarm is probably a product of my age. I was born in 1985. I am part of the generation who pioneered internet use at home. The MSN generation. The first kids to have high speed access in their living room. I have both the tech literacy of a person who’s used computers most of their life, but also the childhood memories of not having them. I got my first DUMB phone at 15. I was probably 20 before I had a smartphone, at best.
Yesterday I saw a VERY popular Instagram miniature painter has released a set of brushes. Made in collaboration with a brand who is supplied by the same company who stole my stuff and nearly put me out of business. AI art all over the box. Insert thank you card with an AI portrait of the mini painter. Same set of brushes that about 10 other brands have too, just with a different paintjob on the handles. People WILL lap it up. They’ll buy it, post about it, celebrate it. Yet everything about its existence is morally and creatively bankrupt…and it’s a fucking paint brush set. The very tools we use to make art, championing its destruction. I left that factory because the used my stuff with AI… others are embracing it.
Is this really what we want our beloved hobby to devolve in to? It doesn’t start in miniature painting. It starts in culture. It starts by normalising theft, normalising shitting on the poor, normalising making people stupid. The more normal it becomes, the less you care. The less you care, the more people can profit from that very same theft and exploitation.
We have to be better than this folks. I cannot allow myself to believe that we, as fans of a creative, artistic hobby are happy to keep supporting this shite and letting it deconstruct everything we’ve built.
Fuck me, I’m no Warhammy-Pilled mega fan (even if I have bought tone pro lol)… but James Workshop even has a strict no AI policy. If those greedy buggers see the problem, I don’t think it’s unfair to ask you to, either.
Please stop with the shit AI logos. The shit AI flyers. The shit AI animations of your miniatures walking off of their bases and taking a poo in front of the camera. Whatever it is. Just lay off… for your own sake.
Cheers.
