Statement on my past use of machine learning in collage/poetry/zines

I've been feeling really weird and ashamed about having created art and poetry using machine learning/"AI"-generated components. I've changed my mind about this over the past eight months or so. I still don't think my process for creating the collages or the poems was particularly unethical or "not art" (I substantially altered and built upon the generated text and images, I did not post or submit anything without clearly indicating it used generated text/images, I didn't get money or clout from making this stuff, and I wasn't employing the technology as a crutch to compensate for a real or perceived lack of artistic/writing ability). But I do think that in the current climate, with "AI" starting to actually replace people's jobs and writing markets being inundated almost to the point of shutdown with "AI"-generated dreck, it's in poor taste and shows a dire lack of solidarity to mess around with "AI" at all, or to posit that it can be used as part of a legitimate artistic practice. It's just too loaded! And it's not necessary-- as previously mentioned, I found it fun to occasionally use as a tool, but it's not something I need to be creative or to experiment with unusual/randomized writing techniques, collage and cut-up, etc.

Furthermore, frankly, as the technology has gotten rapidly "better"/more sophisticated, I've found it less and less interesting to play with, especially when it comes to writing models. It IS really fun to plug an odd sentence or question into a generator, get 40 words of preposterous, surreal, grammatically janky nonsense back, and fashion those 40 words into the core stanza of a poem. It's not fun at all to plug an odd sentence or question into a generator and get 40 words of bland, plausible bullshit back. What would I do with that? What could I do with that? The element of accidental poetry is almost totally gone.

Anyway, I guess this is an accountability post. I was wrong, I probably didn't think hard enough about the implications of messing with this stuff to begin with, and I'm sorry. I haven't done anything involving machine learning in months, and I doubt I will ever again.

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With all of this in mind, I will be keeping the "Shoplifting is Cool" zine up on itch, because it seems to be very popular and I don't think it would actually be the responsible thing to just try and scrub all evidence that I ever did this kind of work from the internet. However, I hope that people will read it in this context. If they enjoy it, I hope they will see how irresponsible, immoral, and greedy use of "AI" technology has turned it from a potentially fun game and creative tool into absolute poison for any principled artist or writer to touch. Not only is it destroying our jobs, the fact that it is destroying our jobs means that only the most boring, craven people on Earth will be using it to make anything. The second thing is a much, much lesser loss to the world of art, but it is still a loss.

I would appreciate it if people did not pay for this zine in the future. They mostly weren't anyway (good!), but if I'm uncomfortable having made this sort of thing, I'm REALLY uncomfortable with the idea of continuing to earn any money off it, even if it's just, like, four bucks.