Guestbook
As you step into the cozy confines of the town’s quaint post office, the creaking of the wooden door echoes softly in the air. Your gaze is immediately drawn to a colossal guestbook sitting atop a polished mahogany desk. Hovering gracefully above it is a pixie, her soft glow casting a warm ambiance throughout the room. She flutters with excitement as you approach.
“Greetings, esteemed traveler! Your arrival is a welcomed breeze in our peaceful town. Would you be inclined to leave an indelible mark within the pages of our cherished guestbook? Your name and a heartfelt message shall forever grace the tales of those who venture through Satyadasa.”
Her enthusiastic charm becons you closer, inviting you to contribute to the rich tapestry of stories woven by fellow wanderers who’ve passed through this magical enclave.
i loveeeee love the vibe and layout of this site so much, and i love the writing you have done on free speech! i genuinely wish this site did not use generative AI, which steals from small artists and makes it more difficult for artists to find work as well as destroying the environment. i understand everyone can do what they please with their own site. but using generative AI on the small web seems so contradictory to everything else published here. i hope you will consider supporting real artists and commissioning pieces for this site rather than leaving the AI images on here.
Hey there! I appreciate you sharing your stance on AI with me. I understand people have very strong feelings on generative AI, and AI in general, and understandably so. However, this seems like a great opportunity to also share my stance on it as it’s a topic that has come up here before. Before I dive into that though I just want to say that I appreciate you keeping your comment here respectful, despite your strong feelings on the topic.
I’ll start by saying there are certain aspects of AI I think are very useful and certain aspects I think are really harmful. It is one of those things that I do not think is black and white, totally bad or totally good. AI is a tool, and ultimately, whether it is a good tool or a negative tool depends on the person using it, what their morals and intentions are and how they use it. Just as a knife can be used as both a tool or a weapon, so can AI. But ultimately, it is not the knife that is bad if it is used to cause harm, it is the person’s intent and the person’s action using the knife that ultimately causes harm, and I think that is an important point to keep in mind.
When it comes to AI artwork, I am not 100% against it as most people are, but I am in some circumstances. I think it does need to be regulated, and there needs to be laws around ethically training AI if it is going to be used to generate artwork. No artist should have their work trained on without their consent, and AI needs to be labelled if it received ethical training on consenting artists work. Thankfully, there are tools starting to surface to help combat unauthorized training on artwork. If you’re an artist who might be interested in that, let me know and I’d be happy to share resources to help you protect your art. 😊
I do use some AI artwork on my personal website. Much of it are placeholders at the moment, which I have slowly been replacing over time with my own dioramas from Tiny Glade, and AI edits of my own photography. I haven’t quite gotten around to replacing everything yet, but eventually, most unmodified AI artwork on my site will be replaced. The reason I’ve used it in the first place is that is has acted as a great tool to help me visualize the vibe I want for my website. I want to create a space that feels like a living, breathing, world of its own. I am not an illustrator, creating visuals like that are not my forte, so it has been great to lay the foundation for the direction I want my site to go with things I am imagining in my mind. I think for personal non-commercial use, I don’t see anything wrong with generative AI at all. I think in circumstances where it is taking jobs away from real artists (ex. Companies using AI art for advertising, video game companies using AI voice overs instead of voice actors, and circumstances like that that take away paid opportunities from real people), it is wrong and unethical. If AI is training on people’s artwork without consent, and then companies use that artwork to make a profit, that is taking the job away from that artist whose work was trained on.
However, I think for personal use, circumstances that isn’t intended for profit, it is not morally wrong or unethical to use generative artwork. It’s a great tool for creating temporary placeholder art, it’s a great tool to use for visual inspiration and to spark new ideas, and I also think using generative artwork as a base to edit and create new art off of is not wrong either, so long as you are changing it in such a way to create something new and make it your own. Professionally, I am not an illustrator, but a photographer and graphic designer. Illustration is not my forte, I am not good at it, but I am very good at image editing. The NPCs on my website will remain as generative art characters, however they will all eventually have my own edits made to them that will make them more of my own creation and look significantly different from the original generations. Additionally, I will be using AI on my own artwork; my photography, to make it look illustrated and remain consistent with my website. I think using my own artwork and creating AI edits with it is another ethical use of AI.
I think there are a lot of grey areas when it comes to generative AI. I think there are ethical uses of it that make it an incredible creativity and productivity tool, and I also think that people can use it to cause a lot of harm, not only to the artist community, but by creating deception and using AI to try and convince people events happened that never did or people saying things they never said. I think the negative ways it can be used can be disastrous and we are going to reach a point where we can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fiction. But here’s the thing; AI is here, and now that it is here, it is not going anywhere. Instead of being 100% for AI or 100% against AI, I think it would be far more productive to start taking a step back and ask ourselves: what are ethical uses of AI, and what are unethical uses of AI? Start defining both instead of labelling all uses of it as totally evil when it’s not. I think that is a very important place to start. This way we can start actually pushing for regulations around it that stop the use of it in ways that cause harm, while preserving its positive, more ethical uses.
All that being said, that’s where I stand with generative AI. While I understand the strong feelings of others, ultimately this is a personal project that does not bring me any profit, so I strongly disagree with there being any moral dilemmas regarding my use of generative AI. If I was creating and selling unmodified generative AI artwork on my site, that would be a different story, but that is not the case here. It is all for personal use and is not practical for me to spend hundreds of dollars commissioning a bunch of artists to decorate this space that’s purely just a creative hobby of mine. While it may go against what many in the Small Web believe, I’m not here to compare myself or my site to anyone else. I’m here to carve my own path; different, if it needs to be. This site is my home. Visitors are welcome, but I’m the one who owns it, who puts time, energy, and intention into every piece of it. No one else gets to dictate what I share or how I show up. If someone wants a voice in the Small Web to express a different stance, they’re free to build their own site and use that space to express themselves. That’s the point; freedom. Not everyone has to agree and follow the same code. I didn’t leave the corporate web to escape one kind of control just to be boxed in by another. Social constructs don’t belong here unless you choose to let them into your own space. I’ve chosen not to—and that’s valid. There are no universal rules to the Small Web. Just people owning their own corners of the web. If someone wants to follow a set of guidelines, that’s their right—but it’s not a requirement. The only space you need to worry about is your own.
I hope all of this makes sense, and again, I appreciate you being respectful. I fully support you in your fight against the commercial use of generative AI art, so may that be where we find common ground on this topic. ✌️
I hope all who sees this has a blessed day and a prosperous future.
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Thank you for your lovely comment, Usare. 🙂 Have a blessed day and prosperous future as well!