Ah yes, the classic ableism argument of why you shouldn't use generative AI art.

Ah yes, the classic ableism argument of why you shouldn't use generative AI art. A quick side note from that, did you know that the artist Neil Harbisson can't see color and therefore uses an antenna attached to his head to actually hear the sounds of the color to make these beautiful images? But that John Bramblitt actually feels the paint on his canvas here. And the reason he has to do that is he's fucking blind. Or how the artist Henri Matisse had such horrible medical complications toward the end of his life, he stopped making portraits and instead turned to paper collages, making these incredible images. Or how the artist Renoir makes these gorgeous, gorgeous portraits despite the fact that he has fucking muscular atrophy, my guy. I mean, hell, even looking at the grand masters of the Renaissance, Michelangelo, who painted the Sistine Chapel, is believed to have had either gout or osteoarthritis so bad, he experienced active pain in his hands every single day of his life. All this obviously ignores a very crucial central part of this, which is that you didn't actually make anything when you use AI slop. You're not an artist. You just had some other tool make something for you. It's the equivalent of commissioning an artist and then saying, I did this. I'm the artist. No, you're not. Someone else is the artist. This is what I mean when I say if you really needed to be an artist or needed your art to be created, you would make it happen because the truth is, there are an infinite number of ways to be an artist. Art's not a narrow subset or a narrow category. It can take all shapes and sizes and people of all disabilities can make art. This includes not only physical disabilities, but also attention-based disabilities. It's believed by some modern scholars that Da Vinci may have had ADHD due to the many, many projects he would start and then completely be unable to finish. And ever being entirely honest, just looking at the present day, almost all artists will tell you they struggle with attention span issues. Myself included, I am a literary and performance artist and I struggle with it all the time and I have systems in place to make sure that I can have those attention span issues but still get work done. Whenever anyone cries the disability argument when it comes to generative AI and accessibility, I get really sad both because it discredits the incredible work being done by disabled artists, but also because it completely misses the point of art. Because art isn't about making pretty pictures. It's about making the image, whether it's literary, visual, audio, whatever, that only you in your specific identity can make. One of the reasons Van Gogh is considered one of the greatest artists of all time is not just because he put in the work to be able to become such an incredible artist, but also because he saw the world in a way that many people just can't. I hear people say I suck at art because of my disability and therefore need AI to create. All I actually hear is I am not proud enough or comfortable enough with myself and my own vision of the world to be able to present that to other people. I want to present how other people see the world, how other people create in this world and present that as my own because I wish I viewed the world through that lens. That's why you're not an artist, because you aren't showing the world through your lens. You want to show the world through someone else's lens. And when we refuse to embrace our own lens of the world and our own interpretation of our ideas into an artistic reality, all we end up doing is choosing to allow ourselves to be more invisible. Because I'm going to be honest, friend, I went onto your page and I looked at those AI images of yours and they look like every single person's images from every other page doing the exact same thing that you are doing. By surrendering to the idea that you can't make art, which I promise you you can if you really wanted to or needed to, you have chosen to make yourself even more invisible. All that's of course ignores the fact that AI relies on stolen content, is actively cooking the planet, uh uses up a crazy amount of energy and is actively giving people cancer in the places where the data center is used to power it are maintained, right? Even if it wasn't for anything I just said, even if everything I just said right now is bullshit, um you're still a bad person for using it so actively. But yeah, um TLDR, disabled artists have existed for basically as long as art has existed and to pretend you need this tool in order to create art is a discredit to those incredible artists.