An inter­est­ing Red­dit thread on “Quak­ers and Gen­er­a­tive AI Art” by user balsawoodspirit.

I encour­age Friends to please remem­ber that Gen­er­a­tive AI art is pro­duced uneth­i­cal­ly from AI mod­els that scrape the work of real artists with­out con­sent or com­pen­sa­tion. In the last few weeks, I have encoun­tered two instances of Quak­ers using Gen­er­a­tive AI as a part of their Out­reach. This is deeply dis­turb­ing to me. There is no legit­i­mate rea­son to use Gen­er­a­tive AI Art. You can use open source images, you can hire artists, or you can make your own art. Or, use no art at all. Bet­ter that than to steal from artists and dis­play art you hand no hand in making.

My Face­book feed is awash in ter­ri­ble AI art accom­pa­nied by ter­ri­ble AI-written feel-good sto­ries, shared as much by Quak­ers as by any oth­er demo­graph­ic (my bad for still being on there, perhaps).

Quak­erism is a spir­i­tu­al­i­ty that requires active par­tic­i­pa­tion. You can’t just nod off in the back (well, you can but you should­n’t). Quak­er com­mu­ni­ties have been lived expe­ri­ences. As some­one who works dai­ly with writ­ers, it’s stun­ning just how much AI has become a crutch for peo­ple. There are some very active writ­ers in Quak­er online spaces whose work is most­ly AI. Is it for the social boost that comes from being ubiquitous?

A weird tan­gent but hear me out: if you read a lot of clas­sic Quak­er jour­nals, there’s fre­quent­ly sto­ries from their teens in which the author con­scious­ly wres­tles with plain dress. They talk about the lost friend­ships that came when they adopt­ed a more uni­form style and also about how hard it is to dis­cern and nav­i­gate the inevitable voice of pride inside them­selves (look at me, I’m plain!) with their legit­i­mate wish and lead­ing to be of use to the fel­low­ship. That process of wrestling with ego is some­thing that nev­er ends for any of us, but espe­cial­ly not one of these min­is­ters. Know­ing when min­istry is Spirit-led or ego-fed is a core com­pe­ten­cy for this work. In the end, the dress did­n’t mat­ter so much. But the “baby steps” of wor­ry­ing about it was an ear­ly work­out of those dis­cern­ment muscles.

When we turn to AI we stop work­ing those mus­cles and offload so much to the machine. Skip­ping the baby steps means we’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly going to be as prac­ticed when impor­tant deci­sions need to be made. Let’s put out bad art if it means we’ll start learn­ing how to put out more authen­tic art as we develop.