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.

As one historian wrote:

The frontier did collapse in late 1763. The surprise was that the armed mob that descended from the frontier into Lancaster — and then to Philadelphia in 1764 — were White frontiersmen. Everybody had expected it would be Indians.

Even more tragically, a few of the people who escaped the mobs ended up being slaughtered in later attacks. Much of the colonial government wasn’t Quaker in the latter half of the century, including some of William Penn’s descendants. Still, Friends today can wonder whether the high-minded promises of eternal friendship between Quakers and Indigenous Peoples were more hollow and aspirational than we’d like to admit. (Of course most of the Lenape and Susquehannock died from European-imported diseases, with every boatload of settlers bringing more death to the original inhabitants.)

The ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ Lost: A Friendship Found  — ICT

The Conestoga massacres in Pennsylvania more than 250 years ago forever changed Native-White relations

ICT

One of the roles of faith is to remember that we’ve been here before. We’ve been the wandering Jews lost in the desert but fed manna to survive. We remember the disciples taken by surprise by the rush of Roman guards come to arrest our Messiah, who urged us to put away our swords. We tell stories of a young George Fox wandering England looking for spiritual teachers until all his “hopes in them and in all men were gone.” We survive by telling stories. We keep ourselves centered and calm by remembering others who found a path through uncertainty and assured us they were held up by a Comforter.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

Joy was my guidepost through my transition,” Willa reflects. “I realized that at the age of 70, I was too old to postpone joy. I realized shortly after that that at four years old, I was too old to postpone joy, but I didn’t know it then.

Willa was one of the regular Quaker bloggers back in the day¹. I had mostly lost touch, only hearing third hand of the transition somewhere. I’m glad she’s doing well and still witnessing to the Truth as revealed to her.

I posted there tonight suggesting that Friends consider a media diet that includes more Quaker media—books and magazines and blogs and videos and in-real-life discussion opportunities. I worry that if Facebook groups become the most visible style of Quaker dialogue, then we will have lost something truly precious.

This message isn’t new to longtime readers of QuakerRanter. I extolled blogging as a hedge against Facebookjust yesterday and in August I wrote about some of the dialogue problems inherent in the Facebook model.

I’ve been figuring out Facebook strategies for Quaker media since it opened up to non-students circa 2006. I appreciate much of the attention it’s provided over the years. Social media like YouTube has also been a useful platform for things like the Quakerspeak projectdespite owner Google’s spotty track record. But it’s becoming hard to deny that social media has reshaped the style of civil discourse and trollish hackery, mostly for the worse. I think it’s really essential that we become more conscious of the sources of our daily media diet.

When the marginalized cry out for compassion, they are not censoring anybody. They are fighting for their very right to exist. Nonviolent disobedience and rewriting the rules of civility is for these groups. It is our job, especially as white people, or those with more societal power and time to protest, to amplify the voices of the most marginalized.

https://millennialpolitics.co/redefine-rude-embrace-disruptive/

Holding the line, speaking the truth is the Christian’s (Quaker’s) obligation in the Lamb’s War. If the God of truth is honored in just one mind, heart, and soul, the world is not lost, as Jesus showed us by prototypal example. In this statement given before Pilate shortly before the end of his earthly life, Jesus identified his life’s purpose not only for himself but for us all.

https://patradallmann.wordpress.com/2018/07/01/dynamics-of-evil/

Losing yourself to anger is possible even with anger focused against injustice and cruelty. You can become so focused on the target of your rage. That you do not notice when you have lost sight of your goals and are only in it for the fight. Even following the Peace Testimony of Non-Violence we need to recognize when we are no longer being Non-Aggressive.

Like many convinced Friends, I came to the society through activism. I had met plenty of people who let righteous anger serve as cover for more visceral hatred. One eye-opening protest in the 90s was in a rural part of Pennsylvania. When one of the locals screamed the cliche of the era—“Go get a job!”—a protestor shouted back, “I’ve got a job and I make more than you.” It was true even as it was cruel and irrelevant and braggy.

I didn’t see this kind of behavior as much with the Friends I saw at various protests, which is largely why I started gravitating toward them whenever possible. I could see that there was something in the Quaker culture and value system that was able to navigate between righteous and personal anger and draw the line in difficult situations. I love Josh’s description of the “Craig Ferguson” method:

I ask myself. “Does this need to be said?” “Does this need to be said by me?” “Does this need to be said by me right now?” Doing this cuts down on moments of spontaneous anger.

This could also describe the Quaker discernment method for ministry. Maybe there’s something to the care we take (or at least aim for) in that process that gives us a little more self-discipline in the heat of protest or that helps us sort through thorny ethical issues that run through our own community.

https://quakerreturns.blogspot.com/2018/04/not-falling-into-fire-of-my-own-ire.html