Peregrine Lake – A Weekly Webcomic Written by Trae Dorn and Drawn by Ethan Flanagan

I Hate the Generative AI Situation. ( May 19th 2025 )

Before I get started here, I want to be very clear -- I will never use Generative AI images in any of my public creative projects. Any comic I write will be drawn by an artist (myself or someone else), every piece of official art for my non visual stuff (books and podcasts) will be created by a person. While I have used Generative AI images in thumbnails historically, I stopped that practice years ago after I learned more. The existing generative AI models for creating image and videos like Sora run on stealing copyrighted materials and use so much energy that they're incredibly bad for the environment.

So let's have that level set before we go forward and anyone gets mad at me for doing something I haven't done and will never do.

But I'm going to admit to something here -- it's fun to play around with image generators to create fake photos of things that don't exist. Like it's fun to make a "photo" of your personal RPG characters. You can commission an artist for a drawing, and I find trying to recreate that kind of art with AI to be gross.

But it's almost impossible to find someone able to make a perfect simulacrum of a photograph of your Halfling Thief drinking at a rooftop bar in Chicago. Like you could definitely do it -- but as a person who literally COULD do that kind of photo manipulation work myself, the number of hours I'd have to spend on stock photo websites, morgue file, and doing original shoots is fairly prohibitive. There's a reason I draw the original art for Stormwood instead of going down that route.

But all of that said, I don't think it's ethical to share those images publicly once I've made them.

First off, I don't know where that training data came from. I can't be sure that I'm not spreading something that was based on stolen work. Like in my own work I might test something out with a stock photo I haven't paid for, but I make sure I go out and buy it before I put it out to the public. Not doing so is, in my opinion, theft. With that in mind, how can I see these images I've created any other way? I don't know where the sources were scraped from.

(I know generative AI doesn't directly use the elements of images from its training data, as it works from refining noise until it resembles the description of the image -- but I feel like we're still in the spirit here.)

So until one of these models can promise that every single element in its training data has been ethically sourced, I feel like we're dancing that line and I'm not comfortable posting it even in situations where I would make no profit from sharing it.

Secondly, there is the environmental concern. Right now AI companies are shoving this stuff into everything they can. This ends up using a ton of resources, and it's being subsidized by investors. Like until a lot of this gets fixed, I don't feel good encouraging the use of AI.

In an ideal world, this would be a fun toy and I could guiltlessly share its output the way I would a meme.

But it's not, and I hate it.

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