Originally Written on Quora but Never Posted
First, some context. Just a few months back, I began seeing a prolific number of posts in my daily feed from a “Space” (Quora-speak for what it uses to describe the thousands of individually run sites on the platform) titled “Suzie’s Space”. Most of these posts either use a heavily “Photoshopped” photograph or an AI-generated rendering, and an uplifting message for each day. Ten or fifteen of these posts, which also include uplifting quotes and well-meaning messages, were being generated every day and I began to watch the number of followers grow seemingly overnight to around 2,500, with some 15 million content views. Larger figures can be found on Quora, but when you factor-in the relatively short period that she’s been at it, 15 million views essentially means that her Space has “gone viral”. The common thread running through these posts is that they are intended to “inspire” and help people have a better day than they may have otherwise had. The author and owner of the Space rarely said more than a few words of her own, like “Have a great day everyone❤️☺️🙏😘👍🥰! Ostensibly, this was a caring individual trying in earnest to make the world a better place, one post at a time.
But this is not what came to mind at first blush. I generally steer clear of this type of post, but I decided to poke around the Space, read her very short bio in which one line stood out, which read “I tend to know things without reason”. I scrolled down through several dozen posts and, with the exception of using a different AI generated rendering or “Quote of the Day”, they were virtually identical in nature.
My problem was with the undisclosed but substantial use of AI and lack of photo or quotation credits. Many people on Quora don’t realize that anytime you grab a photo, quote, or anything written that doesn’t belong to them as the original author, they are likely using intellectual or artistic property which has more than likely been copyrighted. By law, this requires a person to credit (somewhere within their posts) the actual author or photographer, or, if that information isn’t readily available, at a minimum, offer-up the internet site where that content was found. The same holds true for an AI rendering which probably used a genuine photograph as the basis for its creation.
The second thing I found to be disconcerting (as is the case with millions of others who share the same sentiment) is the rampant use of AI generated fakery which can now be encountered virtually everywhere on the internet, not unlike some new, highly contagious and dangerous worldwide disease. Something like fakery in the context of AI generated photo renderings may seem harmless except for the fact that a large portion of the population has already shown that it can no longer discern a fake animal or real landscape from a fake one. The problem is more closely associated with younger Americans who haven’t been exposed enough to the natural world to have an honest and deep appreciation for the planet outside of interactions with other human beings and manmade things. This lack of awareness doesn’t bode well for an already highly, and nearly irreversibly damaged (at the hands of man) natural world. If these kids can’t tell the difference between a comically obvious fake baby platypus (like the plastic one used in a YouTube short that went viral last year) and a real one, how are they going to develop a sense for the importance of seeing the few remaining, truly wild, places and their inhabitants into the next century?
For me, the question had morphed into something like: Is “Suzie’s Space” doing more good than being unwittingly harmful? Her content is not malicious, nor does it have the slightest feel of wrongdoing, and further, is downright beautiful in the eyes of her many followers. I began to wrestle with the question. I even conferred with my wife who is well aware of my values and steadfast advocacy for nature and nature’s progeny but, while she is both highly intelligent and highly educated, she is also much less likely to further educate herself on environmental conservation issues and take action or even view such matters nearly as seriously as I do. You might say that she is a kinder, gentler person with a much higher tolerance for ignorance.
After thinking about it for a day or two, I decided that, since I was already heavily engaged in fighting for environmental conservation on several levels, including tons of writing targeted at motivating people to go from just talking about the issues to taking action by any means available to them. Making targeted donations to any one of of hundreds of organizations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) or the Nature Conservancy (though not perfect, these large advocacy oriented websites are as good as it gets in terms of impacting any level of real change) or volunteering their time by joining a group of conservation lobbyists. Anything is better than nothing. But the question remained, lingering in my thoughts for several days. “More good than bad?”.
Ultimately, I couldn’t help myself and made a comment using just two words to a post using an AI rendering similar to the ones shown above: “It’s fake!”, I said. The post was just one of hundreds based on the same simple, but hugely popular model. Pretty “picture” with an uplifting one-line narrative. I had no particular reason for choosing that post to provide commentary.
The author responded with the question I used as the title for this piece. I offer my response here but never launched it on Quora. I never posted the below comment because I had a significant change of heart and did an “about face”. I have since had some enjoyable conversations with “Suzie” through Quora’s personal messaging function and she went so far as to invite me to be a contributor to “Suzie’s Space”, something I found to be both flattering and ironic. But how could I say no to all that positive energy? Could I somehow harness and encourage it on parallel paths? Something I thought might work for both of us is if I aligned with her but by posting real photos from my own collection, taken during my thirty years of adventuring in Colorado and other beautiful places in the Rocky Mountain states, and other incredible area to visit, like Big Bend National Park in West Texas, in my current state of residence. This is precisely what I chose to do. First, I thanked her and said yes to her offer to become a contributor, and then provided several posts making references to where the photos were taken (examples of a “real” places of natural beauty) while providing brief narratives on the true state of affairs for rapidly diminishing wild places and wild things all over the world. Since I began a couple of months ago, she and her followers have given my posts nothing short of high praise. This was the answer I’d been looking for and in balancing the equation, we, together have created a win-win situation.
One of my own photographs posted to “Suzie’s Space, on Quota. I added a few sentences on the importance of ecological conservation and received numerous positive comments on the post. Suzie, herself, expressed her great appreciation and thanked me for my contribution. We’ve come far from our initial perceptions of one another through our collective capacity to remain “open-minded” in the face of “opposition”.
Refresh your memory by rereading the title of this post, which was Suzie’s response to my “It’s fake!” comment, at the top of the page.
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My Initial (Un-posted) Response to Suzie’s Response to my “It’s fake” Comment
I decided to post it here on my blog so others can read about the dangers of using fake imagery and not crediting sources for quotes, photographs, and even AI renderings (which many people today view as a form of modern art) in contemporary writing.
Me: I didn’t take your response as being disparaging. You make a good point. However, AI technology has been proving itself to be both “good” and “bad”. I won’t get into the “good” because it’s not relevant to our exchange here.
I’ll just touch on the “bad” as it applies to this type of use. There are a few fundamental problems with the use of AI in the areas of photography, art, and writing. This is why it’s important to provide credit to the author or if that information isn’t already attached, then go to the next opportunity which is crediting the site where you found the “rendering”, photograph, or quote . This acknowledgement keeps you free from the consequences of whatever it is that you’ve “borrowed” because it may well be copyrighted by the actual “author” of that bit of photographic art, real, or authentic, or quotation. It has to do with plagiarism (I know that’s not your MO..but it applies, nonetheless, just as it would if you were using a written example that doesn’t belong to you for, say, a term paper or thesis. It is widely accepted that a given “source” must be credited and is a rule of copyright law intended to discourage plagiarism. It is clear that you’re not purposefully “stealing” someone else’s work, but the ethic and potential consequences remain the same.
The other thing with using such renderings but passing them off as “real” has a particular impact on a younger audience which has already shown that, as a large segment of the population, they have much difficulty in discerning what is real and what is a figment of someone else’s imagination. To many, this may seem like a trivial matter but I can assure you that it is not.
Taken further, at some point over the coming years, our most recent generations will be tasked with knowing such things about human society as opposed to completely “reinventing the wheel” when the wheel has already been a technological advancement for millions of years. By not understanding the who, what, when, and where which came before, there is bound to be a completely unnecessary and hugely inefficient “do-over” pertaining to thousands of subjects which have already been taken as far as they can go, given the limits of a given period of time within a given prior generation. The idea is for future generations to “pick up and run with the ball” which was handed to them. Not doing so results in the use of precious time and resources the world cannot afford. The world as we’ve known it is in dire need of effective and productive current generations to lead humanity and the entire world, with ALL of its constituents, into the future (including our responsibility to our own future generations and the continuation of the natural world, which is already deep into the process of dying a slow and painful death).
I know this seems “off-topic” but humor me, if you will. The “art of storytelling” is all but gone as the primary means of older, experienced generations passing on valuable information acquired from the many generations which came before, to younger generations who will invariably need such information not only to survive, but to continue being productive at the highest possible level, given new and emerging technologies. The underlying premise is that the generations from which current generations have sprung are right here (for a little while longer) to tap in helping to ensure that our offspring (generations ‘Y’, “millennials” and “Z”, the children born to millennials, have a better life than their parents may have had to struggle through. This tenet is the same one that mankind has relied upon for millions of years. This potential for such important storytelling has had its legs cut off at the knee in large part because parents are no longer teaching their offspring anything because they, themselves, don’t know anything beyond the scope of what they do for a living, and such important matters have been left at the foot of a vastly dysfunctional educational system, which is already completely overwhelmed with just being whatever it has become.
I ask that you think on all of this for a spell. How will you and your generation handle the load that is being handed to you now and throughout your lifetime if your “thinking through the power of reason and logic” has been impaired simply because your parents themselves weren’t adequately taught things that the internet cannot provide. These things are highly important to the very survival of the humankind. Human characteristics such as a strong sense of community, a strong set of ideals, values, a wholesome belief-structure, ethics, an operational moral compass, and on, and on. A younger person can pickup their phone and lookup information on just about anything, but, try as it may, it will not find these uber-important teachings anywhere on the internet.
So, why is it that the younger generations of today have turned a model which has been in place (because it worked) for millions of years, shaken it and turned it upside down in being so incredibly careless with the knowledge acquired through the lifetimes of “their elders”?! Me, for instance. I find it to be utterly foolish and offensive given the vast amounts of knowledge I have so carefully and steadfastly taken the time to learn and acquire, but when I attempt to initiate a conversation with a younger individual, they could hardly care about what I might have to say…on hundreds of subjects they know little or nothing about.
My comments on the ill-effects of AI are spot-on. And those are just a few. This is why “fakery” is running rampant. The results are revealed every time a younger person, with little experience around wild things and wild places is so easily fooled by a fake animal or a fake place. Promoting fake stuff simply exacerbates the problem, which has at its core, a complete unawareness of the terrible plight of “real” animals and “real” wild places everywhere wherein many species and many “wild” places (places where mankind hasn’t yet irreversibly altered by its very presence) are rapidly going away on their long journey to “Neverland”.
“Does that answer your question?!”
I still occasionally craft a post and submit it to “Suzie’s Space” and she continues to follow-through with a short-but-sweet comment offering her appreciation. It works for the both of us and her many followers and large volume of viewers.
