I have a confession to make.

I really fucking hate AI.

Okay, maybe “hate” is complicated, which is probably the entire reason I’m writing this. Despite my disdain for artificial intelligence, the way it has been shoved into practically every corner of our lives, and the very legitimate problems I have with it, I’ve found myself using it more and more.

And as an artist, I’m conflicted as hell about that.

There are things about AI that fundamentally bother me. I will forever be against someone typing a prompt into a computer, having it generate an image, and then turning around and saying, “Look what I made.”

You didn’t make that. You asked a computer to make it for you.

There’s a difference, and I think that difference matters.

Art is human. Art is sitting at a table for six hours trying to make something look the way it exists inside your head. It’s fucking up and starting over. It’s learning a technique and being terrible at it before eventually becoming good at it. It’s accidentally discovering something because your hand slipped or the paint moved differently than you expected. It’s staring at something you’ve been working on for three days and deciding you hate it, only to come back the next morning and realize maybe you don’t.

Art is frustration, joy, anger, grief, love, boredom and obsession. It’s the weird shit happening inside someone’s brain somehow making its way out into the physical world.

A computer doesn’t experience any of that. It can imitate it. It can analyze patterns. It can generate something that looks beautiful or string words together that sound emotional. But it didn’t feel anything while doing it.

To me, that matters.

And yet, here’s where things get complicated.

AI can be a really fucking useful tool.

I’ve used it to help clean up scanned artwork when the scan didn’t capture the original properly. I’ve used it to refine things I’ve already created. I’ve used it for research when I don’t know where the hell to start. I’ve used it to help me understand technical things and build parts of my website that I would otherwise spend hours staring at wondering what the fuck I’m supposed to do.

Those are the moments when I understand the appeal.

I’m not asking a machine to be creative for me. I’m using a piece of technology to help me accomplish something.

When it comes to my writing, however, I draw a much harder line. I rarely use AI for creative writing because my writing is mine. My poetry, lyrics, stories, thoughts and emotions need to come from me. Occasionally, I’ll use it to catch grammar issues or clean up something I’ve already written, but even then I’m careful. No matter how many times you tell AI not to change your voice, sometimes it apparently hears, “Please rewrite this entire fucking thing.”

Especially with my poetry, I don’t want a machine deciding how my grief should sound. It didn’t lose my dad, Spencer or my mom. I did. Those words need to come from me.

That’s why the distinction with Forever Grief matters. It began as a poem I wrote and later adapted into lyrics. Since my ability to compose music is limited and my singing voice sounds roughly equivalent to nails on a chalkboard, I experimented with AI to turn it into a song. The music and vocals were AI-generated. The poem and lyrics were written by me.

And I will always tell you that.

Actually, that’s probably one of the biggest rules I’ve established for myself as I’ve started experimenting with this technology. If something I release contains AI-generated elements, it will explicitly say so. If the vocals are AI-generated, I’ll tell you. If an image is AI-generated, I’ll tell you. If AI played a significant role in creating something beyond basic cleanup, editing or technical assistance, I want you to know.

I don’t want credit for something I didn’t actually do.

Transparency matters to me.

But transparency alone doesn’t solve the much bigger problems surrounding AI.

Artists deserve protection. Writers deserve protection. Musicians deserve protection. Photographers deserve protection. Actors deserve protection. Every person who spends hours, days, weeks, months or years developing a craft deserves to know that their work isn’t simply being fed into some enormous system so a machine can learn to imitate them without their knowledge or permission.

That is probably the part that makes me angriest as an artist.

Human beings spent their lives creating the art, literature, photography, music and culture that these systems learn from. We cannot allow the people who created those things to become collateral damage in a race to develop better technology.

I hope we see stronger regulations around consent, licensing, attribution and compensation. Artists should have meaningful control over how their work is used. Human creativity has value, and not just monetary value. It has human value.

Then there’s the environmental side of AI, which is another reason my relationship with it is so complicated.

AI doesn’t exist in some magical invisible cloud. The technology requires physical infrastructure. Data centers require electricity, cooling, water, land and equipment, and as AI becomes more ingrained in everyday life, the infrastructure required to support it will continue to grow.

That needs regulation too.

We need energy standards. We need water-use standards. We need responsible decisions about where these facilities are built and how much land and infrastructure they consume. We need transparency about their environmental impact, and we need companies developing this technology to be held accountable for the resources they use.

Innovation cannot continue to mean building something as quickly as possible and figuring out the consequences later.

And I sure as hell don’t want us destroying the environment so a computer can generate twelve slightly different pictures of someone’s cat wearing a spacesuit.

But here I am, still using AI.

Because for all the things that concern me about it, I’m learning that it can be genuinely useful. It can help people research. It can make certain tasks more accessible. It can explain complicated information. It can help someone accomplish a technical task they don’t have the skills to do alone. It can help restore or clean up something a person already created. It can help bridge the gap between an idea and a technical skill someone simply doesn’t have.

I would be a hypocrite if I pretended there wasn’t value in that simply because I’m uncomfortable with other aspects of the technology.

Maybe the question isn’t whether AI is good or bad.

Maybe the question is what we decide to do with it.

I don’t think AI is inherently evil. I also don’t think we should blindly embrace every new capability simply because we figured out how to build it.

AI should remain a tool.

The human being should still matter. The artist should still matter. The writer should still matter. The musician should still matter. The photographer, programmer, designer, researcher, teacher, craftsperson and every other human being whose knowledge and creativity helped build the world these systems learned from should still matter.

I don’t want a future where human creativity becomes obsolete because generating something in three seconds is cheaper than paying someone who spent twenty years developing a skill.

I don’t want AI replacing artists.

I want technology helping artists do things they couldn’t do before.

There is a huge difference between those two things.

And maybe that’s the line I’m slowly figuring out for myself.

I want AI to help me do things. I don’t want AI to become the thing doing my creating for me.

AI isn’t going anywhere. As much as some of us might wish we could shove the genie back into the bottle, that isn’t realistic. People have always had complicated relationships with new technology. We fear it, fight it, misuse it, adapt to it, regulate it and eventually figure out where it belongs in our lives.

Right now, I think we’re somewhere in the messy part.

So maybe we have to work through the storm.

We need to regulate it, question it and improve it. We need to protect artists, workers and our environment. We need transparency and boundaries. We need to figure out where this technology genuinely improves human life and where it begins diminishing it.

Most importantly, we need to remember that technology is supposed to serve human beings. Human beings are not supposed to become obsolete in service of technology.

I’m still skeptical. I’m still protective of artists. I’m still uncomfortable with a lot of what I’m seeing. I’m still going to question where the data comes from, who benefits, who gets hurt and what all of this is costing us environmentally.

But I’m also willing to admit that I’ve found uses for AI that genuinely help me.

I’m learning where it belongs in my creative life.

And I’m learning where it absolutely fucking doesn’t.

Because a computer can generate an image of grief. It can generate words that sound like grief. It can even generate a voice singing about grief.

But it cannot sit alone in a quiet house after losing someone it loves and understand what that silence feels like. It cannot miss someone. It cannot love someone. It cannot grieve someone.

That part is human.

That part is art.

And that part should always belong to us.