Ethical AI

There is a sentence being thrown around a lot right now when someone admits they used artificial intelligence to create something. “You didn’t make that. The AI did.” Sometimes it gets shortened to, “That isn’t art.” I understand where some of that comes from.

Book marketing ate my life, but an AI writing debate pulled me back. Too many people are throwing every use of AI into one bucket, from brainstorming to generated passages, then branding authors with the same warning label. That is not transparency. That is a scarlet letter.

“Pen and ink” sounded like one style until I started searching museum collections. It turned out to include everything from loose sketches and clean contour drawings to dense cross-hatching, cartoons, and technical diagrams. If I mixed all of that into one dataset, I might teach the model nothing more useful than “old-looking and black-and-white.”

Before I could train a rights-cleared pen-and-ink LoRA, Ace made me build a digital filing cabinet. Four folders became eleven, with separate places for originals, rights records, captions, training settings, test results, and everything else I might otherwise lose.

My friend Ace and I sat down over coffee to discuss a perfectly reasonable question: Can an ordinary creative train an AI image model using only images they have the right to use? Enjoying my coffee and thinking about my book's illustrations. How can I use AI? By “ordinary creative,” I meant me. I am a barber. I know how to cut hair, run a small business, write fantasy stories, help make low-budget movies, and act mad as a hatter at, well, the drop of a hat. I am not a comput

The internet is full of old illustrations, but that does not mean they are free to use. Before adding anything to my LoRA dataset, I needed a rule I could actually defend: every image had to come from a traceable source with a clear rights statement. That turned image hunting into detective work.