*GASP* I used AI . . .

to make a meme

in my previous post. Is that the entering wedge? Will I now succumb?

Not a chance.

I’ve been making the occasional meme with it ever since the debut of the first Dall-E, if not before. And long before that, I found ways of hand-making cartoons and memes using drawing, photo clipping and collaging in Preview, and other crude substitutes for Photoshop, such as a delightful free kids’ art program called Tux Paint. (It used to have a “grass” stamp, which I once used to click green beards onto ayatollahs: Shia Pets!)

I just downloaded it again. It’s more fun to play with than AI, I swear. Here’s me fooling around freeform with some of its features. (The grass seems to be gone, alas.)

That’s all AI is to me—a toy for making memes. And a frustrating one at that: It almost never gives you what you see so clearly in your “mind’s eye” (if you have one), no matter how many times you rejigger the prompt. It’s such an indirect process, trying to steer this thing with the tongs of words toward a goal it can’t see; it would be quicker to draw it yourself if you have even the most rudimentary ability. Every time I’ve tried to get AI to execute a meme, I’ve lost patience and settled for something approximate.

I can play around with visual AI because I’m not a visual artist, so it is neither a threat nor a promise, a sirenlike sorcerer’s apprentice. Words are something else. I will never use AI to write, and I will never read anything it has written if I can help it. Big “if.” As its “writing” becomes more refined in its humanoid mimicry, I’ll keep honing my ability to detect and avoid it.

My aversion is a visceral recoil, the kind of ick some people feel toward germs or GMOs or spiders. If I were the last person on earth to relent toward this technology, it would be too soon.