boss said “someone’s parents didn’t love them” about me, how to work with a former manager I can’t stand, and more

by Alison Green on February 14, 2025

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. Boss said, “Well, someone’s parents didn’t love them” about me

In preparation for a team-building retreat, all employees in my department were asked to submit a baby photo for a “match the baby photo to the employee” icebreaker activity. The request for baby photos was framed as a requirement, not an opt-in request. I wasn’t able to get a baby photo because my mom is my only living family, and we are estranged. The request stirred up some *feelings* and left me feeling pretty crummy for a few days. I considered saying something to my boss about how this required activity might be a little rough for some people (for a variety of reasons!), but I decided to just be easy-going about it. Instead of a baby photo I submitted a cute baby animal picture instead.

The actual retreat activity involved going through each photo individually on an overhead monitor with the group guessing who the photo belonged to. My boss was “emcee-ing” the activity with a running commentary on all the photos. My baby animal photo came up and my boss commented, “Well, someone’s parents didn’t love them” (!!!). The thing is, my boss is actually normally a really wonderful boss that I think very highly of! I know it was just a dumb off-the-cuff remark. But of course it still really hurt and has stuck with me.

So my question is: should I say something to my boss? Mostly I just want to let it go. But it’s been eating away at me — I fear this is going to negatively impact the way I interact with my boss in the future. If I did say something, what would I even say? I’m sure my boss would be absolutely mortified and feel horrible if I revisit this with her.

She should be mortified. That is an appropriate consequence for what she said, and it’s a fair consequence even if she is a lovely person who just had a brain blip in the moment and didn’t think about the ways that remark could land — not only for people estranged from family, but foster kids who don’t have photos from their childhood, people who experienced other trauma at that age and so their early years are not happy memories, and more. Even aside from her remark, this particular game is a bad idea to play at work for those reasons.

You could say this to her: “I know you intended it to be a light-hearted comment, but it really bothered me. I don’t know if you realized how that game, and that remark, would be experienced by anyone who’s estranged from their family, or someone who grew up in foster care, or people from other rough situations. I know you’d never want to be hurtful, so I wanted to share how it landed with me.”

It’s okay if she feels bad about it. Sometimes that’s how we learn lessons.

2. How do I work with a former manager I can’t stand?

This is probably the pettiest question you’re getting from a federal worker right now, but: What is the absolute bare minimum of courtesy you can give to a coworker you’re now trapped in the office with since there’s no telework?

For context, said coworker is my former supervisor, with whom I had such an incredibly bad relationship I got to move to another team as part of an EEO settlement. This was after she filed disciplinary charges against me, which prompted me to charge her with workplace harassment. All those proceedings are still ongoing, but she hasn’t been my supervisor for about a year.

Anyway, it’s a small office and everyone knows everyone, and she and I are still in the same even smaller work unit, so I’m going to have to break my vow to never speak to her again. How can I prep so I can act professional with someone who made my life a misery for years?

You do need to be civil, because it would be unprofessional not to — and that would reflect on you, not her, no matter how justified your dislike. You don’t need to socialize with her or initiate small talk, but if she says “hello” or “good morning” or similar, you need to return the greeting, and if she asks how your weekend was or otherwise initiates chat, you need to be courteous in responding. You don’t need to be warm, and you don’t need to answer with anything other than something bland and neutral, but you can’t freeze her out. A good litmus test to have in your head is: if someone who didn’t know anything about either of you or the history observed the interaction, would you appear rude or not?

To mentally prepare for encountering her again, it might help to frame it for yourself as you being the bigger person: you will be civil to her because you are a professional person and she can’t change that about you, and also because you aren’t going to give her the power to make you look bad in front of others.

3. Lecturer said “fuck consent” about using AI for creative work

After a decade working full-time in an office, I went back to school last year to finish my bachelor’s in art and design. In a lecture series class last week, a professional graphic designer straight-up told 200 college students that if they don’t use generative AI in their creative work, they will be irrelevant and essentially fail. He then went on to showcase professional work he and his company made using AI, and spoke about how a project that they wanted to make using only AI was “unfortunately” scrapped (for not complying with fair use laws — apparently the art they stole used was too distinctive).

I am still in shock over the fact that a professional designer, with a successful company, admitted out loud with no shame that he uses AI to create the work he gets paid for. When I asked if he had any concerns about AI using artwork that has been illegally scraped from the internet, he said, and I quote, “Fuck consent.” And the professors backed him up! They said that AI is “just a tool, like a camera, or Adobe software,” and we have to “use our own moral compass” in deciding if we’ll use it or not. Astounding. For what it’s worth, I find the ethical and environmental effects of AI to be completely detrimental, and really have no respect for the lecturer or my professors in saying that these issues don’t actually matter.

I’ve been pondering if I have any ethical standing to name-and-shame this company and creator, or create Google/Glassdoor reviews (anonymously). I want to, but I also wonder if using AI this casually in professional creative settings is becoming the norm. I’ve been telling everyone I know about this company, because holy crap, the blatant disregard and disrespect shown to the students who spoke up about the problems with AI was the most unprofessional thing I think I’ve ever seen. And if I were thinking of working with this graphic designer, I’d want to know if they were using AI for the work I’m paying them to create. Is this an absolutely wild urge? Am I completely out of line? I guess I’m just wanting a reality check because I feel like I have to do something to counteract the absolute insanity of the lecture.

AI is becoming common in many settings, but that doesn’t mean that its use shouldn’t be disclosed to clients who presumably believe they’re paying for original and proprietary work, and it definitely doesn’t mean that artists who don’t use it will be irrelevant and fail (WTF?). Also, anyone who stands before a class of students and says “fuck consent” (on pretty much any issue I can think of, including this one) should be named and shamed, disavowed, and never invited to speak anywhere again.

Your professors aren’t wrong that people have to “use their own moral compass” in deciding if they’ll use AI or not, but there are still many, many situations where its use would be objectively wrong (or even just prohibited).

Maybe you can ask that your class bring in someone to speak to the counterpoint on this issue.

4. How to answer “can we contact your manager” when you have no contact information for them

So my most recent, non-current job was a temporary government contract, we only spoke to our supervisors on company phones, and the contract has since been terminated and presumably most of the contractors have scattered to the four winds (very common with this type of contract).

What should I put when future employers ask if they can contact a supervisor? Other than that, the most recent job I’m still at and the one before that I left about 10 years ago. So far I’ve been trying with old bosses who no longer work for my current company but there’s not many of them (and sadly, soon to be one less) so I feel like it seems a little sketch to have no recent contactable references.

When applications ask if they can contact a previous supervisor, they’re asking about your permission, not how easy it will be. Answering no risks being interpreted as “I left this company on bad terms” and/or “this manager will say bad things about me.” So you should answer yes, they have your permission. Whether or not they will succeed if they try is a different question. (However, if they’re asking your permission to contact a current manager, that’s a different question and it’s fine to say no to that; that’s common since people’s managers often don’t know that they’re looking.)

More here:
stop saying “no” when job applications ask “can we contact this manager?”

You may also like:
{ 578 comments }

{ 578 comments… read them below or add one }

    1. Heidi*

      I had to do this once also. I couldn’t find any of my own baby photos, so I subbed in my sibling’s and everyone said I looked exactly the same. If no one knows what you looked like as baby, you just need a plausible looking photo of a baby.

      Reply ↓
            1. Testing*

              +1

              This is a “team-building exercise” that doesn’t really deserve honest and truthful input. It might make you look weird in the eyes of your colleagues, but it might also be a funny joke.

              Reply ↓
            2. Arrietty*

              Because, as discussed, AI generates “art” using real artists’ work without permission, and uses a lot of energy and resources to do so. Just use a generic baby stock photo if you want to submit a fake.

              Reply ↓
            3. duinath*

              I don’t see any reason not to lie to your coworkers if that’s the life you want to lead, at least about things like this.

              I see many reasons not to suggest AI for this task, or any other.

              For any task that matters, you cannot use AI, because it cannot be trusted. For any task that *doesn’t* matter you should not use AI, because the environmental impact is frankly catastrophic.

              Reply ↓
            4. Tea*

              Others already mentioned the ethical and environmental impact, so I’ll just add that you’d be willingly adding your photos to the dataset for everyone to use (and the LLM enthusiasts aren’t the most ethical bunch) and they cannot be deleted afterwards.

              Reply ↓
            5. Starbuck*

              I thought it was pretty common knowledge at this point that most of the human photo data sets (they’re just scraped from the internet after all) contain at least some amount of CSAM in their training data sets. I personally would feel pretty gross creating an image with that in the mix.

              Reply ↓
          1. Baunilha*

            Or, if you have a friend with similar-ish features, ask them if you could use their photo. I’ve done it for a friend once.

            Reply ↓
          1. Lenora Rose*

            The ONLY reason I can think of to use AI for this would be to intentionally play UP the weirdness and uncanny valley effects of an AI fake, as a relatively harmless way to point out the issues with the activity

            (And that doesn’t address the other environmental or ethical issues of the *AI*, so I wouldn’t do that either.)

            Reply ↓
            1. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

              That 90s “dancing baby” gif would be a possible alternative if you just want to turn in something Obviously Fake without getting bogged down in AI-related issues.

              Reply ↓
      2. Richard Hershberger*

        I probably have baby pictures somewhere, likely in a box in the basement. I certainly couldn’t put my hands on them in any reasonable timeframe. I know that some people put great weight on this stuff. Others do not. If finding those pictures is mission-critical to the company, they can pay me to stay home tidying up the basement. But of course it isn’t and they won’t, nor should they. Given this, I would pull something off the internet. It is a BS exercise and deserves nothing better.

        Reply ↓
        1. Bird names*

          “If finding those pictures is mission-critical to the company, they can pay me to stay home tidying up the basement.”
          Now there’s an idea. :D

          Reply ↓
          1. goddessoftransitory*

            They can pay to fly me to my sister’s house across the country, where our baby stuff is currently residing in her basement after my mom passed.

            Reply ↓
        2. Selina Luna*

          I’m still on pretty good terms with my parents, and I know exactly where my old baby pictures are. They’re in a secret closet that we called the “wine cellar” when they moved into their current house. The door for that closet is behind an entertainment center on wheels. There’s a high likelihood this time of year for garter snakes in the closet because there’s another secret room (to the well) inside of that closet that has direct but accidental holes through to the rock wall holding up the front garden. Snakes will sometimes crawl into the rocks and fall into the water room. There are spiders and sometimes baby mice in there, so they won’t starve, and it’s well, so they won’t go thirsty, so we usually just go in there in the springtime and clear them into a bucket and take them to the woods.
          Anyway, that’s where my baby pictures are. In the closet that probably has snakes.

          Reply ↓
          1. MigraineMonth*

            I’m fascinated that your childhood home has entire ecosystems in their multiple secret rooms. Mine just had mold in the crawlspace.

            For some reason I’m now imagining one snake getting trapped in there, eating all the other snakes until you end up with a giant serpent in your Chamber of Secrets.

            Reply ↓
            1. Carol the happy*

              Thank you for that lovely image that will help me through this Friday!

              As for me, my baby pictures were in my Grandmother’s cellar. After my Father passed, (Pneumonia and flu + age) Mother moved back to European hometown. She sold the furniture and only took pictures and old film clips, which were flooded. The only baby pictures left of me were being held by my Grandfather, (with a blanket over my head- windy day, to look at his hair and tie) and baby-in-dishtub in a sink.

              “Baby pictures were all lost in a flood”.

              My friend Astrud went through a house fire in the early 1970s, so no pictures for her either.

              Those excuses are open source, public domain, and I offer them with love to anybody who doesn’t want to share what they looked like as a baby.

              Reply ↓
      3. ivy*

        I know a close colleague subbed in a friend’s photo. Photo was clearly from the right era (1970’s) and baby was of the right ethicity. Wrong gender but no one could tell that!
        As long as it’s vaguely plausibly you no one will notice.

        Reply ↓
      4. Slow Gin Lizz*

        I did this once in an artistic group I was a member of. The only two people who everyone guessed correctly were myself and the one non-white person in the group. Apparently I haven’t changed much.

        But I do think it’s not a great activity, for all the reasons AAM mentioned. One workplace did a “prom photo” one too. There was one person who didn’t have a prom photo, and honestly I didn’t particularly enjoy my prom and didn’t need to be reminded of it – nothing bad happened, I just don’t like dances and wasn’t a very social teenager. But now I think of all the folks who may have had an even worse time at their prom than I did and I think the prom photo thing is a bad idea.

        Reply ↓
          1. Ginger Beer*

            Woah, Jennifer Jumper, my jaw just dropped. No matter what your smile looks like, I would not want to show a pic with that dude in it.

            Reply ↓
            1. Mad Harry Crewe*

              No. Two truths and a lie is supposed to be a fun team building game. Confronting your colleagues with a story that involves incestuous rape, when you have no way of knowing who may have been affected by similar things or how they feel about it, is completely unacceptable.

              Reply ↓
              1. ubotie*

                Yeah this is (admittedly weird) pet peeve of mine for ice-breakers. I know we all hate icebreakers on here but like, Two Truths and a Lie is NOT the time to go all edgelord. Keep your 2 truths and 1 lie light, fun, dumb, etc. Hell, you can choose 3 lies and just say that 2 of them are truths–no one is going to do a deep deep fact check. I promise. Learn from my trauma, please (as someone who has been through several icebreakers, including ones where people with huge bugs up their butts decided that icebreaker games were the PERFECT time to go all “edgelord keeping it real I just say what’s on my mind” jerk-heads. No one ever wants to work with those people and then those people wonder why they keep getting pushed out for “poor culture fit”).

                Reply ↓
                1. Catgirl*

                  The fact that my referring to this fact as “fun” didn’t tip you off that I was being heavily sarcastic makes me wonder what on earth your experiences of two truths and a lie have been.

          4. WorkingRachel*

            My prom date later went to prison for crimes that I never got the details of, but definitely involved minors, and the sentence was lengthy.

            Reply ↓
          5. No I think I will be anon for this*

            If it had happened in more recent years, my prom date would have gone to jail for what he did with me for a few years before prom. While he was over 21 and traveling across state lines for it, having coordinated via email and phone. Just saying.

            Reply ↓
        2. iglwif*

          I’m astonished that only one person in your workplace didn’t have a prom photo! A lot of places in the world don’t have that kind of activity at all, or conduct it very differently, and in places that do have it, many people don’t participate. Anywhere I’ve ever worked, the number would have been WAY higher.

          (I predict this particular activity will die a natural death, even in places where prom is a thing, as the generation of kids who finished high school in 2020 and 2021 hits the workforce in big numbers. Prom is a thing in the province where I now live, and the dress my daughter bought in January for the prom she was supposed to attend in May 2020 is still hanging in her closet, never worn.)

          Reply ↓
          1. Mentally Spicy*

            In my country most schools do an end of year formal party but it’s not a big deal like it is in America.

            I didn’t even go to my school prom as I was completely done with school and the people I went there with. I never wanted to see most of those people ever again. Plus, even if I had gone there wouldn’t be a photo of me because I was overweight and had bad acne and hideous hair. The photographic record of that period of my life is nonexistent!

            Reply ↓
        3. Susannah*

          I didn’t go to my prom because I didn’t have a date – no boy asked me, and that’s how it was back then. If a girl wasn’t asked by a boy, she didn’t go. How awful it would have been if someone had asked me for a photo of my prom. I was humiliated at not being asked; I felt like a loser.
          Reminds me of a time at one of our weekly meetings when we were all supposed to go around and talk abut our summer vacation trips when we were kids. So, people talked about beach vacations, even trips abroad, sleep away camp, or some big-happy-family event. That was not my childhood. I was fine; we didn’t have much money and my parents divorced when I was 14, so we didn’t have Big Happy Family trips. It was OK! I babysat and delivered newspapers and went to the local pool. But I felt so uncomfortable as people talked about Hallmark childhood summers.

          Reply ↓
          1. Texan in Exile*

            Same! I was not asked to prom. And being asked to show a prom photo at work would have just reminded me of how much high school sucked and how I also felt like a loser.

            And same on summer vacations: summer was when we didn’t go to school. My family might go camping or, if we were in the US at the time (my dad was in the military and I spent most of my childhood outside of the US), we would drive 20 hours to visit my grandparents’ farm, staying with friends along the way and packing our own meals for the trip because staying in hotels and eating in restaurants was something only rich people did.

            Reply ↓
          2. MigraineMonth*

            My school was just barely progressive enough that girls were allowed to bring female friends from younger grades. Years later when my friend came out, I found out I actually had gone to prom with someone of the opposite sex. (I somehow doubt this is a retroactive triumph of heteronormativity.)

            Reply ↓
        4. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          Yeah, I don’t have a prom photo because I’m old enough that it would have been unimaginable for same-sex couples to go, and I had less than zero interest with going with a friend just for the sake of going. What an awful idea.

          Reply ↓
          1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

            Eh, I did this (I was a wallflower, friend was gay) and we had a good time. But, I liked getting dressed up, most of our friends were going, and we just sat back and watched others’ relationship drama play out as only high school relationship drama can play out at prom. That said, I would still cringe mightily if asked for a prom photo at work, and thankfully wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to find one.

            Reply ↓
        5. Observer*

          One workplace did a “prom photo” one too.

          Ah, yes, because everyone goes to prom. /snark

          In some ways this is worse than the baby photos thing. Not from an emotional POV, because not having baby photos has a much higher chance of being tied to some real trauma. But because it’s a lot more plausible to think “well, everyone was a baby once, so there must be baby pictures” (although it does take a fair bit of unawareness!) than to assume that “well everyone must have gone to prom”. Because even in the US, not every school has a prom, and that doesn’t even get to what happens in other countries.

          Reply ↓
          1. Carol the happy*

            I’m old enough that we actually had this ridiculous social rule that “At a dance, you have to dance with the first one- or sit that song out. First guy who asks for a given date, you go with- or stay home washing your hair.”

            Prom was the same. If Nasty Ned asked you to the prom first, you went with him or stayed home, “because it’s so brave of the boys to even ask the girls!” So we were a battle trophy.

            My oldest (half) brother asked me on the first day of my junior year- because my beloved sister-in-law told him to! That way, I had a date (and a refusal option!) if I wanted, and if a cute classmate asked, I could say yes without insulting anyone- and my brother was a military officer, so he had “training” to attend.

            Reply ↓
          2. Chirpy*

            Yeah, prom photos seem like a great way to out people who were shy, poor, went to school with awful people, dated someone awful, were raised highly religious, not allowed to go for other reasons, or are LGBTQ, asexual, or just not into prom. Or simply had fashion choices as a teenager they don’t want to share.

            Reply ↓
        8. RainyBikeCommuter*

          The vast majority of my baby pictures include my twin sister who died at 38 after a sharp decline into alcoholic liver failure.
          There are so many reasons these activities are dumb.

          Reply ↓
        9. Jenesis*

          I didn’t go to any of my school dances for similar reasons – I don’t like dancing, I don’t like dressing up, I don’t like loud music, I never even asked (nor was asked) to date anyone because I was focused on academics instead of socializing, and to top it all off I hate having my picture taken. The only reason I have baby pictures was because I was too young to be asked for consent :P

          Reply ↓
        10. Guacamole Bob*

          My prom was fine – don’t particularly want to be reminded of that boyfriend, but whatever.

          But my prom photos are the ones that make me angriest that my doctor at the time failed to correctly diagnose and treat some health issues I was having; my dress had spaghetti straps and I am noticeably underweight. Not exactly what I want to share with my colleagues, either, given the comments those photos would likely elicit.

          Asking a random group of people for stories or photos tied to specific points in their pasts is fraught with peril. Too much risk of something that lands wrong for someone.

          Reply ↓
        11. WorkingRachel*

          NOOOOO not a prom photo! I did not enjoy prom and in the photo I have acne and a terrible haircut. Thankfully I don’t think I could find that one if I wanted to!

          Reply ↓
      6. Some Words*

        And this activity at my workplace was how I found out for certain that my parents took not a single picture of me as a baby. That wisecrack from the manager would not have landed well.

        Reply ↓
    2. darsynia*

      OOF yeah that would have been tough on me. I was born with a huge purple, puffy birthmark on my ear that didn’t fade until I was 8 or 9. As a consequence, my parents hardly took any baby pictures of me, but you can kind of see it in the one or two I do have. It looks like someone hit me hard on the side of my face, and having that birthmark really fucked me up for many years, partially from being bullied for it and partially because I thought it would never go away. Baby pictures of me in my very loving family are painful for me (not the least of which because my dad is in all of them and he passed when I was still a child).

      The baby pictures thing needs a quick painless excision from work activities!

      Reply ↓
      1. Ally McBeal*

        Oh, this comment resonates. A long time ago I worked at a daycare and got particularly close to one little girl so ended up doing some babysitting on the side. She was born with a raised purple dot, a little larger than the eraser on a No.2 pencil, smack dab in the middle of her forehead like a bindi. It didn’t do a thing to diminish how cute she was, but it sure was the first thing anyone noticed. Luckily her parents weren’t shy about taking pictures, but she’d be an adult by now and I still wonder when and if the birthmark faded and hope she wasn’t teased by her classmates growing up.

        Reply ↓
        1. Zephy*

          My sister had the same thing as a baby, but on the back of her head. It did eventually go away, hopefully the same was true for that little girl.

          Reply ↓
        2. Marmalade*

          One of my kids haas a hemangioma on her head – they fade away by 5, but when she was 6~ months old and had just started medication to treat it, it was by far the first thing I felt like people would see. I was loooking at photos to compare how it looks now and I apparently only took them from the other side of her…

          But also, anyone who lives in a wildfire affected area (or just had a house fire) could have no photos without having any other familial issues.

          Reply ↓
          1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

            which would then raise the traumatic memory of the time your family lost everything in a fire or some other natural disaster.

            This idea needs to go away. How does people seeing what I supposedly look like as a baby help bonding?

            Reply ↓
          2. Dahlia*

            ^That’s why my mom has no baby pictures. She only has one of her at, like, 4, because that’s after their house burned down with all her baby pictures in it.

            Reply ↓
        3. HigherEd Escapee*

          I was born with one of those and I’m in my late 40’s now. The color has faded. I was made fun of for it up through middle school, but it stopped and now nobody notices.

          Reply ↓
      2. MigraineMonth*

        I had a good friend in kindergarten who had a raised red birthmark covering most of her cheek. I thought it was pretty and was actually upset when her parents got it removed. (The parents gave a really weird reason because they didn’t want to explain skin cancer to a couple of 5-year-olds.)

        Reply ↓
      3. Catgirl*

        I was born with a cleft lip. When my workplace played the game I had to find a photo taken after it was surgically corrected and the scar had faded. The game needs to die.

        Reply ↓
    3. Nebula*

      It just seems like such a hassle to me, even if you don’t have any of those issues. I’d have to get my parents to get out the old photo albums and send me something, and although it’s not a huge deal, I wouldn’t like bothering my parents to do something for me just for the purposes of some work thing I don’t care about.

      Reply ↓
      1. TheOtherLaura*

        Yes. Dig up the old albums, find a photo that is not completely degraded due to bad material used in that decade AND is not problematic in some way, take a picture of it, edit out the reflections because it’s a stupid high-gloss photo and who has photos printed high-gloss, anyway, and why? (ok ,so it was on other material and did not degrade, at least) , remove stuff that you do not want to show… If they ever want me to do something like that again I’ll do it on company time.

        Reply ↓
        1. Andor's Endor*

          Dig up the old albums, find a photo that is not completely degraded due to bad material used in that decade AND is not problematic in some way, take a picture of it, edit out the reflections…

          Okay now I feel like you’re just looking for stuff to complain about (as opposed to like, someone who lost their baby photos in a house fire, or was estranged from family and had no access to the photos/didn’t want to be reminded of them, etc). Like, really.

          Reply ↓
          1. Project Manaic-ger*

            But that’s kind of the point – you don’t need some horrific trauma to think this exercise is dumb. There’s much better ways to build camaraderie in teams and going through the unpaid labor of finding a baby photo provides no value to the company.

            It’s bad because it’s bad, with an additional bad for trauma.

            Reply ↓
          2. TheOtherLaura*

            Two hours of my life I will never get back and was not paid for just so someone could show it for 10 seconds at a useless game.

            It’s not trauma, it’s just waste.

            Reply ↓
          3. Chirpy*

            I mean, I don’t keep my own baby photos handy, and I’m pretty sure my parents have them in storage now because there are multiple decades of newer photos of me to display. So I’d either have to have my parents find, scan, and email them to me, or I’d have to drive several hours to their house and dig for them myself. Not worth it for a problematic icebreaker game. Because while I like my parents and have no trauma associated with my baby photos, I understand that other people do have issues, and I’m not going to support a completely useless waste of time that will hurt someone else.

            Reply ↓
    4. Lady Lessa*

      I could pull out one that would probably scandalize a lot of folks. It is labeled “Lessa’s first beer”.
      Interesting side note, I was raised by tee-totaling stepparents, so the first time as an adult having a beer, the flavor was actually familiar.

      Reply ↓
      1. Elitist Semicolon*

        My parents have one of me at about 2, sampling the melted ice and last eighth of an inch of a whiskey sour. Everyone who’s ever seen it thinks it’s hilarious, especially since I don’t actually like alcohol so I don’t drink.

        Reply ↓
      2. Lenora Rose*

        Yeah, we have photos of our younger playing with an empty wine bottle (probably mead bottle actually, but either way, the shape is the same and screams booze.)

        Reply ↓
    5. Roo*

      I’ve had to do it a couple of times too and I really hate it. I actually want to thank Alison for her kind, thoughtful and understanding reply to LW#1. I had a distressing, humiliating childhood. Most of my childhood pictures are of me looking withdrawn, sad and afraid. I’ve had to endure relative strangers ripping the living p~ss out of what a “miserable ugly duckling” I was. I wish I’d had those words of Alison’s to hand at the time. (Me and the dog are happy now).

      Reply ↓
    6. Susie and Elaine Problem*

      We did this in my office too. Having a coworker say flatly “all my family photos were lost when we fled our home country” was a perfect example of why this activity is stupid.

      Reply ↓
      1. Zephy*

        Exactly. There are so many reasons why someone might not have access to their own baby photos and none of them are pleasant. There are even more reasons why someone might not want to share baby photos even if they have them, and few of those are pleasant.

        Reply ↓
      2. iglwif*

        This (and other trauma-filled reasons people don’t have baby photos right there at hand, like they grew up in foster care or their family home burned down in their childhood or they had abusive parents they ran away from or …) is the biggest reason this activity should be put out to pasture.

        Another is that people may not want to share things about their childhood that might be obvious in a baby photo, like that they grew up in a cult or a high-demand religious group that they have since left, or that they were assigned a different gender at birth than everyone knows them by now.

        “Guess whose baby photo this is” situations single out anyone whose gender, culture, race, ethnicity, or age is out of the office majority: ick.

        But even folks without any of those concerns can’t necessarily lay their hands on baby photos instantly! And that’s not how they want to be spending their time!! It’s just a silly activity and we need to stop doing it.

        Reply ↓
    7. Baby Yoda*

      I did this as a baby supervisor, and felt so bad when just one employee had her baby photo in B&W, and all the other employees photos were in color. Luckily everyone kept their sense of humor, but I would not do that activity again.

      Reply ↓
    8. Emmie*

      This exercise did an awful example of othering people. It is especially difficult when you are one of few on a team, such as a person of color, of a certain age, or one of the few of your gender. I would like to believe people mean well, but baby photo guessing games do not belong in professional spaces.

      Reply ↓
      1. Corrupted User Name*

        Yes! In so many workplaces, it would feel incredible awkward for everyone involved to have to “guess” which one of the few POC on the team is the baby in the picture. It speaks to such a huge (white) blind spot for a manager not to think about that very basic thing, much less the memories the exercise might evoke.

        Reply ↓
        1. a good mouse*

          This happened when we did this game in 6th grade – there were only two POC in the class and they were different ethnicities from each other. While the mainly white kids were able to debate and guess about who was who, I’m sure it was very othering to them.

          Reply ↓
      3. Orora*

        THIS. We actually did this in 8th grade. I went to a private Catholic school in the Midwest in the 80s. “Diversity” was not its strong suit. We had 1 African-American kid. How awful to have his “otherness” pointed out so specifically when he already had to deal with it every day.

        Reply ↓
    9. Momma Bear*

      Ugh. That’s so rough and people don’t think about how it might affect others. I hope LW says something. Foster care, natural disaster, fire…so many reasons someone might not be able to or even want to participate.

      Reply ↓
    10. JMC*

      When in the world are companies going to learn that these “ice breakers” are ridiculous and need to stop!! They are not fun, no one ever wants them, and yes they usually touch on something that is tough for someone. Just stop!!

      Reply ↓
    12. tenor eleven*

      I think, if someone ever asks me to do this, I’ll just find a baby photo in Canva and let them go crazy. OP, you did the right thing, good on you. <3

      Reply ↓
    14. aebhel*

      Yeah, I get along fine with my parents, but this would still make me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s curmudgeonly of me, but this sort of thing always feels like prying into parts of peoples’ lives that aren’t really the business of their workplace (as do a lot of icebreaker activities, tbh).

      Reply ↓
    15. Susie Occasionally Fun*

      A previous workplace did the baby photo thing. One of my coworkers, upon being badgered for not providing a photo, told the badgerer that her baby photos, along with her home and everything else the family owned, were lost in a fire when she was a child. With a strong subtext of “thank you for bringing up this traumatic memory, you jerk.”

      Said baby photo thing was not repeated.

      Reply ↓
    16. Can’t think of anything clever*

      I hate any contest like this. About 25 years ago someone thought it would be a great idea. An immigrant from Vietnam had no baby pictures. She was bugged about it to the point she started replying with “In the refugee camp I lived in until I was about 10 no one was taking baby pictures”.

      Reply ↓
    17. Kay*

      I had a project where we had to do a family tree (school related not work, but still) and I absolutely used all photos pulled from the internet. As my husband was walking by he goes “so you’re going to tell them you married -insert some actor’s name- huh?” The movie business is obviously not something I care greatly about so I had no clue. I debated leaving that photo in to make a point, but opted against it. I can assure you that no one made a single hint of questioning/asking, anything. I hope everyone feels free to do this should any of these situations ever come up.

      Reply ↓
    18. busy_woman*

      Mine did too and it made me feel a little crummy. My mom has my baby pictures and I haven’t spoken to her since 2020. People genuinely don’t realize or think about it.

      The point about trans folks is a really good one, too.

      Reply ↓
  2. A Teacher*

    #1: I am an adoptive mom. My daughter doesn’t have baby pictures. The only sort of picture we have of her as a young child comes off of a Facebook page screenshot from her biological mother‘s page that we don’t have contact with. I’ve had to tell teachers in the past that this is a really unfair request to put on kids. There are so many people that cannot get baby photos for a lot of reasons, for some, like my daughter, they experienced a lot of trauma in foster care prior to adoption and literally have no access to any of those photos.

    Reply ↓
    1. Recovering from Foot-in-Mouth Disease*

      Also, if she is as lovely as you say, she will want to know! Some of the most growing experiences I have had have been from friends or colleagues pointing out bone-headed and insensitive things I have said! It is completely mortifying in the moment, and I would be lying if I said I did not remember those conversations vividly and with deep embarrassment. But they made me a better person and I try really hard to remember that it is a gift for someone to care about you enough to have a difficult conversation and tell you that they expect better. I hope she’ll feel the same way. Wishing all good things for you.

      Reply ↓
      1. duinath*

        Yes, I agree. Speaking up for yourself can be such a great gift you give not only to yourself, not only to the person you’re speaking to, but also everyone else around.

        We will know better in the future, and that’s so valuable.

        Staying quiet can feel like the best option a lot, I know, but I think it is that much less often than it seems.

        Reply ↓
      2. hbc*

        A lot of times you don’t even need to tell them you expect better. “Hey, I can’t do this because I’m adopted, and I imagine it’s going to be really awkward how everyone gets Hiro and Jasmine right away in this otherwise caucasian office.” Anyone who’s capable of getting it will get it at that point.

        Reply ↓
      3. Texan in Exile*

        “Some of the most growing experiences I have had have been from friends or colleagues pointing out bone-headed and insensitive things I have said!”

        When I was in college, I casually said how something was so “retarded.”

        A friend pulled me aside and said quietly that his brother was mentally disabled. “I can’t control what you say,” my friend said, “but could I ask that you not use that word around me? I find it very offensive.”

        I was shocked and horrified and embarrassed.

        But 40 years later, we are still friends. And I am still grateful that he thought highly enough of me to say that to me.

        Reply ↓
        1. Isben Takes Tea*

          I have found the approach of “Can I ask that you not use that word around me” is a real solid one for addressing problematic language when you don’t want to have a full confrontational throw-down. Thanks for the reminder!

          Reply ↓
      4. Annie2*

        100%. I am sure many of us have had the experience of someone quietly pointing something out. I have always considered it a favour for someone to alert me to a blindspot, as I don’t want to be blundering about being rude and insensitive.

        Reply ↓
    2. Bluebell Brenham*

      Another adoptive mom here. Several times during elementary school I had to have a chat with teachers about baby photo assignments. If that ever had come up at work, I probably would have spoken up about it, even though I have quite a few baby photos.

      Reply ↓
      1. Jay (no, the other one)*

        We adopted our daughter at birth, so we have baby photos. For us it was the family tree assignments and the “trace your genetics through your family” projects. Ugh.

        Reply ↓
        1. TheOtherLaura*

          Oh goodness, we got “draw your familiy tree as far back as you can find out” as homework in 5th grade. In the 1970s. In Germany. What a hot mess that was.

          Reply ↓
          4. L*

            Oh gosh. Those usually went okay for me, because my great-uncle is an amateur geneaologist, but my husband was straight-up called a liar by his teacher when he was eight years old, because he couldn’t say when one side of his family immigrated to Canada. You know, the Indigenous side!

            Reply ↓
            2. renata ricotta*

              Good grief. “Sometime before the land bridge across the Bering Straight disappeared, according to the scientific consensus”?

              Reply ↓
        2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

          I almost wish we had done something like this so my dad’s love of genealogy could have come in handy. I could have brought in literal reams of printed out paper going back to Germany in the 1600’s. It would have been delightful malicious compliance- “Oh, you didn’t WANT 500 pages with my 18th cousin sixth removed who lived in North Dakota 50 years ago? You should have said.”

          Reply ↓
        3. Ally McBeal*

          I’m so glad my school never did that. I was adopted at birth and had to deal with the occasional classmate saying cruel things like “you’re adopted because your real parents didn’t love you enough to keep you.” I was raised to be proud of being adopted and had no problem refuting their BS on the spot, but bringing more classroom attention to that particular difference wouldn’t have been fun. The closest my school ever got to personal genetics was phenotyping our blood in high school biology, but we weren’t asked to phenotype our parents’ blood as well.

          Reply ↓
          2. I'm just here for the cats!!*

            my cousin and his wife adopted their son from a step family member. I remember once, I think he was around 11, some kids were bullying him about being adopted. He said something along the line of “my parents chose me. Yours are stuck with you!”

            Reply ↓
            1. Kay*

              LOL – I love this! Not the situation or that it ever had to be uttered of course, but the retort part of sticking up for himself is just awesome.

              Reply ↓
          3. Selina Luna*

            I know my, my husband’s, and my kids’ blood types, but only because I had to have Rhogam to be able to carry them at all.

            Reply ↓
            1. MigraineMonth*

              My dad, older sister and I all have positive blood types. My mom is O negative. Rhogam is very likely the reason I’m alive!

              Reply ↓
        4. Slow Gin Lizz*

          I worked very briefly at a public elementary school in a major US city. It was impressed upon me in staff meetings that teachers should *never* do any kind of genealogy-type project, including “what does your last name mean and how did your family get it?” It’s a very bad idea no matter where you are (see Laura’s comment re: German), but in this school many kids were Black and their family names came from the people who owned their ancestors.

          Reply ↓
          1. tangent*

            Even apart from all the issues of inclusion, “what does your last name mean and how did you get it” is probably unanswerable for lots of kids. Plenty of surnames are old enough and have evolved enough over time that the answer is “uh, nobody really knows!” (My family can only narrow it down to two reasonably plausible guesses about ours, and that’s WITH a family member who was a professional archivist and specialist in the language.)

            Reply ↓
            1. Ace in the Hole*

              Goodness, yes.

              My last name is very weird, means absolutely nothing as far as we can tell, and how we got it is a complete mystery since it’s not consistent with any language or naming traditions from our family’s ethnic/national background.

              Reply ↓
          2. MigraineMonth*

            There was a letter on here quite a while ago where someone asked to black coworkers with the same name if they were related. They said no, their ancestors probably worked the same plantation.

            Reply ↓
        5. mango chiffon*

          When I was young they made us do “when did your family come to the US” assignments and some people in my class were like “oh such and such many great grand whatever came on the mayflower” and I’m sitting there uncomfortably as the only non-white person in the class like “my dad came on an airplane for school”

          Reply ↓
            1. Laura*

              I have a black friend from Brazil and she says people do the “where are you REALLY from” and she has to point out that slavery existed in Brazil too.

              Reply ↓
          2. BigLawEx*

            Malicious compliance? When my son got this assignment a few years ago, we sat down at the desktop computer, looked up slave ship images, printed one, and pasted it on the poster board.

            Reply ↓
          3. my little actuary*

            In Trump’s first term our CEO did a shout-out to immigrants and how great we are at the holiday party, but they started with “who here is a child of immigrants? who here is a grandchild of immigrants! what about great-grandchildren of immigrants,” totally forgetting to shout-out the several actual first generation people in the room. Oy.

            Reply ↓
            1. boof*

              isn’t child of immigrants = first gen? So shout out to immigrants and several generations, and then maybe indigenous… kind of covers most bases?

              Reply ↓
              1. CatAdorer*

                First generation are the immigrants themselves. He started with who is a child of immigrants and didn’t say “who here is an immigrant”

                Reply ↓
    3. Momma Bear*

      It’s like the “family tree” projects in elementary school. Not everyone has a “standard” family and kids need options if they’re going to do that project at all. I’m glad you spoke to her teachers.

      Reply ↓
    4. Adoptive Mom*

      Another adoptive mom! Also fostered with trauma. My son was already six years old when we met him and as far as we know there isn’t a baby picture of him in existence, and we even have contact with some relatives. (As an aside I want to know what he looked like as a baby so bad!!!)

      Reply ↓
    5. Bubbles*

      I had to do a family tree with pictures of relatives when I was at school. It was more of a twig. The substitute teacher asked ‘What happened? Did everyone else die in a terrible accident?’. I told her yes and she got SO MAD and it turned into a huge thing. She tried to have me suspended over a filler lesson on family trees! At seven!

      (She was right I was lying about the accident – I wasn’t, I was seven, I just didn’t really think about cause – but they were all dead. I have genetic ailments from ALL SIDES of the family tree.)

      Reply ↓
  3. Ariaflame*

    #3 Would this be your professor’s attitude if you submitted someone else’s work as your own without filtering it through AI?

    Reply ↓
    1. But Of Course*

      That’s what I would do, preferably with that lecturer’s work.

      Also, it’s worth raising this with the department chair or Dean of instruction or whatever you have there; while your professors are making the argument AI is a tool like photoshop, it categorically isn’t because to successfully use photoshop you have to understand what you’re producing with the tool you’re using. Without photoshop, you could still create a logo, let’s say. But with AI, you learn nothing about how to design a logo or what makes logos work. And if that’s your professors’ stance, you are getting less of value from this education than you are paying for, and schools should be very interested in hearing about this kind of thing.

      It’s one (gross) thing to take a prompt engineering class. It’s another entirely to sign up for graphic design and find out your instructors think it should be prompt engineering.

      Also, AI is garbage, and anyone who thinks it’s good, or indistinguishable from real work, or whatever justification they use for not writing the email or designing the thing, is 100% wrong. If I wanted soulless design, I’d buy a Deplorean..

      Reply ↓
      1. nnn*

        And added to all of this, in a world where AI exists, it’s more important than ever that students are trained to be better than AI, or they simply won’t be competitive.

        This lecturer is not providing them with that vital training.

        Reply ↓
        2. CatDude*

          Yep. And it’s important to teach them the ethical issues with AI as well, not just shrug off those concerns with empty platitudes like “use your own moral compass”.

          Reply ↓
          2. GreenDoor*

            And one’s “moral compass” isn’t the only issue here. I might have no shame about AI importing copyrighted material into a response that I turn around and use on client work. But if that client then markets it and gets sued for copyright infringement, you can be certain they’d be coming back and suing me for subjecting them to legal risk! It’s not just a questions of morals and ethics…there’s real legal and financial implications to using AI that AI users absolutely need to be aware of.

            Reply ↓
        3. allathian*

          Yes, absolutely.

          That said, I’m a bit ambivalent about AI to be honest. Sure there’s an environmental impact, but search engines and the basic intranet infrastructure use environmental resources in the same way, yet I don’t hear anyone saying we should dismantle the internet for environmental reasons. It’s a matter of degree rather than kind. I think the AI genie is so far out of the bottle that there’s no putting it back in, it’s a matter of learning to live with it in a way that respects other people’s intellectual property rights.

          I also don’t really see the harm in training AI with artworks when the intellectual property rights to those artworks have lapsed, and I don’t think the descendants of creative people should be able to renew IP, why should they benefit from something they didn’t create? For art in the public domain, have at ye, AI!

          That said, there needs to be a lot more supervision of what actually goes into the black box, and AI models that provide references to the data they’re using are a step in the right direction.

          In addition, I think it should be a legal requirement, as well as simply the right thing to do, to inform consumers when AI has been used to create something.

          Reply ↓
          1. It’s me Stan*

            They may use resources as well, but it’s well documented that generative AI uses resources at a scale that’s orders of magnitude higher. And we are at a moment in history where most people understand the environmental and climate crisis, which wasn’t happening at the dawn of the internet.

            Reply ↓
          2. Mockingjay*

            Most people, including this incredibly obtuse professor, don’t understand how AI works. AI is not capable of independently creating an image. It uses algorithms and keywords to quickly search for like parameters and patterns to create something similar. How does it find those like things? It’s trained on images created by humans. The vast majority of works were used without the author’s direct permission. Those images and data are copyrighted, trademarked, company proprietary – the list is endless. AI companies are making a fortune off stealing people’s labor and product. There are myriad lawsuits in progress by authors and creators against AI companies.

            Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, etc.) is not the same; it provides electronic tools to draw and design, and has stock images available for lawful, licensed use. You can insert your own images of course, but that’s on you/company to decide whether there is liability (risk of copyright infringement, etc.) if from an outside source. AI engines don’t have any checks for infringement.

            Students need to understand that AI can be used responsibly, but only within guidelines set by the company or, as a creator, understanding the risks of making a product that was in actuality derived from someone else’s product.

            Reply ↓
          3. Rock Prof*

            Like others said the environmental impact of ai has been very well documented and it’s substantially larger than most other tech stuff. I’m currently teaching an environmental science class, and I’m trying to plan an assignment that actually has the students look at this specifically. I know I get work that’s ai generated but it’s getting harder and harder to tell. I’m kind of hoping that guilt might work on students who are almost all environmental science majors and minors.

            Reply ↓
            1. CatDude*

              As an environmental scientist myself, I really appreciate you focusing on this with your students. I am seeing more and more about using AI in the field, but not enough about the environmental impacts.

              I am not categorically anti-AI but it needs to be used surgically and with great care, and that requires an understanding of how it can be harmful.

              Reply ↓
            2. Mike S*

              Well you seem to have an agenda but still I hope you won’t ignore more recent evidence that all those original power consumption estimates are very inflated and not remotely accurate. But this is nothing new because in my Environmental Sciences class in 1990 I was told NYC would be completely underwater within 20 years. If there is a branch of science with more guessing involved I haven’t seen it.

              Reply ↓
              1. Calamity Janine*

                i don’t think discounting this person’s entire knowledge base and dismissing their field is something that will make your arguments better, nor convince the audience that you are doing something other than lashing out due to your own agenda.

                Reply ↓
              2. Put a sock in it.*

                And if there’s a branch of technology with more butt-hurt fanbois involved than AI, I haven’t seen it. Yup, you’re worse than Mac and Linux neck beards even. Though possibly only just as bad as SpaceX twits.

                Reply ↓
        4. deesse877*

          I wholeheartedly agree. In all honesty, the entire situation throws the value of the program and the degree into question. Scaring students like that is essentially a high-pressure sales tactic, and I would counsel the LW to investigate graduation and employment rates for their school, in sources like College Scorecard that are not created by the school.

          Reply ↓
          1. Mike S*

            I can just image someone trying to get a job as a designer in a few years and bragging about how they are not competent with (and perhaps even hostile to) the most revolutionary development in the industry in decades. At least you will be easy to screen out as viable for an interview so they won’t waste much of your time.

            Reply ↓
            1. Sacred Ground*

              And I’m trying to imagine someone trying to get a job as a designer without understanding the fundamental principles and elements of design and having no practice at creating original designs.

              Reply ↓
            2. Calamity Janine*

              well, i agree! if they want a prompt engineer, they don’t want an artist. they’ll get the results they deserve, mind, but they won’t interview any artists for it’s not what they’re in the need for. the revolutionary technology is going to end up with them pigeonholing themselves into a very specific role with a technology that cannot work ethically (e.g. cannot work without violating copyright law).

              actual artists will probably be okay through that rise and fall, however. :)

              Reply ↓
        5. Anony*

          A guest lecturer who does one lecture is not providing students with vital training – they are just lecturing about one specific thing at one specific time. We’d need more context as to the program of study in order to make a determination beyond that.

          Reply ↓
      2. paxfelis*

        I wonder how a copyright lawyer would view the “fuck consent.” Probably with a great deal of anticipatory glee and schadenfreude.

        Reply ↓
      3. Jennifer Juniper*

        I just yelled at some random on Quora and blocked and muted him because the dude’s comment was “Chat GPT says…”

        Out, out, you demons of stupidity.

        Reply ↓
      4. Anony*

        Most universities already have AI policies in place. Mine does – it is that use of AI is up to the discretion of the instructor as to where/how they permit the use of AI in the classroom. I’m a professor – I don’t allow students to use AI in my courses, but I have colleagues who do allow students to use AI with proper citations.

        Reply ↓
      5. a name*

        It objectively is a tool like photoshop. It’s also a tool IN photoshop. It’s very naive to think it’s going to suddenly go away. Anyone teaching any sort of graphic design class absolutely should be including AI, as it’s only going to become more common.

        A lot of the comments here feel like they’re written by people who have zero knowledge of these tools. It’s like seeing someone take a picture, and declaring that all photographers are hacks, because they just have to push one button.

        Reply ↓
        1. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

          A chef’s knife is a tool like Photoshop. I can use it to cut a carrot. Or I can use it to cut through a screen into someone’s house. Or I can use it to threaten you to give me all your money. Or I can use it to kill someone. Are those uses equivalent? Are they each morally neutral because the tool is objectively neutral?

          Apparently you are the naive one. Oh gosh, it’s “just” a tool. Nobody using the tool is responsible for how the tool is used, apparently. Or in what context. You didn’t address consent and you didn’t address intellectual property. Maybe you actually have no knowledge of these tools either, since you’re not aware of any valid concerns about them.

          Reply ↓
          1. a name*

            Exactly! It’s a tool that can be used in different ways and it’s up to each of us, what we will do with it.
            So should the cooking school ban knives? Or have a special lesson on how not to stab people? Or should they do what this guy is doing? Teach you how to use the tool within the context of the class?

            The source of AI training data is incidental to the fact that AI tools exist, are constantly improving, and will continue to become more popular. There’s options for people with ethical concerns. Adobe Firefly was trained on Adobe’s own licensed images, and pictures from the public domain. It’s why you never hear anyone complain about the AI tools built into Photoshop.

            Reply ↓
        2. Arts Akimbo*

          People in my field are actively being harmed and their income impacted because generative AI tools have scraped their hard work, their copyrighted images, while giving the actual creators nothing in return.

          We have knowledge of the tools, all right. Knowledge borne from being stolen from.

          I agree that AI should be taught. People should be taught the incredible ethical shortfalls of the tools and how they steal from working, living, human artists.

          Reply ↓
          1. a name*

            People in lots of fields are harmed when new technology makes it easier to replicate their skills and experience. But a class still needs to stay up to date on the latest tools and techniques used in that industry. A teacher saying “AI is bad. Never use it.” is doing a disservice to their students who will likely need to use these tools in the future.

            Reply ↓
            1. Sacred Ground*

              I think there’s a substantial difference between replicating someone’s skills (a welding robot or CNC mill or 3D printer replacing skilled trades, for example) and using someone else’s copyrighted original work with neither credit nor compensation just because it exists on the internet.

              Reply ↓
    2. OwnedByCats*

      It also seems to me that the lecturer, and his company, have signaled clearly that they’d also be perfectly happy stealing work from students, interns, and employees. I agree with other commenters here, that lecturer is not only providing a poor educational experience – but also clearly showing they don’t understand ethical business practices.

      Reply ↓
      1. Bird names*

        Very good point. I wouldn’t want to submit any original work to them, whether as his student or an intern at his company for fear of exactly that.

        Reply ↓
      2. RandomNameAllocated*

        I work in a graphic design adjacent industry and we have been given VERY strict instructions about the use of AI in our work

        Reply ↓
      4. Katie A*

        How have they signaled that? The way AI steals art is obviously very different from taking an individual person’s art and passing it off as your own.

        They arguably may have signalled they could be somewhat more likely than average to steal other people’s art directly, but the LW shouldn’t include anything like what you wrote in anything they do to report this, if they do report it.

        Reply ↓
        1. hbc*

          I mean, they were using AI badly enough that they still managed to violate fair use and have something be an obvious rip-off. And instead of that being a lesson on what not to do, they expressed derision about consent. They didn’t just signal that stealing was fine, they outright said it.

          Reply ↓
          1. Katie A*

            Idk, it’s still very different than directly taking an intern’s art, and they did scrap it, so they didn’t end up using the art that was too similar to someone else.

            Also, the comment about consent was in response to the LW’s question about AI scraping the internet, not part of their story about that project, so they’re not necessarily part of the same ethical question.

            Whether or not you think this guy and the company are more likely to directly take someone else’s art because he said this stuff is something people can reasonably disagree about, though, so I see how you got to your opinion.

            Reply ↓
            1. Lenora Rose*

              Did they scrap it because they realised it was wrong or only because it wa distinct enough they’d get caught?

              I don’t trust anyone who says “Fuck consent”. Period.

              Reply ↓
              1. MigraineMonth*

                Agreed. He was pretty clearly angry that a) someone had identified that it was copyright infringement, and b) that he had to abide by that ruling.

                If he’d presented the exact same situation as “you have to be careful with AI-generated content because sometimes it produces images too close to the individual artworks it has been trained on”, that would be one thing. His reaction seemed to be frustration at the very idea he couldn’t steal others’ work.

                Reply ↓
              2. Observer*

                I don’t trust anyone who says “Fuck consent”. Period.

                This. This has nothing to do with AI. It has everything to do with his stating that he’s entitled to take what he wants from whoever he wants to, regardless of the wishes of the actual owner.

                Reply ↓
            2. Dina*

              Two things for LW3:

              1. I’m genuinely curious as to how this lecturer would feel if he lost work to cheap AI-generated not-quite-copies. Why pay a professional designer when you can just prompt an AI to copy his work?

              2. I don’t know how applicable this is in your specific area, but does you school also teach about using tools like Glaze and Nightshade to protect your work from being used in generative AI models?

              Reply ↓
              1. Carys, Lady of Weeds (OP3)*

                1. Honestly, I have no idea. he seems like the kind of person to turn around and sue for that…

                2. The school doesn’t necessarily teach about it (that I know of), but during the heated Q&A when this went down another student who was much more outspoken against AI than I was – I just asked the one question – brought up that these tools exist to stop AI from stealing your art and his response was a shrugged, “Well, if you feel the need to do that, whatever.”

                Reply ↓
        3. MigraineMonth*

          I don’t know how the art AI generators are trained, but in my field (computer programming) the AI generators are regurgitating large chunks of programs that are under copyright or restrictive license. It’s pretty obvious because the attribution information, copyright and license notices from the original work are included in the so-called “generated” content.

          So, it’s stealing with one extra step.

          Reply ↓
        4. Observer*

          How have they signaled that?

          Because when the LW asked a perfectly reasonable question he didn’t equivocate, spout some nonsense or even try to justify how this is “different”. He straight up said “F consent.”. Straight up no need for consent. Period.

          Yeah, I’m not trusting someone who claims that mass stealing of IP is morally more acceptable than doing it retail. But when someone says that consent just doesn’t matter at all? When someone tells you who they are, believe them. This guy just did.

          Reply ↓
    3. LaminarFlow*

      Came here to say that, and I work in the technical world of AI. This space is very undefined, and it operates with some very loose guidelines.

      There are people who work in the space that are ethical on all levels, and there are those that operate on their own set of loose rules. I am very much in the former camp, and I refuse to change that. Overall, AI can be great, but it can also be extremely detrimental, and just plain dumb. I will say that “fuck consent” could have been a (really tone-deaf) cheeky response to the question due to the loose rules in the space, but why would a seasoned professional choose to say that in front of a group of people he doesn’t know? What a clod.

      TBH, LW, you don’t really need to worry about this guy – the clients that he creates non-original images for without citing the source will likely eventually find out that he has ripped another artist off, and they will stop doing business with him. He is tanking is own reputation.

      Reply ↓
      1. SnackAttack*

        I 100% agree with you. I work in the tech field as well. I have my reservations about AI (environmental impact, copyright issues, etc.), but I also recognize that it can be used responsibly as a tool.

        I think it mainly boils down to people’s lack of understanding around the different types of AI. People here don’t seem to realize that AI has been used for years on a wide basis, and it’s not something that was invented in the last 18 months. If you’ve ever logged onto Netflix and watched something recommended based on your past shows, that was AI. There are also specific AI models that don’t share data with the larger internet and only train themselves on specific datasets that you okay. When most people think of AI, though, they’re thinking large-scale generative AI, like ChatGPT or image generators. I have a much bigger issue with those, since they’re less reliable and do steal from artists’ work. Overall, I think we need to really be teaching everyone about what exactly AI is so that they can be informed about using it.

        Reply ↓
        1. Calamity Janine*

          it would be fantastic if people knew more about how AI wasn’t all large language predictive models! honestly it’s a very small part of the field that is taking up all of the oxygen in the room. …and sadly, this will probably be a bubble that bursts all over the entire industry. and if we’re being honest… the loudest voices trying to define only them as AI are motivated in part to do so by the fact that many of them run on what have been worst practices since before i was born. (this is the field my father works in, so i know a bit of the inside baseball, lol.)

          to make a useful model, you have to be concerned with ethics; if you aren’t concerned with ethics, there’s hardly a way to make a useful model. ignoring ethics isn’t the rallying cry of the entire field – far from it! but it’s what the loud parts don’t want discussed because they want it to be intrinsically unethical so nobody catches them slipping.

          AI is so much more than just large language models and other “we’re based on probability only but also can’t self-report our internal rules to you so good luck trying to get this to not violate laws lol” systems. so much more useful, too! but… people have also been hoodwinked by some hokum on how to view LLMs. even in these comments you’ll see the conflation of this with “the computer thinks just like a human! wow! what a cool sci-fi future!!” attitudes which puff the LLMs up to a mythical status far beyond what they deserve. and it leaves no limelight for the very useful and very ethical ways in which the entire subject is far more diverse!

          it’s the same frustration as if you saw someone define all of knitting as just making very itchy socks that don’t fit anyone’s feet. it turns out you can do much cooler things with knitting needles! things that are way more useful and aren’t unbearably itchy! it’s a real disservice to limit the subject so… but here we are… having to remind people you can use knitting to do more than itchy socks that don’t fit… sigh.

          Reply ↓
    4. Lacey*

      Right? I’ve seen reporting on AI companies that won’t let job candidates use AI in their application.

      It’s a bananas double standard.

      Reply ↓
      1. Bilateralrope*

        OpenAI complained a lot about DeepSeek being trained on ChatGPT without their permission.

        But when the complaints were about ChatGPT being trained on everything it could grab, without the permission of those authors, OpenAI were telling people to shut up.

        Reply ↓
        1. Emotional support capybara (he/him)*

          Big “You’re trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen!” energy from OpenAI on that one.

          Reply ↓
        2. Observer*

          OpenAI complained a lot about DeepSeek being trained on ChatGPT without their permission.

          I had a good laugh when I heard about that. In a black humor sort of way.

          Anyone who thinks that Sam Altman is a trustworthy person really needs to open their eyes. I’m sure he would have agreed with this guest lecturer till the day before DeepSeek hit the news.

          Reply ↓
    5. Carys, Lady of Weeds (OP#3)*

      Of course not, and that even came up during the Q&A portion when this all went down. The university I’m at has strict rules about AI and most classes and teachers won’t allow students to use it. (To be clear, I’m talking generative AI, not, like, the red eye button in Photoshop or something.) In response to students saying “well but we can’t use AI in our classes” the lecturer said “use it for all your side projects!”

      It was just…wild. I’m guessing the teachers are going to start seeing a whole lot more AI-generated art from some of the students in the art programs, just based on the discussion responses from some of them really praising this dude’s approach to AI. Upon their own heads be it.

      Reply ↓
      1. AVP*

        To answer your more specific question about how acceptable this is in modern workplaces…I work in a creative agency where I have a number of clients that we’re doing creative output for. It’s really hit or miss and every company is different. It wouldn’t be much of a scandal to expose this designer unless they were passing it off as handmade or hand-drawn or had charged for something other than what they submitted. If they did an ai-gen photo and charged a client for a real-life photo shoot, that would be a scandal. But a lot of clients are surprisingly into this and fine with it if it saves cash.

        That said, my agency doesn’t use this at all, and we use it “all human created” as a selling point to clients, because the ai-gen work I’ve seen in my area is mostly crap. I have a client who uses it for their written work, and I can always tell right away. I charge them for my time to redo their drafts when it hits my deliverables because the output is not really usable.

        Reply ↓
    6. JMC*

      AI is cheating and theft. Period. And anyone who uses it is cheating and stealing. Anyone with any integrity will just stay the hell away from it.

      Reply ↓
      1. Landry*

        Hard disagree. It is a great tool in certain situations, provided the users and customers both practice ethics and transparency.

        Reply ↓
        1. Sigh.*

          Ah yes, and we all know human beings – especially in the last 20 years or so! – are the absolute paragon of ethics and transparency. Clearly we as a collective society will band together to do the right thing, for all of humanity’s sake! #sarcasm

          Which is why first off we need to stop calling it ‘AI’ and call it what it really is – machine learning. Machine learning can in fact be great, for certain logical processes. But there is NO single solitary ethical way it can be used in any kind of creative arts capacity, whatsoever. ANY machine learning in creative spaces will ALWAYS be theft and cheating. It’s the human tendency to take the path of least resistance, magnified – I don’t have to actually take the time and effort to learn how to paint, I can just feed an idea into a machine! It’s not only hurting the artists who are losing money and job opportunities to this theft, it’s also hurting art as a concept by homogenizing and simplifying it into these weird creepy flat pictures that all kinda sorta look the same. It’s just, it’s trash, man. Fricking burn it all to the ground.

          Reply ↓
          1. Elizabeth West*

            This. If you’re using it for tedious and mundane computing tasks that don’t need human input, then fine. Creative work is human work.

            And don’t touch my stuff or I will make you eat a bowl of Legos. WITHOUT ANY MILK.

            Reply ↓
      2. Mike S*

        Then to maintain your strict ethical rules you should stop listening to all popular music. Every note was “stolen” from another artist because the creator heard it and was inspired to create something different from the raw ingredients (and didn’t write a check when they did – the gall!). This is exactly how generative AI works as well.

        Reply ↓
        1. Sigh.*

          That is … not actually at all how that works. And the sheer amount of copyright litigation in the music world should tell you that.

          Reply ↓
        3. Elle*

          Thank god Mike S is here to absolutely butcher this explanation of what generative AI is- couldn’t ask for a better example of the brain rot that will ensue from dependence on exactly that.

          Reply ↓
        4. An Actual Human Artist*

          You’re making it so very clear that any creative work you deliver should be treated with the utmost of suspicion. That you have no respect for human beings who actually create things. That you have little to no knowledge of any creative process. That you have no respect for intellectual property (so probably none for tangible property, either). And that you think yourself an expert on subjects about which you know next to nothing.

          So very grateful that I don’t have to work with anyone with these character traits. Thanks for making it so clear that you should not be taken seriously.

          Reply ↓
        5. SnackAttack*

          Well…that’s not true. That’s like saying all original art is theft because the colors they used already existed in other pieces. Or that a cake is the same thing as a pile of flour and sugar because the ingredients are the same. I’m not as anti-AI as most on here (mostly since I’m more in the weeds with it for my job and understand the intricacies a bit better), but I do 100% believe that in creative spaces, AI is theft. Any AI that generates brand-new images or text should involve consent.

          Reply ↓
        7. Alpacas Are Not Dairy Animals*

          If you think generative AI is capable of inspiration, then you believe it’s sentient in a meaningful sense. If generative AI is sentient in a meaningful sense, it’s completely unethical to own it or to take the fruits of its labor without compensation, which means that said AI needs the right to own property and make independent decisions.

          Reply ↓
    7. boof*

      I think it’s worth presenting on several cases of plararism bringing someone’s downfall (or at least, major blows) – although the first one I can think of is Shmorky vs Todd Goldman – Goldman was in the habit of cribbing lots of stuff from the internet and even though he was redrawing them it ended up not going well eventually. Parallels to AI are rife even if it was pre-AI.

      Reply ↓
  4. nnn*

    #2: A self-psychology trick that has worked for me in similar circumstances is to pretend I’m in a “be as scrupulously professional as possible” contest with them, and I want to win.

    Reply ↓
    1. But Of Course*

      I actually like being super warm and friendly (but not intimate) with anyone who thinks we have reason to hate each other. It puts them super off guard.

      Reply ↓
      1. Delta Delta*

        This is a good strategy. and especially if others see your behavior, no one can accuse you of being inappropriate.

        Reply ↓
        1. Another freelancer*

          Exactly! It also puts them in a weird spot because they know they will look unreasonable if they complain. They can’t exactly say “Another Freelancr just wished me a good morning. How dare she??!”

          Reply ↓
      2. Zellie*

        I started a job one time where on of my co-workers was mad at me because they took from her job to create my job (I didn’t know this until after I started working there). She essentially shunned me — I didn’t exist. This was the exact tactic I used. It does throw them off-guard. You want to be the better person.

        Reply ↓
      3. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

        I do something similar. There’s a co-worker that I dislike (for a variety of reasons too vast to get into here, but I’ll note that last year I was interviewed for an HR investigation of her for a discrimination-related complaint I didn’t even make, because the similar complaint that I did make was lost in my boss’s vast collections of email, so I’m clearly not the only one…that eventually ended in an extremely vague and overwrought apology from her to the whole staff in a staff meeting, which it’s unclear if she learned anything meaningful from but she does seem to have stopped doing that particular thing at work, at least).

        I’ve decided to publicly call out in meetings every single time she has a good idea and make sure to credit her for it whenever something she says or does ends up being a good idea that we can actually use (this is not particularly frequent, so I have to listen carefully for opportunities). One of her perennial complaints about people is that they’re “not team players” (because they don’t want to do it the way she does and/or have boundaries), and that just takes the wind right out of her hot air sails, plus it makes it more likely that the next time I have to put in a complaint about her to my boss she’ll see it as a specific issue rather than a running feud due to all of the nice things she’s heard me say before…(also this person is less likely to oppose whatever-it-is if I can tie it back to a suggestion she made previously, however tenuously, that makes it Her Idea).

        I hope she retires soon.

        Reply ↓
    2. Sparkles McFadden*

      While doing that, take great pride in how much your polished civility is annoying your terrible coworker. Seriously, you’ll be driving her crazy.

      Reply ↓
    3. NotRealAnonForThis*

      At an OldJob, I managed this but only in short spurts.

      Because I could NOT, for life of me, wrap my brain around I should be the bigger person around an unethical, misogynistic, racist manager who was highly incompetent, all with no consequences to him.

      It may not apply to the LW, but sometimes, all you can do is be professional in the short term while looking to GTFO of that mess.

      Reply ↓
      1. Jennifer Juniper*

        I would have been too terrified to be anything but docile, agreeable, and obedient. That is my default with those in authority. Church has prepared me for being a good team player – including in situations where I should have gotten out.

        Reply ↓
    5. Smithy*

      I agree with this – but I’d also add that it can be helpful to tell yourself you’re doing this as a means of advertising what kind of colleague you are to others around you.

      While it may feel like “everyone” knows what’s going on, there may be visiting coworkers or staff who truly are left out of the details. So now, you’re essentially putting out a billboard to say “I’m an approachable and collegial professional who you’d be happy to work with, bring a problem to, or seek mentorship from”. This civility can have less and less to do with with this person, but rather is there as a message to others perhaps more junior or senior as a means of showcasing how you are to work with.

      Reply ↓
      1. Dasein9 (he/him)*

        This is a really good perspective to take. It’s not about the detested colleague; it’s about the folks you already do care about, or might care about in the future.

        Reply ↓
    6. HonorBox*

      Great suggestion. I’ve done this, and have felt like I’ve needed to take a shower after being incredibly professional with people who – for actual reasons – I’d like to give them my honest opinion of how awful they are. But it works. They wouldn’t know that I actively and strongly dislike them.

      Reply ↓
  5. MK*

    #3, I am not sure why OP thinks this person is concealing his use of AI from anyone. He talked about it openly in front of hundreds of people, and he sounds a loud proponent of AI. I don’t think this is going to be the shocking disclosure OP imagines.

    Also, I am cynical about the extend their clients, and the average client in general, will care about this on principle.

    Reply ↓
    1. Language Lover*

      I wonder if clients realize that things created with generative AI don’t have copyright protections. They’re paying for something they don’t actually own.

      They may have to attempt to go the trademark route.

      So some clients might not care out of ignorance but that doesn’t mean they’d be happy about it with more information.

      Reply ↓
      1. Myrin*

        I literally just read about this (I was actually looking up something else related to copyright and this was in the paragraph above that) – the text in question said that if a real person worked manually on the AI-generated thing afterwards, this person becomes the copyright holder regardless.

        I’m not in the US (although we generally have stronger protections than you guys) and this was literally the first I’ve ever heard of it and only one article but it definitely had me wondering.
        I don’t have the time right now but I’ll definitely look into this more in-depth once I get home today.

        Reply ↓
        1. Thomas Paine*

          My interpretation analysis would be this. (To be clear, this isn’t legal advice!)

          An original work that incorporates AI elements is likely to be a “derivative work.” Derivative works are copyrightable.

          If the AI elements aren’t copyrighted, there is no original owner to claim a copyright over the derivative work, and the artist who made the derivative work can claim the copyright over the derivative elements.

          Reply ↓
          1. Kevin Finnerty*

            I agree with this, but the issue is that quite often the AI elements are indeed under copyright and have been incorporated into the machine’s learning without permission. As a user, it can be challenging to know to what extent your work is violating someone else’s copyright. As a client of an unscrupulous graphic designer, more difficult yet.

            Reply ↓
          2. mreasy*

            A US court just decided that using copyrighted content to create new AI generated works is not considered “fair use” – and therefore any derivative work created would require a license. This professor is not only morally specious, but any work his firm creates on behalf of a client would not become their own (and would leave them open to lawsuit by the copyright holder(s) of the original work(s)).

            Reply ↓
            1. Wilbur*

              I was under the impression that there was another US court decision that work generated by AI without significant human input were also not eligible for copyright. I’m not sure how that’s determined, but as a client I’d be concerned that I’d pay a bunch of money on IP that I couldn’t own.

              Apart from the legal issues, the guy got in trouble for creating knockoff using AI because it was a derivative of distinct work. I’d be concerned that whatever work they made for me would be so generic that it wouldn’t stand out. Finally, if this guy is using AI to create material than his price better be much lower than anyone else.

              Reply ↓
              1. Kevin Sours*

                I would not consider it to be settled law at this point, but a key aspect here is that to be copyrightable a work has have been made by an actual person. That’s well established. The amount of human input into computer generated works required to meet that bar is less well established. But it is not clear that a work generated by a program based on a text prompt is eligible for copyright.

                Reply ↓
      2. MK*

        That’s why I said “on principle”. A client might have specific concerns, but I don’t think everyone is automatically going to be schocked about using AI.

        Reply ↓
    2. AnonAI*

      Agree, I know this is shocking to people not entrenched in it, but this is absolutely the attitude out there from those that are adapting AI and where big business/big industry is going. They openly say this at conferences, lectures, in the media. This isn’t a big expose moment this is a “yes, that’s exactly what I said” confirmation moment.

      Reply ↓
      1. Jennifer Juniper*

        Can a big company retaliate against an author for complaining her work was used in their AI? Like with a SLAPP suit? I am in the US.

        Reply ↓
        1. Observer*

          That’s a different issue. If someone can point to specific use of specific work of theirs, they may have a case (depending on specifics). Of course, things like SLAPP suits can almost always be a problem, but if someone has the capacity to fight back, they can probably win.

          But if the LW tries to “reveal” the use of AI per se, it’s going to be about as interesting as an announcement that Monday happens each week.

          It’s his response to the consent question which has the potential to blow things up for him. Because he is being stupid an arrogant, but he may not have been quite this transparent in public before.

          Reply ↓
    3. Emmie*

      Using AI is a big deal to creative clients. It should be. The work created from AI must have sufficient human manipulation in order to be protected under intellectual property laws. There are few cases now telling us what degree of human manipulation is triggers intellectual property protections. The US Copyright Office has guidelines on this matter, but we need more precedent.
      Using AI as a creative who performs work for hire creates problems for clients. It impacts the client’s ability to obtain rights to the work, which should be signed over in an agreement. Smart clients should also have contract terms addressing this.
      I would not be surprised if this person was uploading proprietary information into AI. It shows a lack of awareness about open AI models and the risks associated with them.

      Reply ↓
      1. MK*

        I understand that, though we don’t know what kind of work he does and who his clients are. But either way, he is being very open about it.

        Reply ↓
        1. Emmie*

          We know he is being open about it in the classroom. We don’t know if he is being open about it to any clients. That is an important distinction.
          I want to clarify that this comment is meant as friendly, not as combative or argumentative. Tone gets lost in replies here.

          Reply ↓
  6. T.N.H*

    For OP3, at least in my industry, yes this is the new norm. Obviously he shouldn’t have phrased it that way, but I think many creatives use AI in all of their work now. At least one of the companies I work for explicitly encourages this.

    Reply ↓
    1. But Of Course*

      I think that’s much more varied than you think. I have never used it, and my org flirted with it for a minute, then chose not to use it at all.

      Reply ↓
      1. Thomas Paine*

        Some artists may use AI, and others reject using it. I agree that the latter group isn’t bound to fail or what not.

        But it is common enough that if LW3 takes a hardline stance against it — e.g., by “shaming the company on Google,” complaining to deans/professors, etc. — she is, at best, going to be perceived as precious, a true pearl-clutcher.

        The instructor was correct to say that AI is a tool, and artists ought to know of its availability and how to navigate it, even if they chose not to do so themselves.

        Reply ↓
        1. CatDude*

          Creative communities do not react to the use of AI with a shrug – LW3 will not be seen as a pearl-clutcher. Many creatives will fully support calling out these professors promoting the use of AI without any regard of how it might have stolen other people’s artwork without their consent.

          Reply ↓
        2. Lacey*

          No, most creatives are actually super against using AI in our work.

          We consider it unethical (theft!) and bad for the enviroment (it uses a ton of resources!)

          Not to mention, the results are incredibly boring and haphazard.

          The people who want to normalize AI are the ones who will get rich off of it.
          They want to scare people into adopting it (you’ll be left behind!) to make more money for themselves while creative skills atrophy.

          It’s a long con. You are being conned.

          Reply ↓
          1. Elbe*

            They want to scare people into adopting it (you’ll be left behind!)

            I completely agree with this. There’s a significant group of people who always want to frame new technology as somehow inevitable as a way of side stepping the very real practical and ethical concerns that people have. And they pressure everyone else to adopt it so that their self-fulfilling prophecy comes true.

            Reply ↓
        3. Hyaline*

          Pretty sure that cavalier “fuck consent” attitude is not well appreciated by anyone outside a very select few, and I don’t think anyone in a university would appreciate that phrasing or sentiment even if they approve of AI use. FWIW, the person saying “AI is a tool” was NOT the same person who said “fuck consent” that the OP wants to name and shame.

          Reply ↓
        4. Lenora Rose*

          I doubt most will see her as a pearl clutcher; a very broad band of creatives view generative AI as a cancer (including ones who have used other tech advancements that were tagged AI years before generative AI existed). She will be seen as highly partisan, but ***that’s not a bad thing***.

          Reply ↓
    2. Myrin*

      I know very little about actual design work so I have to admit I don’t understand how “designer uses AI to ‘help’ with their work” works on a practical level – is it that you give it a prompt and it produces the picture/logo/graphic/whatever and you then go in and manually change stuff?

      Reply ↓
      1. PurpleCattledog*

        I think it’s highly variable. AI can be used to do many things from minor to major. I know design people who use AI tools to do things they previously did manually (they work a lot with images). I expect there’s many tools that have AI underpinning them (AI isn’t new, generative AI is pretty new) that are common in design – and indeed such tools are evolving. I expect many people who work in design don’t dig into recently how the tools they use work (or even can day precisely what is or isn’t an AI tool – I know it’s such a buzz word that I’m not sure where the line is).

        I’m not in design, but when we talk about using generative AI in my industry some are very against it. It’s fine for them not to use it – but the reality is that it’s a tool that is fast becoming the norm. Copyright, ownership etc are still being figured out. But someone insisting they don’t and won’t use generative AI feels little different to those arguing that you shouldn’t use spell checkers, or calculators.

        I really doing think this is the gotcha the LW thinks it is. They clearly sit at one end of the argument with copyright and training material for AIs (or maybe just generative AI), their guest lecturer another and the professor saying you need to make up your own mind. If anything I think the professor is doing their job in making students think about generative AI and putting a viewpoint in front them.

        Reply ↓
        1. CatDude*

          “But someone insisting they don’t and won’t use generative AI feels little different to those arguing that you shouldn’t use spell checkers, or calculators.”

          Then I don’t believe you understand generative AI. Spell checkers and calculators aren’t built on using the works of others without their consent – there’s absolutely no ethical comparison.

          Reply ↓
        2. Pallas*

          Using an object selection tool that was trained with ML to help touch up a photo is patently different from generating whole ass “designs” out of gigantic lumbering models trained on vast swathes of stolen material.

          It produces “work” that inherently has no consideration for function or meaning, which is the entire point of design. Any “prompt” is just keywords for the model to grab sources (of presumably wildly varying unsupervised quality and functionality) and grind up into an averaged-out paste.

          That “work” is then hilariously difficult to closely edit or adjust (another thing that design requires — not waves of random full iterations but careful tweaks and adjustments).

          As a client I would be furious to learn that we’d been opened up to mass litigation, robbed of the ability to purchase the relevant rights, and saddled with a Potemkin village of a design by a smug grifter like this one.

          Like, why not just save that money by hiring a small team to select and customize some licensed prefab designs. Really, there is no shortage of material already in the world.

          Reply ↓
    3. Limmm*

      I don’t mean to sound obnoxious but I’m an artist in an area where some of my peers are insanely famous artists (household names who have won the biggest arts awards on the planet), and we discuss this in our group chat allllll the time, and always negatively. I don’t know one single famous artist who doesn’t hate AI with a passion. Many of my friends have had their work stolen to train AI.

      IMO it’s just wannabes with no talent looking to steal from actual good artists. No one with actual talent uses it.

      Reply ↓
      1. Katie A*

        This isn’t a convincing argument. Your insanely famous artist friends have very different concerns than the average creative working at a company, so of course they have different opinions.

        People who have to do a lot of, for example, graphic design work, to fulfill contracts and get paid have to balance quality and speed in a way famous artists don’t.

        Just because some famous people have a particular opinion about something in their field doesn’t make it correct. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, either. It’s just not especially relevant to how the average person should get their work done.

        Reply ↓
        1. Kaiko*

          But the design is the job. When a “creative” uses AI to do the job, it’s a huge signal to me that they either are not good enough at the job and shouldn’t be in the field, or they’re willing to be duplicitous in order to move ahead. Both are huge huge turn-offs for me.

          Reply ↓
        2. Lacey*

          I’m not a famous artist and I have a lot of mid-level to low level artist friends.
          We all hate AI.

          I’m a graphic designer in my day job. I don’t use generative AI for anything.
          The only thing it would actually makes faster (sometimes) is exapanding images.

          Your idiot client can’t leave enough room around the chair he’s photographing? Well, expand it with AI and hope you get some semblance of a normal room around it.

          You’re still going to have to tilt-shift or field blur that sucker to heck to hide what you’ve done, but it’s a little cleaner than content aware. IF the AI can correctly guess what to put in the new space. It often cannot.

          Reply ↓
        3. Lenora Rose*

          I think looking at how highly successful award winners in a field do their work is often deeply instructive about what is needed to do the work well, though.

          Now, there are people who insist on doing things in old ways for the sake of it – the writer who still insists they have to type on a typewriter or write in a notebook, the photographer who only ever uses a dark room, the method actor going to absurd lengths to “fit their role” – but we can generally tell the overly strict edge case from the overall “this is the effort needed to succeed” level.

          I have yet to see an argument that AI actually produces the kind of *quality* needed. Lots of reports of people trying to take an AI product and edit it into useability, most of which seem to say it doesn’t save time after all, and takes them longer to fix than producing the same thing from scratch would. Lots of reports of non-experts looking at things and thinking they’re great, while the experts cringe. Lots of reports of cases, in text and images, where the original (copyrighted!) source comes through obviously, and LOTS of hallucinations.

          Reply ↓
          1. But Of Course*

            My partner and I call AI product the uncanny peak. It’s all SO clearly soulless that it’s off-putting. Just to tag onto your comment about quality.

            Reply ↓
        4. Skytext*

          The “grunts” doing design work to fulfill contracts they obviously can’t fulfill on their own merits still DON’T GET TO STEAL THE WORK OF THE FAMOUS ARTISTS! So yes, the famous artists do have a valid opinion , and yes Limmm makes a very convincing argument.

          Reply ↓
      2. CatDude*

        Agreed. Anyone who thinks the promotion of AI is just going to be shrugged off by most of the creatives community hasn’t spent much time in them.

        Reply ↓
      3. Sarah With an H*

        I work for a company that, unfortunately, is going all in with (non-artistic) AI, but most people I actually know, including coworkers, and especially artistic people, feel very negative about it. And I don’t know any famous artists so it definitely isn’t just a “famous person” thing.
        I don’t buy the argument that “its here to stay so people need to know how to use it.” I know it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but it only becomes an industry norm when people decide to treat it as such; it basically becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Especially when espoused by people like that professor who are in positions of authority. So I am all for the LW naming and shaming!

        Reply ↓
    4. Tea Monk*

      And they want people to pay for this work? Why shouldn’t I just spend 3 minutes in mid journey to make some nonsense instead of paying you? Pro AI people want to be out of a job.

      Reply ↓
    5. Writer*

      As a writer, I want to push back on this. “Creatives” are not regularly using generative AI. People in creative professions may use it, but actual creators, you know, create things, out of their own minds using their own skills.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ellis Bell*

        Yeah, I think common sense should suggest that if AI is doing X work for you, then you’re no longer an x creator; the AI is, there has to be a line above the AI contribution where your own specialism kicks on and where you’re actually contributing something of yourself. Like, in my profession, teaching, teachers might use AI to do grunt work like coming up with an example sentence, but they wouldn’t get the AI to design the whole scheme of work, assess all students, feedback to students, model the skills and provide advice!

        Reply ↓
      4. But Of Course*

        As a graphic designer, web developer, and writer, agree. I have never used it, I won’t use it – being able to write a prompt isn’t creative work. Being a human who creates art or writing or code or design or music or crafting patterns or a bookcase or a recipe or any of the so many things that humans can create – that’s being a creator.

        Reply ↓
    6. FrivYeti*

      I don’t know what industry you work in, but I do not think it’s standard.

      Every creative community I know feels that AI is a cancer. Any company that encourages AI is a blight that deserves to go bankrupt. AI is garbage and it does not deserve to be normalized and it should absolutely be fought at every turn. The only industry I know that’s pushing it are the infinite growth tech vultures, and fuck every last one of them.

      I cannot wait until this idiotic bubble bursts, the venture capitalists lose their shirts, and machine learning researchers can go back to doing actual work instead of trying to turn all of human society into featureless goop.

      Reply ↓
    7. Observer*

      Obviously he shouldn’t have phrased it that way, but I think many creatives use AI in all of their work now

      It’s true that AI, including generative AI is being used in more creative spaces. But what he said about consent goes way beyond poor phrasing. It’s almost certainly a reflection of a fundamental attitude which is a major problem, unrelated to AI per se.

      Reply ↓
  7. Percysowner*

    #1 I can come up with so many reasons why someone wouldn’t have pictures. Things like Hurricane (insert name here), wildfires in (insert State here), lost phone and never backed it up, parents refused to put pictures of their children on social media and lost all to a computer crash or stolen phone. The remark was insensitive at best and cruel at worst. Your boss should feel ashamed she made such an unkind “joke “.

    Reply ↓
    1. Aggretsuko*

      A friend of mine lost all of her children’s baby pictures because they were on her phone. I give credit to her (normally shitty) ex for actually salvaging the pictures for her recently.

      Reply ↓
    2. Observer*

      Yes. There are sooooo many reasons that people might not have a baby picture available. Many of them not especially traumatic. But still, it would really stink to hear that “My mom never backed up the phone that held all her pictures of me” *really* means “Mom didn’t love me” in someone’s mind. And to hear that said in a group! And that’s a *good* situation, relatively speaking.

      Boss *should* be mortified! Because that’s the only way there is a chance that something this won’t come out of her mouth that way is that she cringes hard any time she even thinks about it.

      Reply ↓
    3. Rainy*

      I have one photo of myself before the age of 5 (and not that many from 5 on). As far as I’m aware there were never any baby photos of me.

      Reply ↓
  8. RLC*

    For #1, every reason I can think of for a person not having a baby photo available is associated with traumatic/sad/unpleasant events or circumstances. Family homes lost to natural disasters, refugee families unable to bring photos when immigrating, families experiencing poverty, unhoused families, and so on in addition to the concerns Alison mentioned. The baby photo “game” is a bad idea for so many reasons, so many ways it could be painful for so many people.

    Reply ↓
    1. WS*

      I have a non-traumatic one – my parents had all their undeveloped pictures made into slides, not photos. So I don’t have any baby photos unless they decide (as they have thought about for decades) to have the slides converted into photos. But yes, I agree, most of the reasons are traumatic and it’s a bad idea.

      Reply ↓
      1. Nightengale*

        Yeah, mine isn’t traumatic. But my 82 year old mother would have to get out an album – which mind you, she would probably enjoy – and then remember how to use the scanner on her printer. Or I would have to talk her through using the scanner over the phone. If said scanner is working which it isn’t always. The youngest picture I personally have of myself is around age 12, and that’s because it’s a picture of me with my grandparents.

        Reply ↓
        1. iglwif*

          My 83yo mother has never put photos in albums, and has hundreds of envelopes of photos stashed in drawers in several different rooms of her house as well as, from the past 20-ish years, probably tens of thousands of digital photos stored on her desktop and laptop computers (yes, she has both).

          Unless a suitable photo is framed and sitting on a dresser or sideboard somewhere in the house (which is possible! There are lots of those, too) it could take literally weeks to find one.

          Reply ↓
          1. ashie*

            When my mother passed away last year we had to go through a gigantic trunk full of 50+ years of loose photos, just tossed on top of one another. It was actually a very moving experience, but one I would rather have avoided.

            Reply ↓
    2. Richard Hershberger*

      Add to this personal indifference. Not on the part of my parents, but of me. My photos are in a box somewhere, probably in the basement. Can I put my hands on them? In theory. In practice? Are you paying me to stay and home a few days to sift through my basement?

      Reply ↓
      1. Antilles*

        Or similarly, if your parents still have the photos themselves. My parents have plenty of photos of me as a baby, a toddler, and growing up. They still have copies of every single one of my School Picture Day photos hanging on the wall. But I didn’t take them with me when I moved out after college because of course I didn’t, my parents enjoy having those photos and those memories.

        Reply ↓
    3. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      My immediate thought if I was “required” to provide baby photos is to say “they were destroyed in the flood, sorry” whether it was true or not. My office has no need to know or look at my personal life outside of emergency contact HR records.

      Reply ↓
    4. WindmillArms*

      I have a loving, financially stable family who took many photos of me as a kid which I have free access to–and I still object to the baby photo thing because I’m trans. It would likely out any trans person who might not want to share that information (not to mention all the other extremely good reasons people have pointed out!)

      Reply ↓
    5. Elbe*

      Agree. It would be different if the baby photo game was optional, and no one needed to justify why they didn’t care to participate. But making it mandatory is just very strange.

      I also think that it was an odd choice for the manager to use the animal photo instead of just leaving the LW out of it. including the animal photo just drew attention to the fact that the LW didn’t have a photo and, as you noted, it’s usually a sad thing for people to not have that. It would have been a lot better for the boss to just skip over it.

      Reply ↓
  9. Pterodactyls are under-cited in the psychological literature*

    My partner creates games. It is a point of integrity with him and many of his game-creating colleagues to use only ethically sourced human-generated art. They document their sources, pay artists as appropriate, and advertise the fact they’re doing so. There *are* communities who care, whether it’s because of the environmental costs of AI or the desire to support human artists.

    Reply ↓
    1. Joana*

      If nothing else, other creatives tend to care about it. There was a scandal last summer with an organization that supports aspiring writers essentially saying that generative AI is the only way disabled people could write a novel, on top of just generally supporting it and digging in their heels when questioned. It was not good for them.

      Reply ↓
          1. CatDude*

            Yea, it was incredibly disappointing. I hadn’t participated in a long while but I still had positive feelings towards it – until I read about this debacle. An organization dedicated to inspiring writers to just *write* – telling those writers that it’s just as good to let a program do the writing for you. And then having the gall to claim it was ableist to criticize them, when they are acting like disabled people can’t write on their own! Such a mess of hypocrisy.

            Reply ↓
            1. Preschool teacher*

              NaNo also was covering up complaints that people on the young writers’ forums were grooming underage kids and getting them off platform. The forums got taken down and NaNoWriMo as an org basically imploded. There are a bunch of detailed posts on the NaNoWriMo subreddit. The AI thing was the nail in the coffin. So disappointing.

              Reply ↓
              1. 2 Cents*

                OMG, I had no idea about any of this and it is so disappointing. I had been a NaNoWriMo fan since (practically) the beginning, but OMG, how far they’ve strayed!

                Reply ↓
              2. Lenora Rose*

                The only reason *that* wasn’t the nail in the coffin for me was that I didn’t hear about it until the AI debacle that followed brought it back to light. (I had only paid attention to my local area forums and not to the overall forum, and I had never looked in on the young writers’ section.)

                Reply ↓
        2. Joana*

          Yuuuuup. I’d participated since 2005 and even was a guest blogger for them in 2023 but I’m not touching it with a ten foot pole between that and the other things commenters have mentioned.

          Not that I expect them to last much longer, their donations basically dried up, they have hardly any sponsors, and they backed out of participating in Project For Awesome.

          Reply ↓
      5. Jennifer Juniper*

        Most of us have nothing wrong with our thinking, writing, or creative abilities. Ableist insult is ableist and gross.

        Reply ↓
      7. Lenora Rose*

        Yep.

        I have only finished NaNoWriMo once but I have done it before, and know a lot of people who did it for years on end (and yes, some are published writers), and every one who heard about that has backed off from the organization — including the ones who did the event by themselves or with a strictly local, now disassociated group. Generally with the response “This is National Novel writing month, not national write a short prompt and push a button month”

        Reply ↓
      8. I Have RBF*

        WTF? I’m disabled, but it has not affected my ability to write, FFS. I don’t need both arms and both legs to write, one hand does perfectly fine.

        Reply ↓
    2. dogwoodblossom*

      I recently saw a game (Beastie Ball) that’s a Poke-like and in the “Beastie-pedia” you can click on each creature and in addition to game stats you can see who designed it and some of the concept art. I have no interest in playing this game myself (it’s very cute but the gameplay is not for me) but I love that feature so much I’m probably going to buy it anyway just to support the devs.

      Reply ↓
    3. Thomas Paine*

      “There *are* communities who care, whether it’s because of the environmental costs of AI or the desire to support human artists.”

      No one is saying that LW3 should be FORCED to use AI in her own art.

      But artists (particularly those taking a course) need to know of its existence and how to use it, if they so choose.

      There will be people who legit disagree with you that “only human-generated art is ethical,” or that people who use generative AI “don’t care,” which is waaaay overbroad and conclusory statement.

      Reply ↓
      3. CatDude*

        No artist needs to know how to use it, actually. Plenty of artists are able to produce art on their own merits.

        And even if they do know how to use it, that means they need to learn how to use it ethically – which this lecturer and the professors are completely failing to do.

        Reply ↓
        1. iglwif*

          This!

          Could there be a place for AI tools in creating art? Maybe, potentially. (I do not personally think generative AI belongs in creative work in any way; I am quite willing to use Canva Background Remover when the occasion calls for it.)

          Must artists use AI tools? Absolutely the eff not.

          Should these tools be used in creating art? That’s a more complicated question that people can have different views on, but they need to be nuanced and educated and informed views, and “You have to use AI or you will fail at art” and “consent to use others’ work doesn’t matter” is … not how you get there.

          Reply ↓
      4. Writer*

        I’m sorry, but a design professor teaching students to use AI feels like an English professor teaching students how to download a fake research paper from a shady website instead of teaching them how to write their own.

        Reply ↓
        1. Observer*

          No, it’s more like an English professor teaching students how to use tools like spell, grammar and readability checkers. Including showing them how this stuff can go very, very wrong.

          I’m not invested in the use of LLMs and Generative AI. But some accuracy tends to be helpful in getting some clarity.

          Reply ↓
          1. Calamity Janine*

            the better analogy that actually preserves how LLMs work is that it’s like an English course where the teacher shows the class how to write an essay, and by write an essay they mean type the topic into google and proceed to open up the first five search results and copy-paste sentence fragments from all of them together into a paper. it is, after all, a model using probabilities to put together words in ways they’re most likely to have been put together in the past.

            a grammar checker is programmed to a far more limited role, and has been programmed with certain definite rules. a LLM does not have any defined rules – merely probability tables. and you can’t get those probability tables unless you get a lot of data in there to generate them, largely by breaking copyright law. you can make a grammar checker by independently writing the ruleset and giving credit to if you are, say, writing from the AP stylebook. you cannot do that with a LLM.

            so… still not useful and more liability than anything else, really. and certainly not in the same ethical clade as a grammar checking function in your software.

            Reply ↓
          2. Joana*

            Er, no? Assistive AI (spell check etc) is completely different from generative AI. The proper parallel would be an English professor teaching students to get Chat GPT to spit out the paper for them. Spell check doesn’t write it, it looks at what you’ve already written and gives suggestions based on dictionaries and such you have downloaded in the program. Chat GPT takes a prompt and writes it for you.

            Reply ↓
      6. FrivYeti*

        This is true only in the sense that artists should learn whether a tool that claims to use AI is using predictive AI, generative AI, or just normal programming that’s had the AI label slapped on it for marketing reasons. And the reason to learn that is to know what to avoid.

        The only thing that artists taking courses should be learning is how to use AI-poisoning tools to protect their art from rapacious thieves.

        Reply ↓
        2. Lenora Rose*

          Yes, there was a brief kerfuffle when someone said that the Spider-verse movies used AI, until it became clear they were using tools for background detail and repeating images that existed before *generative* AI was released, and were not related to the copyright-stealing machine at all.

          Reply ↓
      7. Calamity Janine*

        as an artist… the thing about AI is that it’s just wasting my own time.

        if i sit down to draw something, i already know what i want it to look like. it’s easier to make the lines myself, even as i struggle, than to try and figure out how to translate that into words and then into just the right words to get the computer to jump through those hoops.

        if i sit down to write something, i already know what i want to say. not only is it difficult to translate that into a prompt the computer will pick up on, quite frankly by the time i have done so, i will have written an outline and… it’s just easier to turn those bullet points into sentences. and it’s much faster to cite my sources as they come up than let AI write something and then have to go back to look up every single one to make sure it’s citing things correctly, and is citing something real at all instead of a hallucination.

        it’s three times the work to clean up the AI’s mess after patiently trying to get it to do what i want it to do. so i already know how to use it: as a way to waste my own time and frustrate myself with an aggravating process. and, of course, it’s all going to be for a result that looks as generic as possible – not at all my style, my voice, my personal brand. if i shift my product to these voices that make everything i produce as easily replaceable and generic as possible, and i’m wasting so much of my time to do so… well, it makes it pretty clear that it’s a losing game i simply don’t need to be playing.

        Reply ↓
        1. Myrin*

          In a similar vein, I was quite astounded yesterday when a coworker told me about how another coworker used ChatGPT for her subset of my workplace’s social media posts (she got permission for this, which I m also astounded by, but that’s not the point of this comment); not that she does it, I knew that, but how.

          Apparently she told ChatGPT “Write a post about the new exhibition showing the following: ‘a carnival’s mask from [time], different newspaper articles about carnival balls from [different time], carnival’s medals used for [show], …'” and I looked at the post just now and it said “We’ve got a new exhibition for this carnival season! What all do we have? A carnival’s mask from [time], different newspaper articles about carnival balls from [different time], carnival’s medals used for [show], …” and I’m just like… I’m sorry but you couldn’t come up with those five extra words and ten emojis on your own? Like, she had to be specific anyway because it wasn’t about a general article on carnival or whatever but about the unique pieces we have here so why not just… make it into normal sentences and be done with it?

          This colleague is an intelligent woman who writes well and has tons of great ideas, I’m honestly bewildered by what’s going on with this!

          Reply ↓
          1. Calamity Janine*

            heck, if you’re dedicated to not writing your own words there, just… go on Canva and find a template you like and away you go, lol! then you actually have a service you’re paying to license the work, and a much more clear “chain of custody” so to speak when it comes to legal issues.

            also honestly it probably takes less time than figuring out the prompt to tell chatgpt lol! you don’t have to already know and have these details at hand when you’re working with a template that prompts you for them… and as a bonus those templates have also already done more work. you’re most of the way done with the graphics for a social media post, too, instead of just having copy that you still need to stick on something!

            it’s a bit shiny new toy syndrome, like when someone gets a new kitchen gadget and starts cooking for an excuse to use it instead of what’s most efficient. like yeah, the grilled cheeses in the waffle iron are unique, but the regular griddle frypan is also right there and much easier to clean lol! you aren’t actually saving time by putting it in the waffle iron.

            Reply ↓
    5. Bilateralrope*

      When you say games, I think video games. That might not be what you want, but video games are an area where the lack of disclosure can cause serious problems.

      Steam (the largest video game marketplace on PC by a large margin) requires disclosing the use of generative AI on the store page of a game.

      If a developer hires a contractor to help make a game and that contractor uses AI without telling the developer, then the game they publish to Steam is in breach of that policy.

      As for the ethics of using AI, most of my thoughts have already been said by others. All I can add is that this lecturer telling people to lie to their customers says a lot about their ethics. None of it good, or surprising, when it comes from AI people.

      Reply ↓
      1. Observer*

        Steam (the largest video game marketplace on PC by a large margin) requires disclosing the use of generative AI on the store page of a game.

        Disclosure is a big issue, and I agree that it’s the right way to go. And that even someone who does not personally think that that’s important needs to abide by those rules. Because when you use someone’s service (eg the Steam marketplace) they get to set the rules. And unless you can make a case that those rules are inherently immoral, unethical or discriminatory, (which you cannot in such a case) you need to abide by those rules or not use the service.

        Reply ↓
    6. BigLawEx*

      One of the most reliable sources many artists I know have used for YEARS just started adding AI content. The company (an aggregator) didn’t flag it (notice it?), there was a small kerfuffle where two different folks accused each other of using AI, and now we’re all left wondering how to vet (or how to find the time) to vet sources.

      Reply ↓
  10. Witch of Oz*

    Ugh number 1. How can a functioning adult not foresee how problematic this is? There are so many reasons a person might not have baby pictures! Aside from the obvious ones relating to family estrangement, foster care etc, what if your house had burnt down and you’d lost all your photos? Your boss SHOULD feel bad and learn a lesson: never do this activity again.

    Reply ↓
    1. Anon for this one*

      Because many people that grow up in circumstances where these things didn’t happen don’t always understand or recognize that other people have different stories. It doesn’t mean they’re not functional, just human. I run into far more people that can’t grasp that not everyone had a great time growing up than those that can (which are usually just people in the same camp). I’m not saying this was an ok activity, but I can see why someone may think it is, as they don’t have the life experience to think about those other circumstances.

      And super ironically, I check all 3 of the boxes you mentioned (family estrangement, fire, foster care) and still have baby photos. I feel very lucky for that fact.

      Reply ↓
      1. Bird names*

        For the activity itself, yeah, I can see how someone could cluelessly arrive there.
        The joke though? Wouldn’t that be hurtful no matter anyone’s background? Or are some people so removed from the possibility that parents can be awful that they think they’re joking about something impossible?

        Reply ↓
      2. Irish Teacher.*

        Also, people don’t always put too much thought into activities like this. Even those who do understand that not everybody had a great childhood won’t necessarily stop to think about the fact that people who were in foster care or who arrived in a country as refugees don’t necessarily have baby photos.

        Reply ↓
      3. londonedit*

        Yeah, a lot of the time people just aren’t thinking too deeply about things. They think ‘Ah, baby pictures! That’d be fun!’ and that’s that. A lot of people don’t think too far beyond their own sphere of experience, and if they think something would be fun then they assume everyone else will, too. For them, and the people they know, baby photos aren’t a problem, so they don’t stop to think about whether it’d be an issue for anyone else. It’s not malicious, it’s just a lack of thought.

        Reply ↓
      4. goddess21*

        uh lack of empathy is shameful actually

        and no one accidentally grows up not knowing these things. pretending that suffering doesnt exist is a privilege and a pleasure.

        Reply ↓
      5. Elbe*

        Agreed. A lot of people who had happy, stable upbringings have a very massive blind spot when it comes to this. They really underestimate the number of people who have had very troubling experiences.

        I think that the parent-child bond is such a huge part of development that people have trouble conceptualizing the world based on a different bond than the one that they knew. This is what makes it so hard for kids from stable homes to understand the perspective of kids from troubled homes, but it’s also why a lot of people need professional therapy to unpack problematic upbringings. It’s genuinely difficult to change your perspective on something that is such a fundamental building block of the self.

        Reply ↓
  11. Filicophyta*

    The baby photo thing takes two forms; the guessing game and the simple display. Both have problems, but in the ‘game’, what if you are the only person of colour, or have an obvious facial irregularity (me). Not much of a guess. It’s also bad if you are not-out trans.

    Luckily, I’ve never been forced to do this, but if you can’t refuse for some reason, what people can do is submit a photo from Halloween or a performance in some kind of costume, or a big sports mask/helmet. Or something from a stock agency.

    Unrelated, when I was little we didn’t have a camera, and then a few years ago I also lost all childhood hardcopy photos in an accident, so I couldn’t supply a photo if I wanted to.

    Reply ↓
    1. SeeReeves*

      I came here for those two things. When you’re the only person of color (or at least the only person of your color), this is not a fun guessing game. It’s a point out the person who looks “different” game. And for many trans individuals this is basically being dead named. Even worse if you are not “out.”

      There are other ways this steps on diversity in your workforce toes – like age. When your picture is the one black and white one taken in the 60s, for example.

      Just don’t do this game. Ever.

      And I say this as a person who didn’t always realize all these things and incorporated this game into a workplace baby shower a decade ago.

      Reply ↓
      1. Mark*

        I agree, when I was young we did not have a family camera, the youngest I have seen myself is about 4, so I don’t have any, not through trauma or fire/flood. What I did when we had to do a similar exercise was download a stock photo and I used that.

        Reply ↓
      2. Sunflower*

        This is me. The only one of my ethnicity in my department and also I’m old enough that cameras and film were expensive when I was a baby. If there was extra money, it goes to, you know, food.

        Reply ↓
    2. Cam*

      A previous workplace asked everyone to bring in a childhood Christmas photo for this kind of game…I am a Jewish trans man who was not out at work. I was like “Best I can do is a photo of me when I was much younger, holding a gift from a different occasion” but in retrospect I wish I had just refused.

      Reply ↓
    3. KaciHall*

      I am now thinking of how creepy it would be if someone brought a picture of me in for this because they downloaded a random stock photo. My grandpa was a stock photographer, so I grew up thinking it was totally normal to look at the picture frame sections in stores to see if it’s my family. (Found out as an adult that my grandparents did it to see if anyone was using it without licensing. I just thought everybody did.) But I think it would hit really different if someone brought in a picture of “them” but it was me. It’s been weird enough seeing pictures of my family showing up on random reels on Facebook – that would be even weirder.

      Reply ↓
    4. a trans person*

      I’m out as trans and I still refuse. My parents and loved ones can look at pre-transition photos of me. Coworkers? Hell no, and I don’t care if it’s “just” a baby photo.

      Reply ↓
  12. Daria grace*

    #1 I’m sorry you were put in this situation. It’s not an appropriate game for reasons Alison and others have said. “Well, someone’s parents didn’t love them” is also not an appropriate joke to make in any workplace context. You should speak up if you’re comfortable to do so

    I don’t understand the appeal of the game. Even as someone with low barriers to getting photos (I am on fairly good terms with my mother who retains copious photos), I’m still still asking someone who is busy or travelling a lot to take time to go through their files and maybe have to scan pictures, likely also prompting a discussion I don’t want to have about when I’m giving her grandchildren

    Reply ↓
    1. WoodswomanWrites*

      #1, you mention what a great person you say your boss is. With that context, it sounds like it would be a a good idea to have a conversation where you can share about how what she said affected you, as well as the whole set-up for a baby picture event overall.

      Speaking for myself, I’ve received feedback in the past about how things I said landed. Uncomfortable as that’s been in the moment, I’m grateful for the conversation even in the midst of it. It gives me the opportunity to learn and grow, and therefore do better. I’d rather be clued in than risk creating a harmful situation for someone else again.

      For this particular example, I remember years ago participating in a comparable baby picture event that someone at work initiated. I thought it was just good fun at the time, likely how your boss saw it also. By bringing up your experience directly instead of avoiding the discussion, you can make your workplace and your relationship with your boss smooth again.

      Reply ↓
  13. TokenJockNerd*

    Oh wow #1, your boss is glad you’re her employee, not me.

    Because, honestly, looking her dead in the eye and saying “You’re right! And that reflects on her, and joking about it reflects on you” has been my go-to for that “joke” since I was about 16.

    She should feel bad. She said an entirely unacceptable thing. There’s no situation in which saying that is anything but inappropriate for the workplace (or indeed civil conversation).

    Reply ↓
    1. Delta Delta*

      I like this concept. For maximum uncomfortable impact, I’d trim the response to, “you’re right.” and then let the stony silence and eye contact do the work after that.

      Reply ↓
    2. learnedthehardway*

      That’s a great response for people who INTEND to cause offence, or who double down on being called on saying something offensive.

      Reply ↓
      1. Hey there*

        It’s great even if someone didn’t INTEND to cause offense. People need to learn to STFU with their extra commentary sometimes, especially as a manager in the work place. Saying someone’s parents must not have loved them is in no way shape or form a joke or a cute thing to say. Period.

        Reply ↓
      2. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

        I can’t imagine how saying someone’s parents didn’t love them, in a public forum, was not intended to cause offense. It’s inherently offensive.

        Reply ↓
  14. Bilateralrope*

    #3: Using AI also opens up a major legal problem if the client is expecting to own the copyright afterwards because purely AI generated art can not be copyrighted in the US.

    Do you want to know what happens when the client finds out that the work they thought they had the copyright to is ineligible for copyright protection ?

    Because I’m not aware of any lawsuits about that yet. I doubt you want the expense of being in the lawsuit that sets that precedent.

    Or you could just disclose the AI use ahead of time and avoid all that trouble.

    Reply ↓
    1. Seal*

      Or you could avoid all of the legal and ethical pitfalls of AI and not use it at all. While AI can do some really cool things, it’s also increasingly obvious it can create more problems that it solves. Yet another “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” situation.

      Reply ↓
    2. Thomas Paine*

      “purely AI generated art can not be copyrighted in the US”

      As noted in the original post, the discussion revolved around incorporating AI-generated art into a human-created work.

      Derivative works are copyrightable.

      Reply ↓
      1. mreasy*

        In a non-fair use instance, though, you have to license the original work(s) to publish a derivative work, which I’m presuming “F*** consent” guy is NOT doing.

        Reply ↓
      2. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

        The derivative elements of a derivative work are under copyright, but if the original work is in the public domain and non-copyrightable then it’s only those elements which are under copyright rather than the work as a whole. (This is assuming a perfectly spherical AI in a frictionless field that was trained on a model with no baked-in copyright issues, rather than addressing the other issue with pretty much every current model of whether or not their use of training data was a copyright infringement. That part is under such active litigation right now that I’m not touching it until more things get through the appeals process and we get some kind of stable precedent. The non-human creator bit is settled law due to that pre-AI monkey case unless courts start taking a different view of prompt engineering than they have so far.)

        If I decided to take some prints of old 19th century photos and paint fairy wings on a bunch of men wearing serious suits, I’d hold copyright over my modified version of that image with my particular wings, but I wouldn’t be able to prevent anyone else from using a different print of that same 19th century photo and drawing elf ears on them instead, or even substantially different wings. I would imagine most clients would want stronger exclusive use rights than that.

        (I am not a lawyer, but I am an angry copyright nerd. I have many strong opinions about fair use and derivative works, only some of which are supported by law!)

        Reply ↓
  15. Seal*

    #3 – AI component aside, playing fast and loose with copyright law can cost companies and organizations millions in legal fees; the PR nightmare alone can be enough to end careers. It’s one thing to discuss the pros and cons/frustrations of copyright law (of which there are many), but essentially telling students to feel free to ignore it is at best irresponsible. Definitely bring this to the university’s attention; they tend to take copyright law issues very seriously.

    Reply ↓
  16. Irish Teacher.*

    LW3, this really resonates with me at the moment as just yesterday, our school had an in-service on the changes to “senior cycle” (basically our equivalent of 6th form or the final 2 or 3 years of high school). The big change is that all subjects will now have a project component rather than students’ entire two years of work being tested in one 2-3 hour exam (or in the case of English, Irish and Maths two 2-3 hour exams). I’ve long thought this a great idea, but you can see why introducing it now is a problem. AI.

    The government’s official guidelines are that students have to cite it and give the url and so on and they were telling us yesterday that it would be easy for the examiners to tell if they’d just copied and pasted, since they could compare with the citation. They seemed incapable of understanding that a student using AI to cheat and breaking the rules about just using it as a source and not copying directly would also be likely to break the rules about citing. Heck, even when I was at college, there was, I think, a time when somebody didn’t cite a book because they wanted to essentially plagiarise, but there is more chance of a lecturer recognising book.

    They also seemed completely unaware of the ethical issues inherent in AI, which isn’t that surprising as these people are secondary school teachers on secondment, not AI experts. But they insisted that our options are to “pretend AI doesn’t exist” or teach students to use it properly. Which is true, but I’m not sure, “you can work on projects that the result of will determine of you yet in to college, at home with no oversight and you can use AI, but you just need to cite when you do it,” IS teaching them to use it responsibly.

    I have looked at AI with students and showed them some of the inaccuracies and stuff it comes up with, but there is no guarantee either that all students will have a teacher do that or that they will even listen – students often think “teachers just say that stuff to stop us cheating.”

    Reply ↓
    1. Irish Teacher.*

      Just to stress the importance of these exams, I’ll add that I missed the course I applied for by 20 points, so if I had gotten 5% higher in any four of my six best exams, I would have a (slightly) different career than I do. It may have worked out for the best, but that is the significance of these exams, that even 5% in one subject could mean not getting a course, which could possibly change your career direction. Had I been 5 points short, I would still have missed out.

      And it’s a comparative thing, like say there are 100 place on a course, the top 100 students who applied get into the course, so if cheating gets somebody an extra 5%, they could get a place at somebody else’s expense.

      Reply ↓
      1. Teach*

        I teach secondary in the US, and my district bought access to a school-specific AI tool. It actually has a whole sub-tool for AI detection in student work, as well as a sub-tool for creating assessment projects that are more AI-resistant.

        Reply ↓
      2. Lenora Rose*

        I have seen some good “Here’s how to use AI in education ideas”. One that resonated with me was:

        – Teach the students a subject as usual.
        – Get them to produce an AI generated paper on the subject.
        – Then the students *Grade the paper* based on their own understanding of the subject, highlighting outright fabrications, and bits that are partly right but missing a nuance, and parts that are fully correct.
        – The teacher grades the grading.

        This actually reinforces the subject itself as they have to know the subject to assess the paper, reinforces critical thinking as they find mistakes, AND teaches them why not to rely on an AI summary on any subject.

        Reply ↓
      3. Beany*

        Off-topic a bit, but I also went through the Irish CAO/points system — back when the max was 32 points rather than 640 or whatever — and this is what I thought was so unfair about the Irish bonus points. People sitting exams through Irish got a percentage bump in their results that had nothing to do with their proficiency in the exam subject, and this could get them into a high-points college place ahead of someone else who sat through English. (And of course, almost all college courses were taught through English anyway.) It probably only affected a tiny number of people, but still.

        Reply ↓
    2. Flor*

      Perhaps I’m misreading, but I don’t understand how citations (assuming they’re accurate and comprehensive) would enable you to see if they copied it directly because LLMs don’t produce the same text each time. They re-generate the response every time. Providing the exact URL might help guard against this, but I’m not sure if that would persist long-term.

      Caveat that I don’t use genAI myself so I’m not super familiar with them from an end user perspective, but I do understand the general workings of them.

      Reply ↓
      1. Hyaline*

        FWIW, in the field I teach in/my institution, the use of citations is for academic integrity–the old chestnut that anytime we use words or ideas not our own, we cite. So even though the Plagiarism Machine (I’m sorry, ChatGPT), will spit out a different answer next time, you cite to show “I did not write this. I did not think of it. I copied someone else’s work–the someone else was generative AI.” Of course, unless you require that the student turn in the ChatGPT feed along with the assignment, there’s no way of knowing if they accurately copied–but that’s less of a concern, probably, for most secondary and college level work (unlike those scientific papers that all copied the same AI hallucination!)

        I don’t allow AI in my courses, but I know that’s the rationale others use for allowing AI but requiring citations.

        Reply ↓
  17. References*

    hmm, the problem with the answer to the reference question is that the permission question is always accompanied by a request for their contact information and you will get dinged for not having it/supplying wrong information. You are better off using a non-boss colleague you have info for (and permission to use as a reference) than someone you can’t supply accurate info for (and whom you haven’t asked to be a reference).

    Reply ↓
    1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      Really? You’re going to ding someone for not having current contact information for someone from a job they left seven years ago? That’s a bit harsh, and not everyone uses LinkedIn.

      Reply ↓
      1. References*

        I was actually providing my experience as a candidate – I have been expected to provide names and correct contact info if I check off you can contact my boss. And companies expect it to be correct.

        Reply ↓
    2. NewFolksWhoDis?*

      But you can also just list the company’s general number or the number to their employment verification system if they are big enough to have one of those. That is what I have had to do for several jobs with high turnover. I do not recall ever seeing a specific “name a person we can contact” but if so, listing HR/Accounting/Person who prints the checks will get them started. The point is not to specifically identify your direct supervisor, but to get them 90% the way to being able to verify you worked there and able to speak with someone who can answer the basics (such as “are they eligible for rehire?” which is a checkbox in most HR/payroll systems, so no personal knowledge is needed) vs. having to guess which “Smith’s Bookshop” you worked for and calling a bunch of different numbers. In my current role, I have to verify employment when people call for references, and most of the time I have no idea who the person is or anything about their work, but I can verify general employment time frame, title, and eligible for rehire. Obviously it is better for you as the applicant if you can point them to a live human who actually knew you and could provide a reference if you get to that stage in the process – but at the application stage, do not over-think it, and even at the end sometimes the best you can do is the general company number.

      Reply ↓
      1. References*

        I find people do the general HR check regardless. The can I contact the boss from this job question comes with expectations of name and valid contact info. That’s been my experience, at least.

        Reply ↓
    3. learnedthehardway*

      It would make sense for the OP to get contact information as far as they are able, ahead of time, for sure. Even if it is just the HR number for the organization or the main reception number. HR will be able to confirm employment, at least.

      The OP can say, “Xavier Hammerschmidt was my manager, but I only ever had an internal phone number for him. Here’s the best way to connect with him…” and provide general company info.

      Reply ↓
    4. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

      No, that would be breaking the rules. The question isn’t “provide us a reference of your choosing” it’s “will you let us contact your last boss”. If you give them a colleague instead, then you will be dinged for supplying wrong information.

      Reply ↓
    5. Librarian of Things*

      There’s often a difference between the checkbox at “may we contact this supervisor?” and “please provide 3 references.” A prospective employer knows that if they contact a company and get told, “Supervisor doesn’t work here anymore” or “we can neither confirm nor deny the employment of Candidate,” that it’s a company issue, not a candidate issue. By all means put the non-boss colleagues as your professional references (ideally a grandboss or a project manager and not just Jenny From the Next Cube), but absolutely don’t put them down in the Supervisor field of an application form.

      I’ve had a weirdly high number of former colleagues put me down as their supervisor because our mutual boss retired but I’m still here; then prospective employers assume I was the supervisor and not just a colleague and they ask questions I don’t have the answer to. Really, it looks bad when the person *you* listed as a supervisor responds that they were *not* your supervisor!

      Had they put down our mutual boss, when the prospective employer called, I could explain that she no longer works here; I can confirm employment dates and rehire-eligibility for past employees, but can’t speak to how someone did the job when we barely overlapped in time or duties. Had they confirmed whether I’d serve as a reference for them, I could talk about what our working relationship looked like. When I’m hiring, I do ask slightly different questions of former supervisor references than former colleague references, because I know their working relationships with the candidate were different.

      Reply ↓
  18. PoorQuality*

    Putting aside the ethical issues for just a moment, at the current time the output of generative AI is usually awful, incorrect, and obviously subpar (for written content). This is likely to change over time, but for now anyone using AI to write stuff has a very clear buyer beware. Of course, in some circumstances people/orgs won’t care, but many will have an issue with presenting this content if not on principle then when they start having to deal with increases in customer support, complaints, and other consequences of poor content.

    Reply ↓
    1. Thomas Paine*

      “at the current time the output of generative AI is usually awful, incorrect, and obviously subpar (for written content)”

      Since we’re talking about graphic art, and not written content, how is this relevant?

      Reply ↓
      1. PoorQuality*

        Seems like we were discussing the use of generative AI for created works more generally – certainly the comments have been. I chimed in about the component of the discussion I have personal experience with. Good grief.

        Reply ↓
      2. Daria grace*

        A lot of the AI graphic art contains errors too (patterns that don’t align, too many fingers, non-sensical text ect) in addition to having a weird vibe about it

        Reply ↓
      5. Lenora Rose*

        The same issues crop up in the art and visuals; it struggles to correctly repeat patterns, struggles with number matching, struggles with borders, struggles with what’s physically possible… You can find a lot of examples pointing out the bad parts of existing AI images, and a lot of visual artists who’ve said the same thing writers have said; it often takes more time to fix it than it would to produce their own.

        Reply ↓
    2. I'm the Phoebe in Any Group*

      Using AI also means the creative does not engage in critical thinking or learn and grow their skills. I am a writer, and for me, writing and critical thinking are very connected. It is also through the writing process that I discover what I want to say, have questions about, learn more about, explore, research.

      I imagine it is similar for visual artists.

      Reply ↓
    3. learnedthehardway*

      Agreed – it’s also very formulaic and weird. If I was a teacher, I’d generally give the outputs a C or D – I’ve never encountered anything written by AI that I would present to a client.

      I use AI to generate some reports. It gets me started. But I heavily edit (and remove the bits that are ridiculous). I’m a better editor than I am a creative writer (sadly). In the end, only the “scaffolding” of the AI-generated report still remains, and the rest is my own work.

      Reply ↓
  19. weckar*

    I am generally pro generative AI. I think most arguments against it break down very easily. The way AI learns is far too close to how humans learn to be dismissed offhand. Even saying that most AI work is just a ‘collage’… same goes for most human work, directly or indirectly.

    HOWEVER, it’s the attitude here that is concerning. Even though I am personally in favor of democratizing art in this way, there are far better ways to bring that message. “F— consent” has way too many uncomfortable unrelated undertones to EVER be said in an educational (or any) setting.

    Reply ↓
    1. human intelligence*

      “democratizing art” would be funding schools well enough that everyone gets to have art class and ensuring fair wages and leave so that everyone gets to make art if they want. not using up staggering amounts of the world’s resources (both financial and natural) so that some people can make a computer spit out at best mediocre pastiches.

      Reply ↓
      1. Myrin*

        If “democratising art” is referring to the idea I think it is, I’ve found that an absolutely bewildering line of argument ever since I first heard of it a few months ago.

        “This person wouldn’t be good enough at it to make the art they would like to make otherwise!”.
        Okay, so?
        I don’t have a particularly pleasant voice or enough command over it to be a singer, nevermind some issues with my vocal chords, so that’s not something I could ever pursue even if I desperately wanted to. Not everyone gets to do literally everything they would theoretically like to do, and that’s generally fine.

        Reply ↓
        2. Carys, Lady of Weeds (OP#3)*

          Oh I actually love your take on it. That’s a perfect way to explain how generative AI is a crutch and not just a tool

          Reply ↓
        3. Sarah With an H*

          +1
          Also, everyone can do art! Not everyone can be a professional and not everyone will make incredible art, but anyone can play around with it if they want to, even if it’s only for themselves. The process of making something is valuable in itself, not just for the end result

          Reply ↓
          1. Writer*

            There have been conversations in writer and artist circles for as long as I can remember about people who don’t want to write a book or paint a painting as much as they want to have written a book or painted a painting. The actual writing or painting part is hard and frustrating and takes months or even years, and you have to write several books or paint several paintings before you’re actually good at it. That’s a really daunting process for some people. Generative AI feels particularly tempting to that category of “artist.” They don’t feel like they’re good enough to put in all the work that’s required to make good art, they just want a finished product they can point to and say they made it.

            Reply ↓
            1. Sarah With an H*

              Yep.
              And I do get it; there are absolutely things I’d like to be good at, but when it comes down to it I don’t really want to put in the work because the learning curve is too steep (I really want to be play the accordion but it is NOT EASY to learn! And I don’t know at what point you graduate from making loud sounds to music, but I never got that far). But I’ve also come to accept that if the hard parts are THAT frustrating or daunting it probably isn’t for me. I’ll enjoy the work other people make and focus on the crafts that I do enjoy enough to stick with.

              I also find the idea that genAI “democratizes” so weird because one of the myths about our (American) society is the idea of it being a meritocracy (which is isn’t of course but that’s another issue…), and that people should succeed based on hard work and talent. But using genAI to make art bypasses both those things, and just means that those with access to the best form of the technology having the best chances.

              Reply ↓
          2. Insulindian Phasmid*

            Eh. I can’t draw well enough to communicate the image in my head. It would take years of practice and training to be able to do so, and I just don’t have the drive to put all that in just so that I can do a sketch that does any justice to my imagination. So I’m happy enough to say I can’t draw.

            In a hypothetical world in which gen AI was only trained on donated material and didn’t waste a ton of power and water, I’d absolutely use it for stuff like DnD characters and other personal-use pictures. But we don’t live in that world.

            Reply ↓
        1. Bird names*

          Yeah, absolutely. I’d personally love to develop my art skills, but for that I need time and not to worry about rent or price gouging at the grocery store.

          If I comfortable could go part time for the rest of my life and retire once health demands it, I’d certainly would spent a lot more time on artsy hobbies.

          Reply ↓
          1. CatDude*

            Yep. And frankly this is what AI should be enabloing, handling all the rote and boring work necessary to run society so humans have more time to pursue creative endeavors.

            Instead AI is creating art and humans are still doing the monotonous work. It’s completely upside.

            Reply ↓
    2. Meow*

      Saying current AI is “democratising art” is like saying stealing others’ wallets “democratising wealth”. Until artists are correctly compensated and consented for their stolen work, it’s not ethical.

      Reply ↓
    3. CatDude*

      How is it “democratizing art”? Art is already ‘democratized’. Anyone can pick up a brush or pencil and create art.

      Reply ↓
      1. Elitist Semicolon*

        Ah, but they cannot immediately create exactly the gorgeous art that is in their head, and therefore art is undemocratic. /sarcasm

        Reply ↓
    4. TheOtherLaura*

      For me it sounds less like democratizing art and more like democratizing a form of nondeterministic computer programming. But, well, people have stranger hobbies than that…

      Reply ↓
    5. Carys, Lady of Weeds (OP#3)*

      Yeah. It would have been one thing if he talked about using AI in a kick-starting-ideas way or something, but no, it was “I am going to use this thing that will do the work for me as much as possible, and so will my company, and if you don’t too you’ll fail, and I don’t care about the environmental or ethical considerations in any way because it benefits me.” The dude was deliberately baiting the whole lecture hall. Literally when he responded to my question with “Fuck consent” I sat there with my mouth open. I couldn’t believe he’d actually said that.

      Reply ↓
    6. Dek*

      “The way AI learns is far too close to how humans learn to be dismissed offhand”

      Except for the part where it’s not actually a person with thoughts and feelings and all of the things that actually make the act of creation worth doing.

      “Even though I am personally in favor of democratizing art in this way”

      What does this even mean? How is art pre-AI undemocratic? How does generative AI “democratize art?”

      ANYONE can make art. Maybe they can’t make exactly the thing they want at the skill level they imagine right from the get-go, but that’s part of why you make art–to get better, to learn what you like, to try new things, etc etc.

      There’s something so…I dunno, gross? Unsavory? Icky?…about the whole “This lets me get the art I want without learning how or paying an artist” thing.

      Reply ↓
      1. CatDude*

        Yep, and the process of learning and creating to improve is not just about improving your technical skills, but developing your voice – your own unique creative spark.

        Even if AI will one day be able to match the technical skills of true artists, it will always lack a voice. It will never have that unique spark. It will never be anything more than a copy – it might be a very complex copy, but a copy none the less, bringing nothing new to the table.

        Reply ↓
      2. Calamity Janine*

        there’s a notable quip from some writer of good repute – i want to say attributed to Mark Twain, but it may be me merely associating there due to the acerbic with – about how frustrated he was at people begging him to help them write stuff, and how often they want that to mean he writes it and they tell him what to write. “they do not want to write a novel; they want to have written it.”

        it’s the difference between democratizing hiking to a waterfall being “let’s look into a footpath that’s large enough and smooth enough for people with mobility issues, maybe rental off-road motorized wheelchairs, help teaching people what to expect on the hike and accessible ways for them to get proper gear so they don’t have to come in their everyday jeans and sneakers when that’s a bad idea, and we could look at lighting and extended hours during summer so that people have a chance to come hike after work”… and “i took a video of the waterfall so now you don’t have to bother with walking all the way to see it”. the hike is part of the point. being able to go see the waterfall with your own human person is the point. being given a printout of a picture and told it’s just the same just ends up being a sad substitute.

        some of us don’t want to have written, but instead we want to write.

        Reply ↓
      3. Starbuck*

        These are the people who complain that artists’ commission prices are too high, and that being able to get an AI machine to spit out something that roughly approximates that artist’s style is “democratizing”. They want art for free, basically, or want to be able to make money off art with zero effort. But they know that sounds bad to say (because it is) so they say they’re “democratizing” it because doesn’t that sound nice.

        Reply ↓
        1. Calamity Janine*

          i can also all but guarantee that these are the people who think every quoted commission price is too high… while also providing “oh, just do whatever for those details, i don’t mind” that becomes “omg how did you forget that she has one blue eye and one brown eye and her red hair is in RINGLETS not a BRAID” and a thousand other details they neglected to mention the first time around but will cuss a blue streak at an artist for not magically inferring…

          people don’t know what they don’t know. part of the expertise you’re paying for is to have ideas go through the mind of someone who does know! this can actually be lovely if the artist knows this up-front and is willing to provide that slightly different extra service. i’ve done that myself on both sides of the client and artist line. …and real talk, sometimes as an artist you commission your friends in order to both give them money *and* so you can bounce ideas off them in a limited setting that keeps it polite and mutually satisfying lol. it’s a real talent that artists who take commissions develop!

          and it’s one AI does not currently possess. at all. so if you actually want it to do specific things? well… by the time you chase down just the right prompt that looks the way you want at least some of the time… you could have just gone to an actual artist, commissioned them, spent a third of the time and even less effort than that, and gotten someone who actually can put intelligent thought into asking those questions and getting you where you want to go.

          …but if you just want generic sludge to flood the market, of course you don’t want a quality piece. you just want quantity. “democratization” translates directly to “enshittification” here, lol.

          Reply ↓
    7. Calamity Janine*

      oh dear – i am sorry, but if you think large language models are too close to human learning to be dismissed, you have some very incorrect notions of human learning and how that happens.

      ultimately they are probability tables. very large tables, but probability tables. human learning, or even animal learning, operates with many different systems working in concert and is more than just probability – even when you’re talking about something as simple as which neurons fire in a frog’s noggin so it can chomp a fly.

      if you think a convincing replica of human thought can be made by simply finding a big enough table of the odds at vegas, then i am afraid you just don’t know quite as much as you want to say you do.

      instead what you have fallen for is… the sci-fi idea that we’re creating human consciousness in digital form. this is pseudospiritual dogma, not how things actually work.

      Reply ↓
      1. Lenora Rose*

        Yes, this.

        Gen AI basically shoves all art into a probability machine and puts one pixel next to the other pixel based on how often those two things have been side by side in its training data and whether that particular image in its training data has the right matching text labels and tags – modulo only the places where humans have gone into it and told it “DO NOT PUT THESE THINGS TOGETHER” (Usually due to the content scraper picking up chunks of explicit gore, legal porn and CSAM)

        If you (generic) think that is all a human brain ever does to put together an image (especially when in concert with a human body and its muscle memory and hormones and complications) I feel sad for you.

        Reply ↓
        1. Calamity Janine*

          it’s very much like the starry-eyed sci-fi responses to neural networks. people went – and still go, lol – “wow it’s just like us! what a cool futuristic technology!” when really…

          …it’s just a way to assemble networks of logic. one of many. it has advantages, and it has disadvantages.

          and if you walk in thinking you know basically anything about actual neurons and how biology works from computer science neural networks… well… you will end up having a very rough time in that biology class, let’s say.

          i admit as a biologist i have a chip on my shoulder for this kind of thinking. there’s a particular strain of compsci student who believes only compsci deserves attention and respect and thinks they can have every other subject bow to it. but biology is a field where as soon as you say “it’s so simple!”, biology will start laughing in your face and never stop. and then it rushes over to promptly give you an atomic turbo wedgie. it turns out living creatures are very, VERY complicated machines. assuming they’re going to be something you can easily bully into neat states of one or zero and figure everything out conclusively? oh, that person is in for a world of academic hurt.

          and quite frankly we can also know they’re not good programmers, either. every program is inevitably complicated by the fact it gets used by people; anyone expecting a perfectly pristine playing field for their ease of use is going to be similarly sorely disappointed. and anyone who has the hubris to think that a neural network can perfectly emulate all parts of neurology isn’t going to be a programmer that pays attention to problems they need to solve, either.

          they’re both technologies that sound perfect if you believe the sci-fi space age pitch. but if you know them enough to get your head out of the clouds… the shine comes off the apple very quickly. we’re not living in the cool space age future – we’re living right now. where things are boring, banal, and more complex than we want them to be, lol.

          Reply ↓
    8. Starbuck*

      ” in favor of democratizing art”

      Oh gross. Feeding the work of thousands of independent artists into a corporate machine is not democratizing art.

      Reply ↓
  20. Earlk*

    With references I’ve always found that no one is bothered if you don’t have current contact details for a previous manager. I’ve always used the name of the organisation I worked for and their email/phone number from when they also worked there and if they can’t get in touch with that then they can use the company info to contact HR.

    Reply ↓
    1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      And especially given the current situation with regard to federal workers, anyone working in a government role may disappear at any time, and losing touch is not going to look strange.

      Reply ↓
  21. Myrin*

    #1, all other issues with this game aside, this is just a horrible thing to say to someone, even to friends, even in jest, nevermind as a boss to and about your subordinates!

    Reply ↓
    1. Ann Onymous*

      I could see some friendships where it would be ok to say in jest, but it would have to be people who knew each other well enough to know that a) it’s definitely not true and b) the person appreciates that sort of dark humor.

      Reply ↓
  22. I'm the Phoebe in Any Group*

    Using AI also means the creative does not engage in critical thinking or learn and grow their skills. I am a writer, and for me, writing and critical thinking are very connected. It is also through the writing process that I discover what I want to say, have questions about, learn more about, explore, research.

    I imagine it is similar for visual artists.

    Reply ↓
    1. Daria grace*

      Indeed. No amount of prompt engineering workshops is going to teach you to understand the elements of design (font, colour, proportions ect) and how they work together to achieve a balanced design with the desired impact in the way that repeatedly doing it yourself is going to.

      Reply ↓
    2. General von Klinkerhoffen*

      AI image creation is famously bad at making edits to its own work, as I understand it. So it can “create an image of a family sitting around a breakfast table” but it can’t “edit so the breakfast is vegetarian and the humans have the right number of digits” but rather has to start again from scratch with a more detailed prompt (“family sitting around a breakfast table and the food is vegetarian and the humans have exactly five digits per hand”).

      Whereas actual artists and graphic designers can go, “ope let’s swap out that bacon for some mushrooms”.

      Reply ↓
    3. CatDude*

      Excellent point. Teaching students to use AI without regard is not just a problem in that it’s going to create ethical issues – it’s also stunting the artistic growth of these artists.

      Reply ↓
    4. mlem*

      Imagine paying actual money for a course to learn exactly those skills only to be told, “Go pay for a license for the plagiarism machine and let it (fail to) do it for you. Aren’t you glad you paid tuition for this?!”

      Reply ↓
    5. Calamity Janine*

      it can even be worse – i have never seen the appeal because every time i have used AI, i have to do three times the work to clean up after it. if someone wants me to use AI at my usual clip, it means i have to actively regress my skills! i have to know things are wrong, badly formed, not working as they should be, and just… let them be like that. oof. that doesn’t just rob me of my own chance to grow, it actively undoes my previous growth!

      there’s moments when you can talk about the very important artistic skill of being okay with okay instead of having to be dragged away from your own museum exhibition because you absolutely have to stop with the touch-ups… but what’s being proposed here, and what you have noticed is happening, is a just plain unkind way to treat an artist. the good discussions about being okay with non perfection? those ones are about being kind to yourself, honestly. what’s being proposed is quite the opposite!

      Reply ↓
  23. WoodswomanWrites*

    #3 — I like Alison’s suggestion that you, and perhaps others students with similar concerns, ask for a guest lecturer with a different perspective on AI. If your professors are responsive to student interests, that seems like a good way to go.

    Reply ↓
  24. Tradd*

    Letter 3 – how to work with someone you hate? Be civil to their face while chanting “f you, f you, f you” in your brain while walking away from dealing with them. Imagining yourself flipping them off. Imagining yourself pissing on their grave. Feel the rage flow through you. Then go home and have text chats with friends about the stupid shit the person who hate does.

    Reply ↓
    1. Moira's Rose's Garden*

      IDK, that kind of internal active narration has a high probability of coming across in the moment, in things like body posture and micro-expressions. I’ve found that much like in poker, it’s better not to tip your hand in potentially high stakes work situations.

      I think feeling the rage and venting to friends is a legit coping mechanism, ofc! That said, perseverating on the negative can also have the unintended consequence of “rent free in your head” – warping the filter through which one is processing all things, not just that specific source of pique/negativity. Kinda like the opposite of putting on rose colored glasses.

      Everybody’s fun-to-monkeys ratio here will vary, ofc, but I would personally roll with keeping myself in gray rock mode internally and the polite civility required of work colleagues.

      Reply ↓
    2. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

      No, that has a high chance of going wrong. You’ll accidentally say it out loud. Also, you’re literally digging channels in your brain with this type of repetition and you’re making it worse for yourself, not better. Obsessing generally makes people less happy, not more.

      You also should limit the ranting outside of work to maybe 15 minutes, tops. Get it out, then think about things you like and enjoy instead.

      Reply ↓
  25. CircularLogic*

    LW #2:
    If you have a lawyer involved in that workplace harassment charge, consult your lawyer. The advice you’ve been given here is good in a vacuum, but your lawyer would be more able to give you advice in the context of the workplace harassment case.

    Reply ↓
    1. EE-yo!*

      I can’t believe the case is ongoing and they’re still in the same work unit. I don’t know anything about federal employee EEO processes, but that seems weird to me.

      Reply ↓
    2. Beth*

      100%!
      There may be real consequences to *any* actions or statements you make, and consulting with your lawyer is critical.

      Reply ↓
  26. Despachito*

    I also think the baby pictures are a bad idea worth of pushing back but if you don’t want to do that for any reason, I can think of several solutions:

    – give them a picture of ANY baby that may pass as you (no one will recognize you)
    – tell them that your old pictures are buried somewhere in your parent’s basement and you can’t bother your elderly parents who live far far away to go search for them.
    – tell them that unfortunately all your old pictures were burned because of a fire in your parents’house / destroyed by flood /hurricane (whatever is most plausible)

    You do not owe them these pictures or the true story behind them.

    Reply ↓
    1. Ellis Bell*

      I think what’s particularly poignant about OPs story is that even if they had actually used these suggestions (and they’re good suggestions that should have worked), it doesn’t protect you from the joke made when the picture is lacking. If anything, it makes a joke about not being loved by your parents more acceptable. Say for example, if there had been a collective gasp of shock when the boss had said that, the boss would have been able to say “Oh, don’t worry I’m kidding; the real reason is OPs childhood home had a flooded basement”.

      Reply ↓
  27. Hengabecka*

    #3 The attitude shown by this speaker is not just disrespectful and immoral, it is also really poor teaching. Cavalier remarks like this could get your college into hot water reputationally and even legally if students like you feel like sharing them on social media. I wonder whether the speaker had thought about how being recorded and his opinions shared publicly, or did he get carried away by feeling like a Big Man of the World in front of what he assumed were impressionable students.
    Neither does it seem that there has been any opportunity to discuss the various issues around copyright, plagiarism, crediting and paying artists, explaining to customers what they would be getting, the likely future development of AI and how this affects the quality of work produced – all of which should be part of any decent educational programme about design in the 21st century. Most universities will have a policy about ethics in teaching and a designated team/person to oversee this. They will be also be in frequent contact with the college’s legal advisory team. I would take your concerns to them.

    Reply ↓
    1. Anony*

      It was my interpretation from the post that this was an outside lecturer brought in by the professor to speak in the class – not the teacher themself.

      Since it was just a guest speaker, I would say that the guest speaker is entitled to say whatever they want – the only repercussion would be not being invited back. Generative AI is such a polarizing issue that putting the person on blast might not do anything really – it would depend on their specific professional community.

      Reply ↓
      1. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

        Guest speakers should be held to the same standards. They are not entitled to say whatever they want – that’s what they do on their own time. They are being paid by the university and there should be no surprises in the content.

        And the professors supported the lecturer’s stance. They literally did not address the students’ concerns. And they apparently ignored his assertion to fuck consent. I think i would have just called him a thief to his face in that case.

        Reply ↓
  28. Rachel*

    For the student concerned about the AI instruction, what worries me (as another HE person) is that you appear to have been encouraged to break intellectual property law. You can and should be exposed to ideas and ways of working that challenge you, and that you may not adopt yourself, but this is a clear line. I would suggest going to your department head or next level above that saying that you are concerned that what you have learned appears to violate the law, and perhaps the university’s own AI policy (they should have one at this point). You are worried about what this means for your own education and about the reputational damage to the university if a student or recent graduate did what was apparently encouraged. Try to be friendly and not hostile, and not be attached to a certain outcome, because students frequently take issue with things that they really don’t have standing on, but here there is a professional boundary that has been crossed and I would be extremely surprised if the highers-up were happy about it.

    Reply ↓
  29. Turingtested*

    When will businesses and the people that make them up learn that not everyone has a rosy family life?

    I also expect managers to have a better sense of what’s appropriate.

    Reply ↓
    1. Morning Reader*

      Couldn’t a person take a current photo of themself and reverse age it through AI? I’m not encouraging this kind of baby picture contest but it seems an easy solution to the lack of actual picture problem. (An alternative to the contest would be for everyone to age their photos to 100, then try to guess who they are.)

      Reply ↓
      1. Daria grace*

        They could, but they shouldn’t have to and a lot of people will prefer to not voluntarily feed AI their images

        Reply ↓
  31. Lab Snep*

    After having worked for a design firm that was very much unethical, the “fuck consent” thing sounds like something that would have come out of their mouths.

    I had a prof (and this is more than 20 years ago) stand up and tell us if we didn’t run our own companies we were stupid.

    I stated that some of us don’t want to run companies and work better under someone else and he looked at me and said “Then you’re stupid”.

    I walked out of the class.

    Reply ↓
  32. Hiring Mgr*

    I don’t really have advice for #3, other than I wouldn’t waste time reviewing them on Glassdoor – I doubt anyone would care that much about one graphic designer’s thoughts on AI. Plus, you don’t even work there so you’d be lying

    Reply ↓
      1. Hiring Mgr*

        Technically no, I suppose anyone could go on and say they worked somewhere – but that’s the spirit of the platform at least.

        I

        Reply ↓
  33. DJ Abbott*

    #3, Long ago in the 70s and 80s I thought I might be a musician and took college music classes.
    There were people then who said that going forward, all music would be generated by computers and synthesizers and no one would want music played by actual humans on actual instruments.
    Obviously, that didn’t happen and wasn’t true. Plenty of people still make real music with real instruments, and plenty of people enjoy it.
    It’s the same in the art world. Art made by computers or science can be interesting, but IMHO As someone who’s not in the field, people will always want to make art, and other people will always want to enjoy their art. :) <3

    Reply ↓
    1. DJ Abbott*

      Further thoughts on this – this professor sounds like a type I encountered a few times back then. Generally hostile and disrespectful, he is towards his field as well as everything else. I agree with taking action since he is a professor, but when it’s just a random jerk, you can ignore them. Let them be miserable.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ellis Bell*

        Yeah, I mean I don’t know the exact wider general context of saying “fuck consent” in terms of tone, but it just seems very edge lord and defensive to me. This isn’t someone who gets actual enjoyment out of their work.

        Reply ↓
        1. DJ Abbott*

          Defensive is a good description. If he’s like the ones I knew, he doesn’t enjoy anything very much. The negative hostile attitude is applied to everything.

          Reply ↓
    2. Emily Byrd Starr*

      That prediction about computer generated music is literally the plot of “We Will Rock You,” a musical based on the music of Queen. I’m currently in a community theater production of it, and it’s a little scary how the dystopian “virtual world” portrayed in the show resembles our own current world where everyone is absorbed in their smartphones and struggling with anxiety and depression brought about by social media. I’m Gen X, the last generation to remember life before the internet, and sometimes I can’t help but think it was better then.

      Reply ↓
      1. LimeRoos*

        *Just jumping in because I saw We Will Rock You in it’s original Las Vegas run in ’04/’05 (spring break ’05 I think), with Tony Vincent as Galileo and it blew my mind! So excited you get to enjoy it! And I haven’t really met/heard of anyone else knowing about it.

        Reply ↓
      2. DJ Abbott*

        There is some computer-generated and electronic music, and some people who like it. But it’s nowhere near all music, or all of the market for music.

        Reply ↓
  34. General von Klinkerhoffen*

    “They said that AI is “just a tool, like a camera, or Adobe software,” and we have to “use our own moral compass” in deciding if we’ll use it or not.”

    Accidentally correct. Because you bought the camera, and paid for the software licence, and attributed all contributors, right? Right?! – padme stare dot jpeg

    Reply ↓
    1. Dek*

      The reason I really hate the “just like a camera” argument is that if you take a photo, people KNOW it’s a photo, y’know? Like you’re not going to be able to tell people you painted that and have them believe you.

      Reply ↓
  35. CatDude*

    LW#3 – Anyone who says “AI is just a tool” comparable to a camera or Adobe software clearly does not understand AI. Cameras and Adobe software don’t steal massive amounts of other people’s works without their consent. AI has its uses but it’s critical to understand how to use it ethically, which these individuals clearly do not.

    I would absolutely spread the word about this because what this lecturer – and the professors supporting it – are encouraging is unethical and actively harmful. Anyone thinking about taking these classes deserves to know what they are promoting.

    Reply ↓
    1. Reba*

      I don’t think there is value in LW 3 seeking to blast this company in Google reviews or whatever. Their reputation is not going to be affected by a student rant however correct it is.

      But I DO think there is a LOT of value in the Lw continuing to talk about this issue with peers, faculty, post about it wherever you are active on social media. Maybe an op-ed for a student or mainstream publication? again not to go after the lecturer per se but to share your reasoning, explain why what they said was so wrong, and push back against the logic of “everyone is doing it.” You might change a few minds and you will find more people who share your ethics.

      Reply ↓
    2. Antilles*

      Also, the use of a camera or Adobe to create something has a firm and well-understood legal framework regarding ownership, ability to be copyrighted, etc. AI is still very much up in the air regarding all of this.

      Reply ↓
  36. Falling Diphthong*

    It would be something if we went back to the dawn of generative AI, and when very wealthy people claimed that they couldn’t make a profit if they had to pay for copyright when training the model, just pointed out that that’s not a business plan. Any more than if I made a business plan that involved using 2/3 of the space in that person’s house, because if I had to pay for the space my plan couldn’t turn a profit.

    Reply ↓
  37. Hiring Mgr*

    The baby photo thing is weird in 2025 but to be fair this is a somewhat standard icebreaker type of exercise- I remember doing this around 20 years ago at an all hands.

    For 98% of people it’s probably fine and there’s no trauma, but I think a quick word to the boss in this case should do the trick since she’s a great boss

    Reply ↓
    1. Ellis Bell*

      I know you mean this in a very general sense, but there’s just no way to know how many people it will affect in terms of percentages! If you’re going by what people say out loud, well, people don’t go around volunteering details of their very unhappy childhoods all that much. You’d be surprised. I do know that after I became a certain level of teacher, and suddenly looped in on all the kid’s backgrounds, I was incredibly shocked at how common, how seriously common, it is for people to have difficult childhoods. It is like way more than 2 per cent of people in my sample size of a thousand kids. It’s closer to twenty. By that, I mean kids who are likely come out the other side and will go on to get professional careers (obviously there’s also some who will not). I do take your point that you could always tell your boss, particularly when you trust and like your boss, but that decision comes with risks. What if you tell your boss that you’re trans, or that you come from poverty, or that your dad was so violent you fled, or that you’re adopted, and then suddenly you feel, very subtly, like you’re considered as being different. I can tell you it won’t be the first time they’ve been judged for not having a perfect background. Not in a nasty way, but now you’re thought of differently, or you just feel vulnerable in case you might be. Even if as a boss you think you know your staff really, really well this is beyond intimate level stuff. I know my partner has access to his childhood pictures, but they come attached to very difficult memories and trauma and I know he’d rather disappoint the organiser of the activity than have to go into the whys and wherefores with someone he worked with.

      Reply ↓
      1. Hiring Mgr*

        I agree with this. When I said tell the boss, I meant LW should do as AAM advised – just talk to the boss and let her know why this isn’t a great activity – not outing herself in any way.

        Reply ↓
    2. Lily Rowan*

      I remember doing it 20 years ago in a group where it was very obvious who about half of the people were, because of race, gender, generation. So as a “guessing game” it just didn’t work, and that’s assuming every single person has a baby picture they are happy to bring in.

      Reply ↓
      1. Hiring Mgr*

        Yeah, I think the idea at least when my group did it, was more a fun/cute way to spend a few minutes in a meeting rather than a real contest. But it was totally voluntary and no pressure.

        Reply ↓
  38. EEO*

    #2 – as someone in a very similar situation, I empathize. Since you mention the EEO process is still ongoing, remind yourself that anything that she could latch onto as proof of bad attitude/a non-discriminatory reason for her to have treated you the way she did will ultimately just hurt YOU. (I know that depending on where you are in the process this may not actually apply, just wanted to throw it out there.)

    It really sucks.

    Reply ↓
    1. Thankfull*

      And with the current administration even harder as your employer/HR is unlikely to do anything to make things easier for you ie put you on another floor etc.
      But can you make sure you’re sitting on another floor?

      Reply ↓
  39. Good Man Hennerz*

    #4 – I’ve worked for a few companies (finance~related), who are so totally security-paranoid, any ”reference call” would be treated as a phishing attempt. Actually, I think the NDA and whatnot I signed for one of the (Big Indian) consultancies stated that disclosing manager names or the client would make me forfeit any bonuses etc. So yeah, I have a few ’professional contacts’ on my Linkedin and a few ’numbers on my phone’, but giving them out as ”references”… ummm yep, no. Refer to HR-only. Even we are not working there any more.

    I’m ”juggling careers” it seems, I’m back to what I started as in hotel business and it’s the same ”everybody knows everybody” so a totally different ballpark. I did a stint in building work, and theres lads that give me as a ref, even I sacked them, so lolz.

    Reply ↓
  40. Alex*

    Everyone saying that no one will care about a company that uses AI, lol, you’re hilarious. Plenty of people boycott things that use AI. If you use it to write a book? We’re not buying that book. To make art? No one’s buying that art. You aren’t a real graphic designer if you’re using AI. And yes, big companies like Netflix are using it in their documentaries (and it’s SO obvious and poorly-done) or Coca-Cola is using it in their commercials. Guess what? Canceled Netflix and am no longer buying Coke products. Using AI looks incredibly cheap, not to mention the environmental impact. Plenty of people speak with their money, and they’re not spending it with companies who can’t bother to use a real person to do their design work. My sympathies to you, LW3. It’s hard out there with all the AI apologists.

    Reply ↓
  41. Peanut Hamper*

    The real solution to #3 is to go to that lecturer’s website, download some of his projects, run them through AI, and then turn them in as your own work. You should get an A automatically, since 1) the work is based on professional-quality work that people got paid to do, 2) You used AI, and 3) the professors all agreed with this yahoo.

    I have many, many thoughts on AI and its self-imitative qualities, but I’ll save them for tomorrow’s thread, perhaps.

    Reply ↓
    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Hahahahaha, this is a great idea! Pretty risky, I suppose, but if OP has nothing to lose….

      (Note: don’t necessarily take my advice, an anonymous internet commenter.)

      Reply ↓
      1. Carys, Lady of Weeds*

        (I’m OP#3) If I wasn’t so grossed out by the thought of using AI, I totally would, lol. One kid actually used AI-generated text in his discussion responses and I thought that was pretty hilarious.

        Reply ↓
    2. Calamity Janine*

      why even use AI? i mean, this lecturer did make his views on consent very clear, and what are things like copyright law and contracts for work and even the student conduct pledge when it comes to plagiarism in class if not expressions of consent? you’re just trying to fully follow the guest lecturer’s example, honest, teacher…

      Reply ↓
  42. NeurodivergentEducator*

    LW1:
    I tried to make a joke once in a department meeting (which I run) and realized it was making fun of a personal experience one of my staff had. Once I realized that, I apologized.

    Full story:
    In a department meeting, one of the people I supervise made a joke about about something being so annoying it was like being stabbed. Then he said “well at least I could go on leave if that happened”. In the moment, I very inexpertly tried to communicate what he said was inappropriate and convey concern for safety. It came out wrong and I said something about a shoulder injury would be a better way to go on leave.
    I realized later that a member of my team had gone on leave the prior year for a pretty severe shoulder injury and the recovery was incredibly challenging. She came to my office once in tears asking to go home due to the pain (which obviously, I let her).

    Not only did I fail to handle the moment correctly in front of my team, I had said something that hurt a team member.

    So the next morning, I went straight to the team member who had the shoulder injury and apologized for making that comment. I owned how inappropriate it was regardless of her personal experience, but that I wanted to apologize to her directly as she had personal experience about something I joked about.

    Since you say that your boss is generally a good and supportive boss, she will want to know that her comment upset you and want to make amends. I think you’ll also get a lot of relief by naming it.

    Reply ↓
  43. Artist hit by AI.*

    ‘Your professors aren’t wrong that people have to “use their own moral compass” in deciding if they’ll use AI or not, but there are still many, many situations where its use would be objectively wrong (or even just prohibited).’

    It’s illegal. It’s a violation of copyright law. AI is trained by violating copyright law. People are being told that violating copyright law is “just a tool”.

    I’m part of a class action suit of authors whose work has been fed into AIs to train them. You can ask AI to write something in my style, and it will do a terrible job, but it will know what you mean. A few months from now, it will do a better job.

    Only those of my books that were heavily pirated were scraped. That is, the scraping of authors’ books appears to have been done entirely using pirated copies found “free” online, which were already a violation of copyright law before AI got involved.

    I know it’s only a small part of the dissolution of the rule of law, but it’s a part that hits home. Until recently, I made a living off my books.

    Reply ↓
    1. Starbuck*

      Yeah, I find use of AI in creative work especially indefensible. There’s no shortage of people willing to do creative work; there is however a shortage of people willing to PAY for that work. Using AI to generate “free” work that you didn’t have to pay someone for is extremely gross. Is this really what we want out of this tech? AI writing books and drawing, so that humans can spend more time, what… scrubbing floors, working in call centers, denying health insurance claims? It’s bleak.

      Reply ↓
  44. Anony*

    #3 – I am a professor in a field that is talking about AI use generally – and we are all over the place in where we stand on the issue, including if we have an AI policy in our syllabi. And for us, working with students, they are going to use AI whether or like it or not – so it is more for us to communicate how they can/cannot use AI in our classes and set the parameters and expectations there.

    That being said, higher education is a different sphere than other places in the workforce. It’s a place where faculty’s opinions and viewpoints about topics drive their work (both teaching and research). Although I agree that saying eff consent is not a good look (but its clear to me it is in the context of people’s artwork being stolen by AI – not any other realm), that professional is entitled to his opinion (and has the freedom to express it in the classroom). He’s also not a professor, so he’s got more latitude as a guest speaker. Your professors are also entitled to their opinion that AI is a tool (which is correct in some ways) and they both acknowledge that is a morally gray zone (some people feel one way and others feel a different way) and say that it is up to you to decide if AI is something you want to use. They can also express that opinion in the classroom, if they wish.

    I say this as someone who does not use AI at all because I am worried about both the environmental effects and fact that it is stealing intellectual property from small creators. I have colleagues who encourage students to use AI for some assignments and others who do not allow AI use on any assignments. Our department allows us the academic freedom to make those choices for ourselves and apply them how we wish.

    NB: I don’t think hate speech should be allowed in higher education settings, but I don’t view this as hate speech – rather a difference of opinion over a hotly debated topic right now.

    Reply ↓
  45. NicaB*

    Yeah, sometimes even the best bosses make flubs. I used to work for a fantastic boss “Jim.” Great guy, great mentor. I was pregnant with my 2nd child and I decided to let him know when I was 11 weeks along. My older child was 2, so these weren’t “back to back” pregnancies. Anyway, I went in to Jim’s office and said, “I have some news to share. I’m pregnant and expecting a baby in June.” Now I thought he’d say “Congratulations” or “What wonderful news.” Nope. He looked at me square in the eye and said, “Was it planned?” which is a REALLY odd question/response from a boss. It kind of caught me off guard and I kind of looked at him askance in silence. After I collected my thoughts, I just looked at him and said, flatly, “Well, as much as you can plan these things.” The truth was this was a very wanted child and the result of many expensive and painful fertility treatments (he was not aware of this part). I guess my response kind of knocked him out of whatever weird place he was in and he went back to his “old self” saying “Well, that’s wonderful. You and your family must be so excited, etc.” To this day (and my son is a teenager now), I’m not sure WHAT he was thinking. My point is, we all have faux pas from time to time. LW#1 boss’ one was HUGE and I think it would be a positive thing both for LW and boss to talk about it so boss can learn, OP can have her peace and everyone can move on from it.

    Reply ↓
    1. Wellie*

      “Was it planned?”

      Yep! We put in Sprint 2024.2 on the family Jira board! It was a busy sprint, if ya know what I mean…

      Reply ↓
  46. DramaQ*

    The contacting managers one makes me think of a job my husband applied to once. They called annoyed because they couldn’t get ahold/find one of his former managers from a job that by that point was over a decade ago.

    He responded “Well of course you wouldn’t be able to. He’s dead. I told you that when you asked about contacting all my former managers”.

    Only time we ever encountered that and I do believe that my husband dodged a bullet with that job.

    A lot of my former managers are retiring. I am not going to cyber stalk them trying to find their information. What I do is I put down the number for the HR employment office and then click “yes you have my permission to contact”. They can confirm whether or not I was employed and eligible for rehire just fine. They can also confirm my manager is retired. I’m also fine if they insist on providing a coworker reference from that job.

    Sometimes you just don’t have manager information.

    Reply ↓
  47. J_crane*

    A lot of us remember when a camera wasn’t standard on every phone. When you had to pay for film and development of that film well sometimes there was no documentation of particular events. I think it was the comedian Jim Gaffigan that mentions he only has about 12 photos from his childhood while he has hundreds of his kids.

    Reply ↓
  48. AI-Curious*

    What I don’t understand about generative AI is that human creativity is often inspired by works seen and read by that human, much of which is copyrighted. So where is the line between work generated by a human who learned from copyrighted material, and work generated by AI that did the same thing? For a simple example, many 80’s TV sitcoms had episodes with storylines that had previously been seen on sitcoms in the 70’s. Certainly these ideas were “stolen,” but I don’t remember hearing many complaints.

    Reply ↓
    1. mreasy*

      There are plenty of law firms who make their money suing songwriters for being obviously “inspired” by their work… and have for decades now… so complaints are out there!

      Reply ↓
    2. TechWorker*

      To some extent I agree & I do think it’s harder to claim copyright over ‘things that are reworded’ because I don’t actually think that breaches copyright.. (especially if the information provided is somewhat factual vs creative original idea..). But rewriting/rewording is not hard to do, whereas recreating someone’s art style *is* generally quite hard if done manually. If the computer is making that trivial, it is quite a big difference, I think.

      Reply ↓
    3. Crepe Myrtle*

      Humans have brains, emotions, ethics, and souls to lend something else to their work inspired by other art or media. AI doesn’t have any of that, so it’s not the same situation at all.

      Reply ↓
    4. Hiring Mgr*

      You must not remember the outcry when Webster was being dramatic and put is hand on his chest and said “Elizabeth, I’m comin’ to join ya honey”

      Reply ↓
    5. Dek*

      One is made by a person with thoughts, feelings, and life experiences that influence their creative choices, and the other one is made by an algorithm doing ones and zeroes.

      Reply ↓
    6. Calamity Janine*

      the quippy answer? AI is simply a gigantic table of probabilities. it does not derive – it copies. it copies from many different things, but it copies them directly. there is no derivative work being made because there is no ability to derive, only parrot. there is no additional work going on in order to make it a derivative work, merely copying… and it’s not using logic created on its own to know what to copy. it’s using other people’s work to make those probabilities. a human mind will intentionally choose what patterns to keep around. generative AI literally can’t. it’s entirely taking its cues from others. the work is theirs, just spread diffusely.

      Reply ↓
    7. Elizabeth West*

      I’m not a lawyer, but as I understand it, ideas aren’t necessarily copyrightable, but execution is. Most stories have a lot of the same elements, particularly in genre fiction. If the elements are too close to an existing work, then you can get into trouble.

      The only example I can think of right now is two characters getting stuck in a situation where they can’t avoid each other and come out either friends or tolerating each other (or even fall in love). It’s a general trope, and it’s been done a zillion times in a zillion ways. But you couldn’t put them into squirrel suits like Mallory and Skippy in that Family Ties episode where they were trapped in the basement and put on some old costumes to stay warm. That would be too specific.

      Reply ↓
    8. TyphoidMary*

      Ted Chiang’s essay in the New Yorker, “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art,” is one of my favorite explanations.

      Reply ↓
  49. Boba Feta*

    I didn’t even finish reading all the letters because the “professor” in #3 made my academic blood boil so riotously I cannot hear my thoughts over my now-very-heavily-pumping arteries.

    W. T. actual F., bro. You should NOT be in a position of assumed authority over 1 student, let alone 200 (!!!!!) with that kind of attitude about copyright, consent, professional norms (!) or…. ANYTHING.

    Excuse me while I practice some deep breathing techniques before I must teach my own students how to use their own damn brains to navigate the world they live in.

    WTF

    Reply ↓
      1. Boba Feta*

        Fair point, my blinding rage caused me to misread that detail.

        I’ll therefore amend but not retract my comment – someone brought in as a guest speaker, for better and worse, is given authority by proxy in the eyes of students as an extension of the professor’s voice in the classroom. Plus, the LW did say that “the professors backed him up!”, further lending credibility to the guest’s comments.

        I’m not going to argue about the relative merits/evils of AI – for better AND worse it is here to stay, but to put this voice in front of 200 (!!!) students who are presumably desperate for gainful employment after college as if it’s the only way not to “Fail” (!!!), is proverbially criminal in the eyes of this particular academic who takes her job as a mentor to students very seriously.

        Reply ↓
  50. Orange Cat Energy*

    #1

    Your boss just revealed her true self. You say your boss is a wonderful boss, but do you also mean to say she’s a wonderful person? Her gross comment just revealed that she isn’t a wonderful person. Even as an offhand remark, it’s so grossly offensive and it says a lot about her beliefs/prejudices. I write this as someone who also encountered “wonderful” people who said gross things.

    You could bring it up to your boss about how the activity and her remarks were insensitive, but be aware that her reaction could go either way. She could understand or she could get defensive or she could be a mix of the two (such as “thank you for telling me” but then not actually apologizing or doing the “I’m sorry to hear you feel that way” sort of apology).

    Reply ↓
  51. Molly*

    re: baby pictures – transgender folks might not want to share baby pictures, especially since many parents dress their babies in gender-specific colors/prints

    Reply ↓
    1. Pocket Mouse*

      Parents of young kids have so many opportunities to help shape a more inclusive world for trans people, beyond their own children.

      “Boy or girl?” We don’t know yet! We’ll find out in a few years when they develop a gender identity and tell us!

      Reply ↓
    2. WorkingRachel*

      This! Considering how many people really gender their babies from the beginning, the baby picture game could result in outing anyone who presents differently from their gender assigned at birth.

      Reply ↓
  52. Sketchy*

    On the AI thing, maybe try and get the programme to bring someone in to discuss if the work you do using AI is copyrightable? As my understanding is that it is not.

    Reply ↓
  53. CherryBlossom*

    For #4: Usually when I see/hear “Can we contact your manager?”, it also requests some form of contact info, usually phone or email. I can’t imagine “You have my permission to try, but they’ve passed/I’ve lost their info/they retired/etc.” going over well. How should that be addressed then?

    Reply ↓
    1. Librarian of Things*

      I’d just put the HR department number if there is one or the company main number. I have exactly one supervisor from the last 25 years who hasn’t retired (mmm, maybe two, but I’m not sure if she just moved on or retired; in either case, she’s not there now). So, if you’re hiring me, calling HR is the best way to find out anything about my time there.

      I do the same thing now. I adopted a pet and had to put my boss’s contact info on the application. I am the boss. It’s me. (While I do report to a Board, it’s a vague, general thing. None of them could discuss my day-to-day work. They can absolutely tell you about the great things my staff accomplishes, though.) But, for the purposes of knowing that I am gainfully employed and can feed a cat, my HR office can verify all of that perfectly well, without getting into the weirdness that is my autonomous working conditions.

      Reply ↓
  54. Pocket Mouse*

    Re: baby photos – funny, a few months ago I asked in an open thread here about whether/how to push back on a baby photo guessing game my work was planning to do (with voluntary participation, when I don’t have personal trauma/difficulties around providing a baby photo of myself) due to these exact issues, which have been discussed on this site multiple times before. Even after I briefly listed the issues with the game in my question, responses were overwhelmingly “eh, it’s fine, just don’t participate if you don’t want to.” I’m curious – is anyone out there who would have answered that way before starting to change their mind on this?

    Reply ↓
    1. HannahS*

      I think I remember that question, and IIRC one highly relevant difference is that in your situation it was an opt-in party game at a Christmas party (which hopefully was itself optional, though I don’t remember exactly what you said), not a mandatory activity at a work retreat. That’s what’s different here.

      There are very few activities that are truly inclusive–including hosting a Christmas party, going to an escape room, trivia games, hiking, and being on a boat. When workplaces host optional social activities, I think they have an obligation to be thoughtful about offering a variety of options so that over the course of a year, there is something for everyone.

      When it’s mandatory (or not-explicitly-but-implicitly-mandatory) then the workplace has a much greater obligation to be inclusive, IMO, because people can’t opt-out, and being not-included or others is way more noticeable and much worse.

      Reply ↓
  55. Pocket Mouse*

    Also, a PSA on baby photos: if you are now aware of the problems of outing a trans person via baby photos, and you have a baby, for the love of everything please take photos of them in gender neutral clothing, with nothing coded as belonging to a specific gender in the scene! Bonus points for taking photos of them in both slightly masculine and slightly feminine clothing! Even if baby photo guessing games go the way of the dinosaur, your child may grow up deeply appreciative to have baby photos with more than just one gender presentation.

    Reply ↓
    1. Emmy Noether*

      Unfortunately, it is currently weirdly difficult to find non gender-coded clothing for babies (which is WEIRD. This obsession with marking them). Everything is either baby blue, baby pink, or beige/grey (which I find drab and joyless for a baby). It’s to the point I jump at pretty much anything I spot that’s a nice yellow, or even better, multicolored.

      Reply ↓
      1. Pocket Mouse*

        In my experience, that’s not true at all! Even Target has solid-color shirts and the like. Even so, putting in a plug for Primary dot com – all colors, all gender-neutral. :)

        Reply ↓
  56. Susannah*

    What’s with the baby photo thing? Are we supposed to feel more connected to our co-workers if we know what they looked like as babies?
    And how many people even have photos of themselves as babies? I don’t.
    These silly little games that are supposed to be “team-building” are just patronizing. Treat people with respect, nurture a welcoming and inclusive workplace environment, and the team will be fine.

    Reply ↓
    1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

      The only time I’ve encountered baby photos is when children are moving from one school phase to another (here that’s at 11 and 16) so it’s in the context of personal literal physical growth. It’s also very common to share younger photos but not necessarily baby photos, precisely because children change so quickly.

      As an adult, and at work? Nooooope.

      Reply ↓
  57. Carys, Lady of Weeds*

    I’m the Letter Writer for #3. I read through all the responses and don’t have time to reply to all of them, so I’m just making a blanket comment.

    I really appreciate everything that y’all and Alison have said. I wrote to her last week the day after this happened and made myself exhaustingly irate over this for a couple days, to the point where I’m pretty sure it was giving me an ulcer, ha. I’ve let it go. I’m mostly just sad now that a creative professional chose to be the anti-Mr. Rogers and tell a bunch of young students that their creativity and imagination aren’t as good or valuable as generated AI content. There were several comments in the class discussion pushing back and saying “No, I create because I am human, and I value my own ideas,” which was encouraging. I’m not saying AI is evil (though the corporations behind it may be another story); I just think that there’s no replacement for pure imagination.

    And maybe this is hopelessly naive, but I do think that the people who create from their own minds will one day be the artists featured in textbooks and classrooms – AI can’t make masterpieces; those are reserved for true masters, and AI will never be that.

    Reply ↓
    1. online millenial*

      You’re absolutely right, and I encourage you and your fellow students to keep pushing back. GAI slop is inhuman and soulless, and people can tell the difference. (Also the theft, the exploitation of labor, and the environmental destruction.) It’s been very heartening to see so many people push back against GAI in the comments. This garbage isn’t inevitable, it doesn’t have to be the future. Continuing to push back and refuse it is critical.

      Reply ↓
      1. online millenial*

        I’ll also recommend looking up Ed Zitron–he’s a tech journalist/consultant who fiercely loves technology and the internet and is livid about what tech giants are doing to some of the most brilliant innovations humanity has ever come up with. He loathes GAI, and you can likely find some good resources and arguments in his work. It can also just be kind of cathartic to see someone else express the same anger you’re feeling about these tools.

        Reply ↓
    2. Ihmmy*

      if your post secondary has some sort of student feedback system after courses, this would be a great place to comment on your disagreement with the lecturer’s view. Glassdoor won’t do anything, ratemyprofs will warn other students, but the in-house systems are usually the best way to flag concerns for someone’s dean or department head. If there isn’t such a system, perhaps talk with an academic advisor about your concerns and ask if they can bring it forward to the leader for that department. Especially if there are several of you flagging this.

      Reply ↓
        1. Calamity Janine*

          the guest lecturer got backed up by the professors, though, and that seems very relevant.

          it may be a bit below the belt, but i would be sorely tempted to leave a note on ratemyprofessor as a potential safety issue – “teaches x, y and z well but also invites guests to give lectures with morals like ‘fuck consent’ and agrees with that. be very careful about attending this class if you have experienced harm due to people disregarding your consent.”

          Reply ↓
          1. Anony*

            My interpretation of that part of the comment was that the professor said that AI is a tool and its up to you to choose to use it or not based on your viewpoint of that – and that’s the backing up that they did.

            I also am cautious about being clear to interpret the eff consent comment as only applying to the use of AI using artists’ materials without consent. I’m not sure it can be interpreted correctly without the context of a conversation about generative AI, rather than other places where consent is (also) important.

            Reply ↓
            1. Calamity Janine*

              it may not be that the lecturer intended any more broad applications of the phrase, but it’s one heck of a hand grenade to toss into someone’s face. the intent there isn’t magically going to save anyone who would be hurt by those words casually uttered, y’know? that’s what turns it into a worthwhile heads-up – just the same way that an R rating on a movie is a valuable heads-up of “there can be gore and nudity and cussing happening” versus a G rating.

              Reply ↓
    3. Elbe*

      I think that you’re handling this really well and I’m glad that your perspective is being supported by other students around you.

      In the end, this class may end up being a good learning experience, just not for the reasons the speaker thought. He thought that he was teaching you to embrace the “future” of design, but maybe what he’s actually teaching is how to identify and push back against the devaluing of human expression.

      Reply ↓
  58. Jam on Toast*

    LW3 your professor behaved abominably. I can also tell you with near 100% certainty that by admitting and detailing all the ways that they used AI to ignore copyright and trademarks to create creative work, they’ve contravened your college’s Academic Integrity policy. Every college and university I know has one. Most people think academic integrity only applies to students’ work, but it doesn’t. You should be able to search for it online. It will lay out what your college considers to be academic dishonesty and the penalties and sanctions they could face. You may even find that there is an academic integrity office that can answer questions and give you guidance (not all universities and colleges have one, but many do).

    In terms of reporting, your department chair (and the program coordinator, if there is one) are your best bet for getting action. Detail what was said, who said it, and when, and then include parts of the academic integrity policy that you think apply. If you are still in the class, or will have this faculty for future courses, be explicit that you expect the chair to keep your identity from the faculty to avoid unfair reprisals.

    Faculty should never normalize this kind of dishonesty, and your sense that this was wildly inappropriate was spot on. It tells you everything you need to know about this faculty member’s judgment and professional practices.

    Reply ↓
    1. Anony*

      The person in question was a guest lecturer who is a graphic designer. Not a professor. So not held to the academic integrity policy of the university because they are not employed by the university.

      Also, as a college professor – our university’s academic integrity policy addresses AI by saying that AI use is permitted in classes at the discretion of the instructor and that students must abide by our policies as outlined in class. I do not allow AI to be used on my assignments and it is stated as such in my syllabus, but other instructors do allow AI and spell out the ways in which students can use it and should cite it.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ann*

        Agree – also a professor – and while I’m not in favor of generative AI myself, I think it’s important to point out that the OP and many commenters here have a much stronger stance than actual universities or the artists employed at those universities. There are many ways that AI is being incorporated into courses and creative activities, for better or worse, and reporting that an artist who openly uses AI uses AI is just generally not going to be surprising or productive.

        Reply ↓
        1. CatDude*

          It may not change the university’s stance, but it could discourage students from taking their classes. And if there’s enough push-back from students, it’s not impossible the university would revise its stance.

          Reply ↓
          1. Anony*

            The guest lecturer, presumably, doesn’t teach any courses – they were just asked by the professor to speak at that one session.

            And many people I know who work in higher education are very interested in using AI to give students more robust experiences and since most college students are coming from high school, they are already using AI. Not all students view AI as a bad thing – and many of them enjoy using it.

            Reply ↓
            1. CatDude*

              There’s nothing inherently wrong with learning about generative AI but the professor needs to actually understand what they’re teaching. Inviting a lecturer who says “fuck consent” to a legitimate question, and then the professor backs the lecturer up and doesn’t discuss all of the ethical concerns for the technology – that professor is providing the opposite of a robust experience.

              Reply ↓
            2. CatDude*

              The problem is not teaching generative AI itself. It’s that the professor invited a lecturer who shut down the ethical concerns and questions of a student, and the professor *backed them up*.

              And teaching generative AI without teaching about the ethical concerns is a massive failure to provide a “robust experience”. This professor is, at the very least, a terrible teacher.

              Reply ↓
              1. CatDude*

                Sorry I posted twice. The first one didn’t show up for a while when I first posted it, so I thought it didn’t go through.

                Reply ↓
              2. Anony*

                I interpreted “backed them up” as the OP wrote – to say AI is a tool and that it is up the individuals moral compass on how to use it. And, as a professor – I kind of agree with that. I don’t use AI (and don’t allow my students to use it) because of my concerns over copyright and environmental load. On the other hand, I have colleagues who allow their students to use AI – after having taught them how to use it appropriately for the assignment.

                I’ve had people come and guest lecture in my class – and, granted, none of mine have dropped an fbomb or said eff consent – but I can’t control what a guest lecturer says. And we don’t know if the professors will invite that person back after this particular lecture.

                We’re also missing the context of the course in general and the specific class this person spoke in – we don’t know if this program is teaching generative AI or if this person is just speaking about their experience as a graphic designer using AI. We can’t speak to the quality of the professor because we don’t know anything other than how they handled this one (awkward) moment in class.

                Reply ↓
      2. Abogado Avocado*

        I agree with Jam on Toast and would point out that students have identified flaws in professional thinking that has had an impact on the world. In this regard, I’m thinking of the engineering and architecture students who raised doubts about the design of the bracing and tuned mass damper in the 59-story Citicorp building in NYC. It turned out that the calculations of the building’s stress perameters were wrong and that the building risked toppling in 70-mile-per-hour (110 km/h) quartering wind. The building’s designer embarked on strategic repairs to the already-built building, none of which were revealed to the public at large until 15 years later. But if it hadn’t been for those students. . .

        Reply ↓
  59. Abogado Avocado*

    LW#1, I love your solution of using a baby animal for your photo. I’m going to do that the next time this inane idea arises — because it repeatedly comes up, no matter where one goes or what one does, because for some reason people think it’s “cute” (ugh!).

    Reply ↓
  60. Dina*

    Two things for LW3:

    1. I’m genuinely curious as to how this lecturer would feel if he lost work to cheap AI-generated not-quite-copies. Why pay a professional designer when you can just prompt an AI to copy his work?

    2. I don’t know how applicable this is in your specific area, but does you school also teach about using tools like Glaze and Nightshade to protect your work from being used in generative AI models?

    (I also accidentally posted this as a reply in an unrelated thread – my apologies!)

    Reply ↓
    1. I'm just here for the cats!!*

      I’d also like to know what the universities policy is about AI. I bet if a student turned in an assignment using AI that the student would get in trouble for plagiarism.

      Reply ↓
  61. Old Woman Yells at Cloud*

    #3: I realize I have my tinfoil hat on here so I’m probably just going to throw this in here and run away, but… It’s like tech bros or–let’s be real, our oligarchical overlords–are encouraging regular people to use AI not just to line their own pockets, but to drain away our own capacity for independent thought. Eventually our ability to think, reason, or even write a coherent email will atrophy allowing them further control over society as they dominate all sources of information.
    Remember all those folks in Wall-E confined to their chairs on the space ship travelling away from a wasted Earth?
    Resist!

    Reply ↓
    1. CatDude*

      I don’t think that’s far-fetched. Trying to subvert and control art is a common tactic of authoritarians. Art, in its many forms, are some of the most powerful weapons against such regimes and so they will always seek to control it.

      Reply ↓
    2. Calamity Janine*

      i have a far more banal variant on this that i hesitate to even call a conspiracy theory because it’s one of those where everyone goes “yeah… yeah. that’s probably just happening, yeah.”, no conspiracy needed:

      OpenAI has admitted in parliamentary hearings that they can’t make it work without breaking the law.

      the rush to put this type of generative AI in everything is just an attempt to become “too big to fail”. if you say that your business isn’t profitable unless you run the orphan crushing machine, you just get shut down. if you make it so *every* business depends on running an orphan crushing machine, well, they’re not going to outlaw the orphan crushing machines. …not without you having a reason to then appeal to the government outlawing them for money to help you through this hardship, anyway.

      we don’t even have to get towards dead internet theory and widescale manipulation. it’s enough of a motivation for them to want more money, and not just more money, but all of the money ever. just silly, pigheaded greed. …that has about the same result.

      tldr you ever think about how a medieval peasant would be horrified that we made super advanced machines to make art inside all day while we’re toiling in the fields? yeah…

      Reply ↓
      1. Elbe*

        I think that this is very accurate. Companies are rushing to entrench AI so that it’s harder to control it down the road.

        Reply ↓
      1. Elbe*

        There does seem to be a trend where the most talented people are the ones that are strongly opposed to AI. And it makes complete sense. If you have enough skill to create without relying on the work of others, why would you want your work to be plagiarized so that people with no skill can reap the benefits of your skill? Very talented people have everything to lose and nothing to gain.

        Reply ↓
    4. Elizabeth West*

      100%. Tell me Elmo isn’t making an offer for OpenAI so he can make deepfakes that back up everything they’re trying to do. I will not believe you.

      Reply ↓
    5. Head Sheep Counter*

      Well when we get rid of all of the immigrant labor… we need someone to do that work…

      ah the tasty tasty tea of peasantry and racism (some Elmo is still mad about South Africa)

      Reply ↓
  62. Lemons*

    #3 One thing I really don’t see people talking about regarding AI (and why hearing this IN SCHOOL is very concerning) is that AI enables cognitive offloading. AI will do the hard thing for you, AI will figure it out! So why would you learn? Why would you try?

    I think this is deeply worrisome beyond students, if you don’t know how things work, you’ll become dependent on the tool, and you won’t be able to troubleshoot an issue, because you don’t know how it works. Plus, AI is still really stupid? It comes up with bad results all the time.

    P.S. as a professional designer, I do not see graphic designers using AI much at all. Writers, yes. As a student, do things the hard way. Learn what AI can help you with in terms of production, but don’t rely on it for creative solutions. The guy who told you that had the benefit of a standard design education, not one reliant on AI. He’s not a reliable narrator.

    Reply ↓
    1. Carys, Lady of Weeds*

      Oh man, “cognitive offloading” is SUCH a perfect phrase for that. I’m gonna write that down and bring it up every time AI comes up now.

      Reply ↓
    2. Elbe*

      Exactly this. Cognitive offloading is extremely dangerous, especially concerning communication.

      It’s a cliche that good educators don’t teach you what to think, they teach you how to think. But it’s absolutely true. Learning to write sentences is very closely linked to how to read sentences because it’s about two-way communication. You can’t get rid of one without the other. Not everyone has to be author-level proficient, but everyone needs to understand the basics of how people can present their thoughts in a way that their audience (even if the audience is just a friend or coworker) can understand.

      Reply ↓
  63. Aggretsuko*

    1. I’m still really upset at a friend of mine who acted poorly towards me in a somewhat similar fashion and I’ve been dwelling upon it for years now (and really downgraded the friendship too). I just thought the line, “A hit, a very palpable hit” reading that remark, which probably made it worse. But I have no idea how you’d bring it up to a boss without consequences and uncomfortableness.

    2. When I shared an office with people who hated me, we all just ignored each other and didn’t speak. Assuming the other party can’t stand you either, they probably don’t want to say hi when you come in in the morning either!

    4. When job hunting, every single job told me I wasn’t allowed to say no to contacting my current manager and they were going to do it no matter what. :( But I’m not sure what happens when you literally can’t give them that information in the first place even if you wanted to!

    Reply ↓
  64. Put the Blame on Edamame*

    LW3, I am with you 100%, the whole thing is so disappointing. In my work I run into lots of colleagues who now dismiss writing skills as unnecessary, which baffles me as we literally work in communications. Not to mention the environmental impact of these technologies.

    Reply ↓
  65. Amber Rose*

    #4: I get that it’s about my permission, not about how easy it would be, but should I still say yes if I know my former employer is dead, because that’s why I left? And that the company itself probably did not survive long after?

    Reply ↓
  66. CzechMate*

    LW 1 – Yes, one of the first thoughts things that came to mind for me about this game is that someone wouldn’t have baby pictures, if, say, their family home burned down (this is true of a good friend of mine) or if they’re immigrants, particularly if they were refugees and their homes were destroyed. That SOUNDS rare, but I’ve met people in that situation from Chechnya, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and even Mexico.

    I think OP should bring up how the situation made them feel, but if they feel uncomfortable doing that, they can mention some of these other scenarios and more vaguely hint that they and some other employees are in that situation and felt uncomfortable.

    Reply ↓
  67. Zipperhead*

    I find myself just barely caring about the baby photo issue. It absolutely pales in comparison to the manager saying “Someone’s parents didn’t love them.” That’s not a dumb comment, that’s a rude, sneering, toxic comment, especially made in a public setting.

    That’s the kind of thing that should have you demanding an immediate transfer to another department, or if that’s not possible, starting an immediate and intense job search, followed as quickly as possible by quitting with as little notice as possible.

    Reply ↓
    1. Elbe*

      It can be really hard to imagine, but a lot of people who had relatively happy childhoods with caring parents have an incredibly difficult time wrapping their mind around a parent truly not loving their child. A lot of the really insensitive things that people say to those estranged from their parents come from this place.

      My guess is that this seemed like a joke to the boss because she didn’t actually consider the possibility that it could be true. In her mind, it was funny because it was just so absurd and unlikely.

      I think that the LW should let her know that the comment was hurtful, and let her feel bad about saying it. Appropriate feelings of guilt/embarrassment/remorse/regret are particularly effective for ridding people of their blind spots.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ellis Bell*

        Yeah, I believe OP’s assessment about the boss being lovely because ignorance on this topic is common. The subtext to the joke is “Of COURSE their parents love them! All parents love their kids… that’s why it’s safe to laugh at this!!” I remember reading a Captain Awkward post where someone said the worst thing about having a problematic family was how at Christmas, you can’t simply say “nah, not going home” because so many people, who never get exposed to the alternative family narrative, think that’s epically weird and literally can’t imagine one reason why you’re not dying to be with your family whenever possible.

        Reply ↓
        1. Elbe*

          I agree!

          This is a topic that I would love to see get more traction within the broader public culture. It’s great that sites like this one and Captain Awkward are tackling these issues and exposing them to larger audiences. We need more awareness about this specifically because it’s common enough to be a heavy burden for the (many) people who are dealing with it.

          Reply ↓
  68. Throwaway Account*

    re #1 and the baby photo,
    I’m low/no contact with my mom, and I think there is some shame and judgment of me surrounding that, so I wonder if OP#1 is feeling some hesitancy in speaking to the boss due to feelings like that. I wanted to say that estrangement is not something the OP should feel some kind of way about in the work context!

    Also, my spouse’s family is not exactly displaced or a refugee, but his parents did meet in the disorganization that was their country after WWII, and even years later, when he was born in the 60s, cameras and baby photos are hard to find. They have just 3 photos from his entire life before about age 16!

    So I wanted to add that there is yet another reason for someone to have no baby photos that does not have anything to do with parents not loving their children!

    Reply ↓
  69. Another Academic Librarian too*

    Yikes and more yikes- I have no childhood pictures. Yes, there was trauma. No I don’t want to discuss it. Ever.
    Seriously- can’t management leave our outie lives out of work related stuff?

    Reply ↓
  70. Graphic Designer at Large*

    LW3 – As a professional graphic designer who has been in the field 15+ years and worked both agency and in-house — this IS NOT how we operate. I would argue that designers as a whole are more aware and worried about copyright because we are concerned about the creative fields and AI ethics.

    This person was wrong and I would say something to your professor as this not what our industry wants.

    Reply ↓
  72. The Rural Juror*

    LW3 – I work for an architecture firm and we’ve had a lot of discussions about AI use in recent years. We work on lots of commercial projects for large buildings that use a variety of exterior materials/finishes. One of the ways generative images have been helpful is using a conceptual shape (that we created) and having AI apply different types of materials (brick, wood, glass, etc). It saves sooooo much time and can help clients make decisions much quicker. But –
    1) We’re very transparent with our clients on how we’re using the AI
    2) We’re using concept drawings that we created based on a lot of factors and input from clients
    3) The AI-generated images are a step in the process and nowhere near the final product

    I think AI can be a great tool to save time and money. But you HAVE to be transparent with the clients paying you on how you’re using it and the value it adds to the project. If you’re saving time but adding little value, then it’s not a good tool. If the process works by stealing from others, then it’s REALLY not good.

    LW, sounds like you have a good moral compass.

    Reply ↓
    1. The Rural Juror*

      I should also mention, we have to know if the materials we’re trying out in AI will even work for that application. It can produce some really pretty images that aren’t even constructable.

      Reply ↓
  73. Observer*

    #3 – My original comment didn’t come through. In case Alison blocked it because it was too harsh, here is take 2.

    Feel free to name and shame the guy who thinks consent is for losers. It probably won’t make you any friends, but I think reasonable people can look at it and recognize that this guy is so far over the line that you can’t even see it anymore.

    But for the rest? The idea the use of AI in creative work is utterly out of bounds is naive at best. In many ways, AI is not fundamentally different than the use of any other tool. And people have been using tools to enhance and improve their creative endeavors since the beginning of time. I’m old enough to remember similar kinds of comments about most computer tools in relation to creative endeavors.

    As for the essential morality and ethics of AI in general, you have the right to your opinion. But you are misreading what your professor seems to have said. Saying “use your own moral compass” does not mean “those things don’t matter.” It means that different people can come down in different places on some of these issues.

    Lastly, in general, it’s important to understand the AI is not one thing. The ethics of different types of AI, different use cases, and different situations do make a difference. Because the effects (both ethical and environmental) *are* different, depending on the circumstances. If you actually want a shot at reducing the harmful use of AI understanding this is going to be useful.

    Reply ↓
  74. Calico Engine*

    Great answer on Q1.

    There’s a useful distinction between “trying to make someone feel bad” and “giving someone information that might make them feel bad.”

    Trying to make someone feel bad is usually a bad idea. Trying to avoid making someone feel bad is also usually a bad idea.

    Reply ↓
  75. FattyMPH*

    Re: #3, I’m VERY curious about how “fuck consent” lines up with your school’s policies on academic integrity, cheating and plagiarism… because it sounds like this lecturer just told y’all that plagiarizing is normal. I think you will have better luck with achieving some reasonable consequences for this if you look at what channels your school has, vs. going straight for publicity.

    Reply ↓
  76. RagingADHD*

    LW 4, I have encountered situations where there is a required field for former manager contact info (or a third-party reference checker who can’t leave their boxes blank). In situations like you describe, I give permission and then offer the closest approximation, like the main number for the company, or for the HR department, or the agency that booked me for the gig. And if there is a field for comments (or I’m talking to a live person), I briefly describe why they may have trouble.

    If the company has gone out of business entirely, I will just the approximate date or year they went out of business.

    Reply ↓
  77. CSRoadWarrior*

    #1 – That kind of activity is why something like submitting a baby photo is a bad idea; some people are not close to their family. And like OP, some are estranged. Some may have had bad childhoods. I am not one of those people; I have a close and strong bond with my family. But I personally know others who are not so lucky.

    The boss just likely slipped her tongue and made an honest mistake. It happens. I would suggest OP just tell the boss that the comment was off the mark and triggering, and please be careful next time. I am sure it wasn’t meant to rude, but it was still wrong nonetheless.

    #4 – I ran into that dilemma many times. Luckily, I do have two of my bosses’ cell phone numbers, but other than that, it can be tricky. Even if I see on LinkedIn where my other former bosses work, I would not know their email, their direct work phone number, or let alone their personal email.

    But as Alison said, they are asking permission. But even if you say yes, it can get tricky if you really don’t have any of their contact info.

    Now, it will NEVER be okay for any potential employer to contact your current supervisor as Alison said – and I think we all know why.

    Reply ↓
  78. Push back*

    #3: I do not work on the creative field. But one thing that stood out to me was the consent between professor and lecturer. I think it is appropriate to push back on this. Both persons are entitled to their opinions, but you, as students, should be able to have a well-rounded discussion on this in order to learn, be it through the professor talking a neutral stance or inviting two guests for pro/contra positions.
    This is as factual as it can get. I encourage you to give feedback to your university!

    Reply ↓
  79. Wellie*

    #1 & #3:

    What a marvelous confluence of questions! The answer is obviously to take a current photo and run it through an AI to generate a baby photo.

    Reply ↓
  80. BritSouthAfricanAmericanMutt*

    Letter #1: I am so sorry you went through that. My parents lost all their personal possessions in a case of arson, including all our family photos! There are many reasons one does not have baby photos. I am Gen X, but some older people still in the workforce might not have baby photos because of the expense of taking and developing them in the early 1960s and, indeed, through the 1970s.

    Reply ↓
  82. Crencestre*

    LW1: When my late father’s company invited (NOT demanded!) that employees submit their baby pictures for publication in the company newsletter, my father wanted to participate but had no baby photos of himself. He and my mother hit on an alternative; he wore a frilly baby cap (c0mplete with satin ribbon!), put on a pouting babyish expression and she snapped a picture of him. The caption in the company newsletter was “Dear old Tom – he hasn’t changed a bit!” I’m sure that many of his colleagues who knew him as a dignified professional got a good chuckle out of that!

    Reply ↓
  83. Bill and Heather's Excellent Adventure*

    LW1, if your boss truly is as wonderful as you say, then they should be told about this. Because any decent person would feel awful that they’d insulted one of their employees in this way and because telling them hopefully means you can stop this happening to someone else.

    Reply ↓
  84. James*

    My mum has a grand total of 8 baby pictures of me, all of which are of her holding me but me covered up or with her hand over my face.

    I was born during a mid-1970s heatwave, and my parents literally had no money. That meant that photographs were not common, since developing them cost money; the flash cubes for my dad’s camera also cost money, so photos could only be taken outside… in the beating sun.

    When one of my employers did this type of nonsense as a team-building/win a prize thing, the picture I submitted was of me aged 4 – when we had more money and the weather had improved/got worse depending on your PoV so there were plenty.

    Still, nobody knew who it was, I must’ve changed. And also they launched a wave of “rightsizing” the same day as they put up the noticeboard with the guess-the-picture thing on it and people were more concerned about the sudden gaps on the board where leavers had taken their photos back on their way out the door…

    …and it is only right now, almost 20 years later, that it has just occurred to me that the baby-photo-quiz thing was a distraction exercise as the consultants went room-to-room firing one in six of us. Oh good lord.

    Reply ↓
  85. Happy*

    I hate how AI is seeming to infiltrate everything these days! I went to the doctor today they now audio record the appointments and it creates notes for our charts (which he then edits and corrects.)

    I requested to opt out, but felt deeply uncomfortable doing so, especially when in an already stressful and vulnerable position. It sounds like I was only the second person to object since they started this a year ago.

    Reply ↓

Leave a Comment

Before you comment: Please be kind, stay on-topic, and follow the site's commenting rules.
You can report an ad, tech, or typo issue here.

Subscribe to all comments on this post by RSS