I’ve had the chance over the years to rummage around deep into the pocket of excuses for not stepping up to the line at a cycling event: illness, deadlines, illness, weather, pleurisy (I’m adding this here as possibly my best day-before excuse for forgoing a race), funeral, illness, finances, having a sniffle, and a fistful of other reasons that may or may not stand up to much scrutiny other than I just couldn’t be arsed – which is an often underused yet perfectly valid excuse, to be honest.
I think, though, this might be the first time I decided I was not able – or unwilling at least – to attend an event because of the promotional material. And when I say unwilling I mean refused, as some kind of demonstration and point of principle. Possibly a futile one.
A series of regional and local-to-me cyclocross races have been using AI images to publicise their events, which really shouldn’t matter than much in the grand scheme of things. But it does matter, because it is a small gurgling part of the circling the drain of the grand scheme of things.
They certainly aren’t alone in using AI to promote their services, as it’s use is all-pervasive, absolutely everyfukinwhere – especially if you like takeaway food. While I can ignore most of it, or at least just give it a brief yet disparaging stare, this one hits close to home with a weighty sigh.
If you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years, or just out riding your bike lots, and are unaware of the ever-increasing issues and wide ranging impact behind the use of AI, then I’ll have to let you do your own research there. Start your reading by clicking beneath Google’s AI-generated overview, mind you, as there’s a fair bit more to it than a brief blog post on a cycling website can satisfy. TL;DR, it’s generally not good.
That’s not to say for all the predictions of upcoming death of both humanity and the planet due to AI it doesn’t have its uses. I’m not going to dismiss it with a broad sweep of my luddite brush as it’s one of finely shaded nuance. But we live in binary times where no-one has any time to wander quizzically around the shades of grey in between the black and white, so again, I’ll have to let you investigate the space in between the doom and the gloom in your own time.
Almost as an insignificance to the overwhelming global implications of AI, there is also the issue of artistic merit to have a disappointed mutter about. You may not have even considered this an issue, but I have to put my hand up here and say that I have skin in this game, quite a lot actually with a whole ink-smudged body’s worth.
When I’m not bothering a keyboard on here, I’m agitating pencils and paint around pieces of paper, and have been doing so for the whole of my working life. I have surfed the troublesome waves of computers arriving, and am front-crawling hard against the tide of print media going under – so while I don’t necessarily see AI as the newest and ugliest threat to my living, I have to keep a wary eye on it. Know your enemy and all that.
Thankfully there are still enough out there who appreciate craft, and things done by actual people with sparks of imagination and time- honed skills – but the torrential open sewer of AI sets a precedent that ‘art’ (I’ve used the term very loosely here) can be made for free and in an instant. In this age when life is a permascroll and attention spans are fleeting seconds at best, there’s no need to spend either time or money on something that’s been and gone in the briefest blink of an eyeball. Do something that does just enough to register without the need to survive too much critical scrutiny.
As a method of consumption it is as intellectually barren as you can imagine. Wait, I’m being unnecessarily harsh… let’s call it intellectually mediocre.
There is something in the quality of the image and the style of any lettering that because of its scraping of the internet for material will do nothing but deliver an average, and the continued overuse will just reinforce that as it circlejerk feeds upon itself. With all of that comes an inevitable lack of individuality and care with ‘That’ll Do’ being the default, although that is in no way specific to AI.
Even though it is growing more detail-accurate by the minute, the AI style of image creation and graphic design are already instantly and depressingly recognisable. It’s the new Comic Sans, and makes any creative person cringe. Why spend the time and bother creating something with thought and personality when a decent enough image can be created immediately with a few tapped out prompts? Slop is as slop does.
I can see that I might be desperately grasping a particular and niche view here and tripping over my own rabbit hole, but if we take a step back, the use of AI for cycling images could be part of this whole larger problem, and also a smaller one.
The bicycle world is probably more artistically blessed than many other pastimes, and so not without a vast pool of talent with which to fish in. Poke around the teeniest bit and you’ll find an exquisitely rendered peloton of pedal-based artistic content or just creatives that use a bike, all of whom have been ignored to produce something with little creative merit – or worse, their style hacked and cut ’n’ pasted to generate an image that is artistic adjacent.
In a time when all cycling events are being run on less than no money and have to rely on ever decreasing volunteers, the mining of a bottomless supply of imagery to mash up something new doesn’t come with an invoice, which does unfortunately make pragmatic financial sense. I do have a sprinkling of sympathy here, but I have donated my artistic talents gratis to a variety of events and races, and see it as fulfilling my volunteer role to help out towards the event. Drawing a picture in the warm with a cup of tea is a lot easier than standing in a field in the cold, I admit…
So, is AI going to kill us all, and will it be in the shape of a muddy duck with one blinking red eye? That’s a level of dystopia none of us predicted, and so probably not. Is it going to make us put up with a mediocre level of homogenous imagery and design that we won’t care about and have no emotional attachment to? Probably, yes. Is it worth letting a business or organiser know that you disagree with their AI promotional methods and the reasons why? I’m sure they’ll shrug their shoulders and say a lot of people actually like it. Is it worth the pyrrhic protest of boycotting the event, or am I overreacting to something most people see as just a bit of a laugh? Or does supporting the local race scene overrule everything? Well, since writing out the first couple of paragraphs of this article, I’ve now decided I will go and race alongside the mucky duck with breasts.
Rather than just grumble or take an ineffective and vain stance, it’s far more effective to offer up a practical solution. In my privileged position of being able to effect positive change, I’ve let this local race organiser know that I will happily create them a human-made promotional image for a future event. The AI slopbots aren’t having this one…
