Selling AI art is another get rich quick scheme.
NaNoWriMo is the latest in a long line of organisations to fall in with the AI crowd and while it was not a squeaky clean in the first place, it’s one of the bigger ones that revolves around writing to either advocate or welcome AI content on their platform. A lot of what we’ve seen over the past few months have been very much focused on Art in visual terms but with NaNoWriMo’s recent statement, we are reminded of the risks to the written word and literature.

Both me and my wife have messed around with AI generators. My wife tried Dall-E when it first came around and we were amused by how outlandish some of the images it returned were. I have messed around with AI, with ChatGPT, trying to see if it could be used to help the small charity I worked with at the time, or if it could help me write more but I could never quite understand how this was better than just using my own brain and my ideas. It didn’t seem any quicker or any more useful than the half a dozen tools I was already using. Such as name generators, or prompt tables, or software I already had.

The real use for Al Content creation seems to be for people looking for that next get rich quick scheme. People looking for a shortcut to creativity inevitably end up not being creative. People looking to get rich from art, tend not to really create art. While I’m not a huge fan of the starving artist requirement, we definitely should be paid for our work and that’s the difference. Using AI isn’t work.
There are endless videos on Youtube, telling you how to make money selling AI art (and other AI created things) on Etsy. All with big numbers in their thumbnails to entice you. It’s a little like MLM – multi level marketing – schemes. Lots of numbers but not a lot of reality.

But I’ve been selling on Etsy for four years, it’s not easy to see art you do create, it takes time and effort. It’s a lot of work to run a successful online shop. You can’t just slap some AI generated art on a product and list it and wait for the money to roll in. You have to source products, make sure images work on different templates, create images showing it off, describe it, work on the SEO, figure out Etsy’s algorithm, market it outside of Etsy (and figure out any algorithms on social media), sell it, pay the fees, make sure that your product actually ships if you’re using a Print on Demand company…

For full transparency, the above image is my last 30 days on etsy. That 121 quid? That’s revenue, that’s not my profit, and the profit it much less. I’m not making crazy money, I’m making enough to pay for my kids extras. I bought my wife breakfast last week with the money I made at Carmarthen pride and groceries today.
It’s not easy money, and anyone telling you as such, is definitely lying. The only real money made is selling courses and making videos on how to make money with AI created art.
Luckily, more and more people are getting wise to how AI art is theft and hopefully, as AI generators become poisoned wells, the bubble will burst like so many other get rich schemes. And yeah, there are uses for AI, but even editing your work needs to be done by a human, you can’t replace the way a human sees something. Human’s have imagination. When NaNoWriMo insist that it’s classist and ablest to ban the use of AI, they forget that, yeah, AI is definitely going to be of use to my dyslexic sister to make sure her essays have no spelling mistakes, but Word could do that anyway. I could and have done that for her. And yeah, AI can create a list of prompts and ideas, and but when it comes down to it, it can’t really make much of a story. It’s not really art.
Hell, it can’t even properly render hands.
So if you’re looking for another writing challenge this autumn – check out the 100 Days Of Writing Challenge here on Substack. And if you’re queer as all hell, you’re welcome to join us in the discord for 30k in 30 days of October.
Sign up to get posts directly to your email:
Subscribe and get posts via email: