AI Statement and Disclosure:
The presence of AI in art and other copyrightable work begs the question: “who really made this?” There are many far wiser people than I working on answering this, among many other questions of an ethical and moral nature to do with what kind of role AI should play in our collective future. The impact on the environment and communities affected by rapid data centre expansion cannot be understated. As creatives, the scraping of our work by LLM companies for model training without consent or compensation is concerning. I can’t say what we should do, all I can do is talk about my personal attitude towards AI within my own work and that is this statement’s purpose.
It is my belief that art-making is a way for human beings to channel Source energy; to connect with each other and communicate ideas far more sophisticated than possible through spoken word alone. As this is my belief, that art comes from a divine place and human beings are instruments channeling something greater than we’re capable of understanding, I do not use AI in my art making or writing process ie. idea generation, proof reading/spell checking or altering the work in any way. When I write a piece for my blog, newsletter or captions on Instagram, know that they are in my own voice and in my own words. I wrote them and I haven’t run them through a LLM. If we listen carefully to Source, we are capable of creating something more impactful and full of soul than any machine could possibly attempt to replicate. Art-making is humankind’s birthright — It’s hard and takes practice, but that is quite literally the point.
However, I will state that with how AI is already so deeply integrated with the internet, it would not be practical for me to completely avoid all presence of AI. For example, I can’t control if the author of an article I use for research used undisclosed AI to write it, and so forth. I have no desire to engage in witch hunts and can only control my own process and outcomes. The CMS I use to publish this website, Wfolio, has recently integrated AI features such as a retouching engine and gallery facial recognition. I do not use or have these features enabled on my website or for photography client galleries. Please note though, that at this time it would be impractical for me to migrate my website and cloud storage to another CMS, and alternatives will likely also have similar features or integrations. Occasionally I will require a new imbed feature coded up for this website; my fiancé is a web developer and will likely use a tool like Claude Code to build it for me although I don’t imagine this will happen very often at all.
It seems like this new technology is not going anywhere anytime soon and until we’ve achieved greater clarity, it will be something I continue to observe with caution and curiosity but, also crucially, without indifference to the aforementioned moral considerations. I make this statement so that anybody curious about potential AI influence in my work can be assured that everything I post is made by me.
If you have any questions, concerns or would like to complain, please feel free to contact me at veronika@barelysomewhere.com or via my contact form. My inbox is always open for respectful dialogue and discussion, however, please note that abuse will not be tolerated or responded to.
Thank you for reading this statement. Please check out the other pages on my website to learn more about me and my art.