Sometimes... it takes a little self-control.

If you have been on facebook recently, you will have seen the "trendy images" generated of people - using photos as a base, they are rendered in Studio Ghibli-style or, the most recent fad, you can turn your photo into an action figure, in its plastic packaging, with some objects as accoutrements.

Yeah. There was a big blow-up about the "Ghibli filter" in AI, because the material taken to train the AI was taken without permission, and without reimbursement to the artists. So basically their work was stolen - much like the books that were used to train AIs, taken without permission (and one I co-authored was among them, by the way).

And now the trend is action figures. Well, at least that does not take someone's work and hands it out for free, right? However, there is still a stack of issues connected, one of them being the use of water (to cool) and energy (to run the servers).

You can read a little more about this here on Instagram...

or in this BBC article here. (Though I don't get why this, or other critical articles, are saying "don't do it" only to decorate their posts with multiple images of the figures, including those of the authors. Hm.)

Would I find it fun to see myself as an action figure, or drawn Ghibli-style? Yes. Will I have the AI make it? Definitely not. Apart from the intellectual property issues with the Ghibli filter, I don't really want to feed the AI enough data about myself to render a nice image. (Also you'd probably need a pretty oversized box if you wanted to include all the stuff to describe my work and life...) And it would feel a little off to waste energy and water on making a "fun" image when I'm trying hard in the other areas of my life to be as sustainable and low-impact as possible.