The PopCulteer
January 30, 2026

I had planned to write a long essay today about Artificial Intelligience.

But the crappy weather this week meant that I had to drive my beautiful wife to work, and then go pick her up, and that meant going out in the cold, which aggravates my Myasthenia Gravis, and also wears me out a bit physically.

It also cuts my workday from about ten hours to about five.

So I didn’t have the spoons to crank out a long, coherent essay. Instead, you’re getting an off-the-top-of-my-head ramble.

In short, the point I planned to make was that, AI in and of itself is not evil. There are applications in science and medicine that are truly exciting and hopeful. A good friend of mine is using ChatGPT in place of therapy because the health system she’s forced to use does such a poor job dealing with mental health. It’s doing a much better job for her than what she was getting from her provider, which ranged from nothing to downright malpractice.

It’s use in the arts is more problematic.

See…most of the popular AI art and music programs “scrape” the internet for their techniques and actually swipe huge chunks of works. Most AI art and music at the moment is just where people feed prompts into a machine, which spits out a conglomeration of plagarized works. Plagarism, in case you didn’t know, is theft…and it sucks.

And right now it’s still in the “toy” phase. People who never had the patience to create real art are just typing sentences into a program and adoring whatever it spits out. Aside from instances where it clearly steals somebody else’s art, it’s relatively harmless. It’s also really, really ugly and annoying most of the time.  To someone like me, who’s been doing digital art for decades, it’s as visually grating as the overuse of autotune is aurally.

It’s also not as much fun to see as it is to do, most of the time.

To be honest, if I never see another short clip of action figures coming to life, it’ll be too soon, but if that’s how you get your jollies, go right ahead. That’s why we have the “snooze” button on social media.

And I have to admit that I’ve seen AI used impressively to restore and colorize old photos and films.  I’ve even seen a member of a WV band from the 1960s do some amazing work restoring old band photos, changing angles and working to make historically-accurate new images based on those old photos. That’s pretty cool, especially since they clearly label all the AI use.

Of course perverts are using it to take existing photos and strip the clothes off of people. That was inevitable. The desire to see boobs and dongs has pretty much been the engine that’s driven the adoption of every visual medium since the dawn of man.  From cave paintings to classical Greek statues to the Renaissance to the printing press, photography, motion pictures, cable television and the internet, the initial interest has been prurient.

That leaves us with ethical issues in terms of consent and people being violated, and that’s a subject for a whole series of more serious essays that I will write someday when I’m not burned out by bad weather. We also have the ethical issues of using a technology that plagarizes existing works.

Plus we have the fact that, when it comes to scraping facts, AI is pretty freaking unreliable. It’s so bad that now, whenever I use Google, I automatically type “-AI” at the end so I don’t have to see some useless half-baked summary that’s usually filled with wrong information.

I do not plan to use AI for my art, ever. I did use it for a music video once, but that was because I wanted the video to look deliberately bad in a cheesy way, and misusing AI was the way to get that effect.

You will not see AI used for Monday Morning Art. It just strikes me as pointless. I’ve created digital art in the past, but it was all created by me. Now that I’ve regained the use of my fingers enough to make real-world art, the idea of just typing prompts is a bit offensive to me. I may be lazy, but I’m not that lazy.

However…there is an exception.

If somebody sends me a graphic for an upcoming event that is clearly AI slop…I will go ahead and run it in PopCult’s STUFF TO DO feature. You won’t see me use AI in the feature images, but if I’m re-posting a graphic or flyer for a show, I’m not going to be too picky about it, no matter how freaking cringeworthy the AI use is.

The reason for this is, for years I have begged people to get me graphics for STUFF TO DO. I have repeatedly said, “Just give me an image that has the name of the artist, the venue, the time and the price, even if it’s just text on a white background, and I’ll run it.”

My standards for plugging a show in STD are very, very low. So if somebody takes the time to make a graphic, no matter how cheesy, generic, derivative or hackneyed it looks, I will consider it for STUFF TO DO.  In fact, there’s one coming up next week that sort of prompted this essay. I’m running it, but I’m not endorsing the use of AI in that manner.

All those altered images from the American Sign Museum that I’ve used for feature images in this blog were done using good, old-fashioned Paint Shop Pro.

It is somewhat hilarious that technology is moving so fast that digital graphics programs are now seen as archaic.

Back to the prurient interests, I’m sure we’re not far from the time when nobody will bother making real-life porn. AI will just generate anything a wanker wants to see, based on whatever they type into a little box.  By the end of the year we’ll probably see OnlyFans accounts that are entirely AI-generated. Facebook is already creating fake AI profiles so that they can “drive engagement” while padding their advertising clicks and paying less engagement money to real people.

Soon AI will be making content to be consumed by AI to use making more content. 90% of the electricity generated in the world will go to power this virtual snake eating its own tale.

Then they’ll put AI in charge of dealing with Climate Change, and that’s when it’ll send the robots to wipe out humanity.

At least that’s the plot of probably a third of the sci-fi novels and comics I read as a kid.

And on that cheerful note, we wrap up this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh, handmade content, and all of our regular features.