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I didn’t think I’d be writing this post, but with the pervasiveness of AI being shoved down everyone’s throats, it seemed appropriate to make my position clear so my readers and followers can understand what goes into the content that I create, share, and sell.

I acknowledge that AI (or at least, what we generally refer to as “AI” since it isn’t actually artificial intelligence) has the potential to be a valuable tool, especially for tedious organizational and administrative tasks. However, it’s currently being abused on a massive scale that pilfers copyrighted intellectual property and has severe impacts on the environment.

My local community is currently being threatened with incoming new data centers that are already driving up regional energy bills sky-high and will most certainly threaten our valuable natural resources, especially our wetlands and fresh water reserves.

I graduated from Purdue University with a degree in landscape architecture; I care very much about the environment and responsible stewardship of the land. I also grew up in the 90’s and distinctly remember a big push in environmental conservation in my childhood. Fundraisers sold T-shirts for endangered species, and people were panicking about the Antarctic ozone hole.

(But you don’t hear about that anymore, do you? I had to search and see if it still existed. 2025 was the fifth-smallest hole measured since 1992, and models predict the hole in the ozone layer will be mostly recovered by 2040.)

I remember learning about the importance of conserving water and electricity. Don’t leave lights on if you aren’t in the room, don’t leave the faucet running when you’re brushing your teeth…

“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”

― Alanis Obomsawin

I would like to firmly state that I don’t use AI at all beyond skimming the occasional automatic AI-generated summary when doing a quick search on a topic. But I have to acknowledge that with the AI tools being integrated into just about every digital application, it’s very possible that I might be using it in some cases without even realizing it.

I can say that I have never used ChatGPT or created AI art. I don’t actively seek out AI, and whenever I’m prompted to use an generative AI tool, it’s extremely rare for me to use it beyond a simple auto-filled sentence in a quick email.

Call me old-fashioned, but I have zero interest in falling into the trap and risking any potential sacrifice in my creative skills. I don’t want to lose my voice by being lazy and letting AI take over “thinking” for me.

If you see my art or read my writing, I want you to know without a doubt that it was created by a real person. I’m not going to mince words about this topic because I’m becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of regulation and the way AI is impacting the creative community, environment, and state of society as a whole.

Books & Blog

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As an author, I’m appalled to see AI-generated books flooding the market despite bookstores, libraries, and Amazon attempting to identify and remove them. It takes SO MUCH time, passion, hard work, and dedication to publish books. It’s a labor of love and an absolute battle to build an audience and scrape by to earn a living as an author. And this careless, undercutting move to churn out AI slop as fast as possible and pull sales away from real authors is a disgrace.

I’ve spent years developing my own unique voice in my writing. So, let me address a point that has been hounding other writers. There’s a common assumption that em dashes are a telltale sign of AI. I use a lot of em dashes, and I’m not going to stop using them just because of a baseless correlation. Large language models were trained on HUMAN WRITING. Are we supposed to stop writing like humans because AI is mimicking that pattern?

Em dashes started becoming prevalent in my writing back in high school when I was studying Emily Dickinson in an advanced English class. Her use of em dashes to control the flow of her writing was something that I really hadn’t encountered before, and it had a big impact on me. I’m just a human being inspired by another human being who made a mark in history. And now, authors are being pressured to change their style because AI has hijacked a particular punctuation choice? Yeah… fuck that. AI is already taking enough from us. I’m not making any more concessions.

I worked as a part-time freelance writer for a while just as AI was starting to become competent enough to begin posing a threat to that market. The agency I worked for was pressuring their writers to use AI as a tool (not a replacement) to help them quickly generate rough drafts that then needed to be fact-checked and edited by us humans so the writing didn’t sound too robotic.

I was extremely resistant to doing that. I had to use generative AI to a limited extent, just for the sake of writing a couple of articles that were specifically about the tool and needed examples of AI-generated text, but I didn’t like it, and I actually found myself getting stuck more frequently because AI interrupted my natural flow.

I DON’T use AI to write any sentences, paragraphs, or summaries that are then copied/pasted into my books or blog articles. I don’t use it to generate outlines. I don’t ask an AI platform to provide any worldbuilding ideas. I am steadfast, stubborn, and paranoid about relying on a large language model built on stolen copyright and regurgitating ideas without any thought or inspiration. I refuse to surrender the creative process and would rather work through my ideas and writing blocks on my own, as I’ve always done.

(I also don’t use ghost writers. If you read something published under my name, I can 100% guarantee that I wrote it.)

Art

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As an artist, I’m heartbroken to see how AI has completely invaded the art space. Artists have always struggled to have their time, talent, and hard work properly valued when society has an insatiable appetite to consume art while simultaneously dismissing those professions at every turn—slashing funding, attacking the arts in education, pushing the narrative that artists deserve to live in poverty because making art isn’t a “real job” contributing to the labor force.

Most of my art is drawn by hand. I usually use a mechanical pencil as my primary medium, but I also sometimes use ink, charcoal, and a white-out pen. Over the last few years, I started sharing timelapse videos of each new art piece with my Patreon community so subscribers could watch me draw. (If there’s any doubt about whether I actually did create the art… I have videos to prove that I did since everyone questions the authenticity of everything these days.)

@author.sara.a.noe

I was surprised to have someone “jokingly” question my art at a recent event and express doubt that I really do draw freehand with a mechanical pencil. This is my newest piece I just finished yesterday. No, I don’t trace (although I did print out a Finonacci pattern to help me with this one). In all honesty, the paper in my sketch pad is too thick for tracing even if I wanted to. Yes, I really did just use mechanical pencils, a blending stick, and a white-out pen. No, I don’t use AI. Patreon subscribers can watch the complete timelapse video from start to finish: https://www.patreon.com/onthecobblestoneroad ✨️ #drawing #art #artwork #arttok #artist #artistsoftiktok #artistatiktok #artistoftiktok #artistontiktok #artistsontiktok #patreon #patreonartist #patreonartists #butterflydrawing #sunflowerdrawing #fyp

♬ Titanium – Jasmine Thompson

How do I come up with my designs? Sometimes, I have a clear image in my head, and it’s just a matter of transferring it to the page. Other times, I have a vague idea of the subject, and then I’ll skim through images online to find inspiration and use as references for proportions, textures, shadows, etc. (It’s becoming harder and harder for me to find genuine photographs of the references I’m seeking rather than AI-generated images.)

But that’s the difference—inspiration. That’s the key component missing in AI. It treats art like a piecemealed equation of components to be copied and pasted into a Frankenstein mash-up. Let me show you an example of how art sometimes inspires me and becomes part of my process.

In 2023, I stumbled across a painting called “Solstice Stag” by Kyra Wilson on Facebook, and the art instantly resonated with me on a visceral level. I felt that deep pull of inspiration and knew that I wanted to draw my own version of a stag in a snowy winter landscape for my next piece.

But I didn’t trace hers (actually, on that topic, let me clarify that I NEVER trace!) and call it my own. I created a completely different version in my own style. That’s a human experience that AI simply can’t do. It can’t be inspired by art and use that feeling to create something different. All it can do is pull (cough, steal) from existing data even though the artists never granted copyright permission or relinquished their ownership rights.

Below, you can see Kyra’s “Solstice Stag” on the left next to my “Yule Stag” on the right. Completely different styles. Different mediums. Different positions, backgrounds, and colors. Nobody would look at these two pieces and claim that one was plagiarizing the other.

If you like both/either of these art pieces, you can purchase a print of Kyra’s “Solstice Stag” here on her website and shop for my “Yule Stag” print on various products such as notecards, necklaces, mouse pads, etc. on my website. I also sell artboards at events.

I do, to a much more limited extent, also create digital art in Photoshop. But let me be clear—even if I wanted to use Adobe’s generative AI Photoshop tools, I can’t. I’m still operating Photoshop CS6… which is so outdated that Adobe stopped releasing updates for the software way back in 2013. Those AI tools didn’t exist back then.

But the program still works, and I greatly resent Adobe’s decision to force customers into an endless subscription that will never be paid off, so I’ll continue using this old, discontinued program I paid for in college until it croaks and I have no choice but to switch to the subscription.

Learning about copyright has been an ongoing process for me as a creative. I’ll admit that I probably wasn’t perfect in the past. (I had also received some bad advice from a college professor who perpetuated the myth that you could avoid copyright infringement simply by changing at least 30% of the original work… which is not true.)

But I do my best to operate in good faith, and the oligarchs pushing AI have done the exact opposite. They’ve boldly, proudly, and publicly flaunted their lack of respect for copyright and integrity. And, until legislation catches up with technology, creators really don’t have a legal leg to stand on against AI. It’s completely blurring the lines and destroying our livelihoods.

“AI artists” don’t exist. Typing instructions into a prompt doesn’t make you an artist. That would be like ordering a pizza and claiming that I’m a chef because I dictated which ingredients I wanted on it.

I take great pride in my art, whether it’s writing or drawing. The harder AI is pushed into my life against my will, the more I’m inclined to resist, even if those tools could be valuable. That’s why, at this time, I can confidently let my readers, followers, fans, and subscribers know that generative AI is not a part of my books, blog, or art… and I can’t imagine a future where that ever changes.

Maybe that means I’ll be obsolete by refusing to embrace the rapidly changing technology. But, despite my pessimistic world view at the moment, I still have faith that people will deepen their appreciation for actual art instead of the cheap, instant gratification of AI. I hope society recognizes the value of real people with genuine talent who are dedicated to honing their craft and feeding into the cycle of creation and inspiration in a human experience that technology simply can’t recreate…