The situational ethics of stickers (with speaker notes)

How my AI-generated sticker hobby forced me to grapple with questions about AI, training data, and whether or not using these tools is something I can ethically do. This is a five minute lightning talk version of the longer argument at https://charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/make-ai-boring-again.

Transcript

1. The situational ethics of stickers Charity Majors
2. 2 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. I have always loved color. I love colors. all the colors. I always wanted to learn how to make my own. I tried a few times — I tried photoshop, I tried the GIMP. Nothing I made ever looked very good. It was incredibly time consuming.
3. 3 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. “Good people who care about artists don’t use AI to generate images” Once OpenAI started generating images, and Midjourney and all of them came out, I was tempted to try. But I have a lot of lefty artist friends, and everyone was very irate about the training data. So I held off. Until I ran out of time, and I needed images for an event, and I couldn’t get an artist to help me. Shit. I decided to join the dark side.. just for a visit. Only temporary!
4. 4 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. My early efforts were eyesores I was hooked. Almost immediately. My early efforts weren’t very good. But I got better fast. I found myself staying up late into the night, tinkering and toying with the image families. I started learning about typography, visual languages, color palettes.
5. 5 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. But I got better
6. 6 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Why do I like this better than that? Why does this look stupid and that doesn’t? Any time I saw a cover of a book I liked, or a combination of colors I liked, I would drop it into chatgpt and ask it to describe it for me. Why do I like this? What’s so compelling about it? Why do I like option A more than option B?
7. 7 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Why do I like this better than that? Something that had always frustrated me about working with other artists and designers was that I couldn’t really tell them what I wanted. I knew what I liked, but not why I liked it. I knew what I wanted more of, or less of, but not why.
8. 8 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Why do these colors call to me? Why do I like this book cover? Why don’t I like that one? When you’re paying a designer $100-200/hour to generate designs for you, with a turnaround time of days or weeks, you don’t linger on quibbles. You kinda take what they give you. But when you have the tools yourself… you can linger. I have learned so much about my own tastes, and what i look for and care about in art and design.
9. 9 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Book covers were an incredible level up. They already have a coherent visual language.
10. 10 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Cover designed by Joanne O’Neill I was having SO much fun. I developed entire taxonomies of ribbons and swooshes and curls. But as I started spending more and more time working on my designs, I realized I was never going back to paying someone else to do this for me. And I had to really, seriously grapple with the question of, is this ethical or not? Is it okay?
11. 11 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. …shit. This is deeply personal. What about ethics? What about artists? Can i justify doing this? Here’s where I’ve come out. I can’t keep it a secret all my life. I have to be able to defend my actions and what I’m doing to my friends. Ethics are personal. This does not mean that everything is relative or equally ok. This is where I have landed, but you will have to do your own work.
12. 12 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Was it legal? I don’t know. Was it right? No. Ethics, morals, and the law are three different things. Was it legal? We don’t know yet. The law wasn’t written for this use case, and case law has been narrowly decided and contradictory to date.. We’ll find out whether it was legal or not when the Supreme Court weighs in. Whether it was legal or not: it was wrong. It feels morally wrong for anyone to train their models off people’s work and then sell it back to them and us. But ethics, morals and the law are different things. There’s a LOT of what the big AI companies are doing that feels just fucking wrong. It has always been hard to make a living as an artist. It’s not getting any easier.
13. 13 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. There are A LOT of ethical, moral, legal, environmental, and other problems with AI. This does not mean AI is uniquely evil or corrupt. It means we have work to do. There are a lot of moral, ethical, and legal reasons to be troubled and angry about AI, including on how data was trained on works without permission or compensation. I hope creators prevail in the courts (I doubt they will, but one can hope). I agree this is a huge problem.
14. 14 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. I disagree that this means we should abstain from using and mastering the tools. I think we have an obligation to use and master the tools, and participate in their governance. AI is just technology. I disagree that it leads inevitably to the conclusion, “… and so we cannot ethically use these tools, because they are tainted.” I disagree strongly. I think we have a responsibility to engage, become experts, become people worth listening to. If not us, then who? AI is just technology. There is no original sin.
15. 15 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. The argument to unilaterally disarm in the face of powerful new tools is an appeal to purity. It slips easily into narcissism and performance art. The quest for purity fuels every fundamentalism on the left or right. I was raised to believe that purity was the ideal, the world was corrupt, and righteous people would remove themselves from it. I have devoted my own adult life to the opposite proposition — we are all interdependent, we are all implicated. I think that unilaterally disarming in the face of powerful new tools is neither wise nor desirable. I believe that the pursuit of purity slips easily into narcissism and performance art, centering ourselves and our quest instead of centering the problem or the ones who are harmed by it. The pursuit of purity is behind every fundamentalism, left or right. It may be tempting, but it is not effective.
16. 16 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Action is more powerful than abstention. If you say you support artists… SUPPORT ARTISTS Everyone is frustrated right now. It’s a GREAT time to propose new ways of working and being together. Abstention is not as powerful as action. If you say you support artists… support artists. Grapple with the harms. Build better ways. Build solutions. Foster dialogue. Everyone is frustrated. This is a great time to propose new ways of being and working together.
17. 17 © 2025 Hound Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. And stickers are pretty, and art is nice. We do not get to choose to live in a pure world. We only get to choose whether or not to participate in the compromised world we have, and make it better. And stickers are pretty, and art is nice.