The parts of this website which I wrote and designed without generative AI quote three sources:
The collaged elements of the site owe their inspiration to What It Is by Lynda Barry.
Giving due credit for the AI-generated portions…gets a little more complicated. While the two models I used were strongly influenced by my writing, they had already been trained on vast datasets which likely contain copyrighted information (at least one of the models is trained on The Pile, a transparent and open-source dataset which nevertheless contains subsets with dubious consent and/or usage rights). This project acknowledges the influence countless writers, forum users, testers, and data workers have had on its output. My intention is not to brush past questions of influence and ownership but to democratize those questions, using these ethically fraught methods in public-facing and non-commercialized ways to help the same audience of writers and artists whose data is used to train machine learning systems to be better informed about how their data is being used, or perhaps misused.
Where possible, I have used open access and preferably open-source tools in my development and design of this project. The notable exception to this is Adobe Photoshop, which was used to create the AI-edited photographs in the margins of several pages. This was a regrettable decision, given recent disputes over Adobe’s terms and gen-AI use, but a necessary one due to the limited time and computer resources I had to complete this project. For those with hardware to support it, I strongly recommend using open-source alternatives for image generation instead.