IN A NUTSHELL ...

back to 'thoughts'

wired to please (the question being, "whom?")

As a freelance legal journalist in South Africa – specialising in reporting to the legal fraternity on public policy and legislative processes of interest to their clients – I spend most of my time behind a computer screen unpacking complex technical documents and reading the political mood of virtual meetings.

After completing a seven-year stint of monitoring South Africa’s copyright law reform process – and with our ‘government of national unity’ treading water on the policy-making and legislative fronts – I found myself with an unexpected amount of spare time on my hands. Which didn’t mean I could escape from the Internet. My job is to find even the slightest hint of public policy reform in the pipeline … So, I trawl South Africa’s key government websites and live parliamentary meetings almost 24/7 looking for leads.

One day in October 2024, when I was Googling for an image to portray box-ticking (which is what our parliament’s public participation process has become, at least n my view), I stumbled across NightCafé’s website and managed to produce one myself for free. That’s when I first became aware of the possibilities of self-generated AI text-to-image art – and I was intrigued.

Using NightCafé’s free drop daily credits, I could have created a limited number of work-related pictures each week using some of the AI text-to-image models available to non-subscribers. But I wanted to hone my skills. I wanted to create interesting images portraying South Africa as I experience it. Which meant practising. Which meant using more than the daily drop and other free credits one can earn by ‘liking’ the prescribed minimum number of images created by other people on the platform, welcoming the minimum prescribed number of ‘newbies’, and performing other credit-earning tasks. So, I paid for a six-month beginner subscription.

Occasionally, an AI image generating model will immediately interpret a word prompt exactly as one had hoped. More-often-than-not, it takes at least five attempts. Which, as a perfectionist, is how I became hooked. I wanted precisely what I had in mind, which usually took multiple attempts (chomping up credits). So, having consumed my six-month allocation well before the subscription expired, I bought more and more top-ups – eventually upgrading my package to ‘hobbyist’ level so I could submit worthy entries to NightCafé’s official daily and numerous community-hosted competitions.

Which is when I began noticing the inclusion of oversexualised images of women and ‘girls’ among the entries to competitions with rules expressly prohibiting submissions deemed ‘not safe/suitable for work’/NSFW according to the platform’s community standards.

Several community competitions not bombarded by that type of entry were run by a NightCafé subscriber who was banned from the platform shortly before my subscription came up for renewal. They tended to focus on children. By then, I had already begun diplomatically querying the number of NSFW images I regularly encountered in other competitions – mostly to no avail. And I had also created and published many push-back (safe viewing) images of my own, deliberately underscoring the double standards I was experiencing. So, when my favourite community competition host was banned for running competitions focusing on children in fantasy settings considered to have violated the community standards, I made a fuss.

I struggled to understand why competitions calling for images of children in unusual but not the least bit offensive situations had suddenly been found to violate NightCafé’s somewhat vague community standards expressly referring to child safety – when images of provocatively posing, suggestively dressed women regularly broke so many other rules.

This time, my repeated requests for an explanation were rebuffed in no uncertain terms. As far as NightCafé management was concerned, the matter was closed. I had blotted my copybook by asking too many questions. Which came as a shock. But I decided not to give whoever had made the decision the satisfaction of believing their intransigence had forced me to close my account.

Instead, I renewed my subscription for another six months – nevertheless downgrading it back to ‘beginner’ level. And I slowly withdrew from participating in community competitions – using my credits mostly to generate images expressing dismay at ongoing double standards and the host’s sudden banning. The rest is history.

With the wisdom of hindsight, I should have closed my account the first time I encountered an NSFW image objectifying and oversexualizing a woman. I should have forfeited the money I had spent. I should have withdrawn the positive reviews NightCafé had incentivised me to write – or at least followed up with insights into the platform’s darker side.

But here’s the thing: As the platform’s X profile unapologetically acknowledges, among other things creating AI text-to-image ‘art’ can become ‘addictive’. Hooked during the early stages of learning how to ‘prompt’ effectively, I had allowed myself to be trapped. By the time I broke free (triggered by a temporary suspension after pushing back too vociferously) a heavy price had been paid – not simply in money ill spent, but by compromising my own integrity by allowing myself to participate in ‘creative’ pursuits with the potential to do so much harm.

For transparency’s sake, here are most of the images I published as ‘Killjoy Kate’ aka ‘Hillary the Happy Hippo’ aka ‘Nobomi’ aka ‘Eternal Optimist’. Changes in pseudonym were made to reflect prevailing circumstances at the time.

Of course, I’m no artist, as you’ll see. But I do have interesting thoughts that, on NightCafé, occasionally inspired a reasonably pleasing image. It took 35 thousand attempts to produce my ‘gallery’, each unsatisfactory outcome consuming anything between 0-5 credits. Many were deleted as disasters. Others were published and then archived.

My account is now dormant.