"I would prefer not to."

I take a lot of pictures. A lot of pictures. I share some of them here, and on social media. For every 100 photos I take, probably 70 are deleted immediately: out of focus, or the bee flew away, or the bird is looking the wrong direction, or it's too shadowy/too bright. Or any variety of terrible.

Some of those problems could be fixed with a bit of Photoshop, no doubt. I considered learning to manipulate my photos a little better, to squeeze a few more usable photos from that 70% of unusables, but I always decided against it. The most I do is maybe lighten or darken a bit using the slider bar in the standard photo viewer, and cropping/rotating as needed. 

Why? It wasn't so much reluctance to learn a new skill. It was more that I didn't want to introduce anything between what I experience on the Sycamore Greenway and what I share. If I took a picture of a catbird skulking in a shadow, it should look like it's skulking in a shadow. Once I start making judgment calls about what a photo should look like, it leaves the realm of reality and becomes a piece of art, filtered through my perception of what I saw, or what I think people want to see.

That's all the more reason why I shun using AI, particularly for sharing about the world outside our doors. Even leaving aside its hallucinations and its confident inaccuracies: it obscures authenticity. 

Could Claude, or ChatGPT or whatever, make this Bald Eagle a little more crisp? Maybe fix that little wedge of missing feather at the base of its left wing while it was at it? 

Sure. But that wouldn't be the eagle that soared over the trail. Or this slightly jumbled scene of a Painted Lady butterfly being displaced by a bumble bee as a second bee approaches...could it replace the semi-closed wings with a more photogenic spread-winged shot, and make the bumble bee a little more obvious?

Probably. But that's no longer reality. It's a fictional dramatization of a story to which I was the only witness. 

Coming up with things to say about the Greenway every day can be a challenge, and it's certainly time consuming. But that little "Write with AI" button that appeared below the text box some time ago has never, ever been tempting. Because whatever composes that blurb didn't feel the sun on its back as it hunkered down to inspect a leaf, or hear a distant woodpecker tapping away on a tree in the distance. It didn't wait patiently for that bee to stop buzzing around and land on a flower, and then wait longer until it turned around to face the lens. 

You'll never need to wonder if a photo or text on this page was created using AI. It was not. It never will be. 

Could AI write better posts—more engaging posts, less lazy posts, maybe even more factual posts—if given a photo and an appropriate prompt? Would it be able to play the algorithm with keywords and phrases to reach more people? Definitely. It draws on all the collected skill and wisdom of writers, artists, and naturalists available. 

My work is limited to my experience of the world. But it's mine, and good or bad, that's not something that can be found anywhere else in the world.