Personal Blogs

Gouache on paper (40×50cm)

Syncopated Flow

Painted in Scarborough, 29th December 2025

(Gouache on paper 30x40cm)

Festive

Acrylic on canvas (40×50 cm)

Gouache on paper (20×30 cm)

Gouache on paper (30×40 cm)

Mixed media on canvas (30×40cm)

I have become a private person lately. I spend a lot of time alone. 

I paint because I have to. 

I enjoy the process. The swishy feeling of the brushstrokes. The way mind, eye, and hand become one. A flow state. Where what was once difficult feels like second nature now. 

This is something AI can never replicate. 

A prompt is not the same as making something by hand.

What is art? Who defines it? 

And what was art before it was defined by that person?

How old is it?

Older than we.

Acrylic on canvas (40×50 cm)

Gouache on paper (20×30cm)

Gouache on paper (30×40cm). Painted by the author, Richie Cuthbertson 

Have been writing a lot on Medium. I like it that they have decided to set the default flag to 'no' for allowing A.I. to train on the site's content. 

I don't know if putting writing behind a paywall also helps to protect one's writing from being fed into a large language model, but I have decided to do that now. I put my best polished work on there.

Medium encourages one to work hard on their articles, which is good, and the financial incentive does work as a carrot on a stick to work harder at carefully crafting my articles, especially when submitting to a publication (magazine) on there. The editors of publications I have got feedback from have been really helpful in me improving my writing.

I don't think it is fair that A.I. companies are just hoovering everyone's content off the Internet to train their machines without asking permission or compensating authors for it. Especially as these companies are for-profit. Using people's hard work to make money, without acknowledging them or sharing any of the profits with the artists whose work they've used is wrong.

Another thing that concerns me, is if enough of your content is fed into the machines, they can start to mimic your style. And that could be used by people wanting to market and promote stuff, (stuff you might not agree with), and to create propaganda, and deep fakes. That gives me the creeps. We are entering a world were noone will know what is true anymore. People will be smeared by deep fakes that look real, and those who are not victims of deep fakes will claim to be, when something true is reported about them that they don't want people to know. It is a very disturbing and troubling world we are heading towards. One were critical thinking will be invaluable. 

The sad thing is we are all conditioned to believe what we see on a screen. So one is going to have to be very careful about what they trust in the future. Now in fact, the future is already here.

I am about to study A.I. for the next module on this degree. I am not sure I am well enough to work in an office again, or do long hours, or if I want to work for companies that steal people's data to make money. I am hoping to make a livelihood with writing, as that's where I feel passion when it comes to making a living. But it won't hurt to learn about how A.I. and machine learning works, and I also may be able to make a living writing articles about it in the future. So studying this will not be a waste of my time.

Painted in acrylic. Prints available from here.

© Asoka Richie 2023 (all rights reserved)

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