AI Took My Voice, And I Want It Back

‘Let’s dive deeper’ — and other phrases I don’t dare to use anymore…

Photo by author. This is how I feel without my favourite words.

Believe it or not, I started — with a tiny eye-roll — compiling a list of phrases to avoid, just so I don’t sound like a robot when writing or creating copy for my toy photography work. It’s a fairly recent development triggered by the boom of AI generated text.

There’s a lot of debate around using generative AI for content creation. It’s quite a divisive topic — in writing, photography, tech, software development… and pretty much everything else (well, except mopping my floor).

You already know my thoughts on using Midjourney and Photoshop for my art — TL;DR: I love Midjourney for creating backgrounds for my LEGO photos, but it takes a lot of editing, twisting, and sometimes even shouting to get the result I had in mind. Photoshop’s generative fill is a miss 90% of the time, but surprisingly useful for expanding images in the other 10%.

But what about other types of content? Is it actually useful for me there, too? Well, let’s see how I use ChatGPT for my toy photography. Oh — I mean, during its better moments. Since I’m using the free version, I see it as a good friend with an English Lit major: a total genius when it’s running on GPT-4o. But when it slips back to the older free model…