Many Thoughts on AI Art

Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you write a poem and immediately burn it without ever showing it to anyone else, you’ll still have been in conversation with every poem and other piece of art you’ve ever encountered just by writing it in the first place.

Art is the language humans use to communicate feelings and experiences and beauty. Art is fundamentally about connection, whether it’s between someone who creates art and a separate person who experiences it… or even if it’s just a way to communicate more deeply with yourself. Continue reading “Many Thoughts on AI Art”

Art Is Not a Zero Sum Game

I’ve been getting quieter on here (note: this post is converted from a thread on Twitter) about AI art, because the communities I’m in clearly hate it with a raging passion.

But I love AI art. And I’m really disappointed in Uncanny Magazine’s choice to publish a whole essay calling it theft, plain and simple. Continue reading “Art Is Not a Zero Sum Game”

AI Art Doesn’t Have to Be a Culture War

The amount of absolute unfettered hate I see on here (Twitter) being spewed toward any artist who would ever use an AI program to assist them in their art is… terrifying. It makes me want to just close up shop and disappear from this corner of the internet for the next few years.

How did it somehow become okay to bully people just because they like AI art? Continue reading “AI Art Doesn’t Have to Be a Culture War”

Flowers Want to Be Free

by Mary E. Lowd

A Deep Sky Anchor Original, January 2023


“Sometimes, you hear about a dandelion managing to grow up from a crack in the concrete somewhere in the city. People who are lucky enough to find it go viral instantly with their pictures.”

The city stretches as far as I know in every direction.  Some kids at school say it covers the entire world, wrapping the globe of our planet in concrete snakes and strangling tentacles, dimpling its surface with metal and glass towers.  I don’t know if they’re right.  The websites that would tell me for sure — the good, scientific, trustworthy ones — are behind paywalls, and my parents say we can’t trust what we read on the free sites.

I know we can’t trust what we’re taught in school. Continue reading “Flowers Want to Be Free”

Pen Pals with the Tooth Fairy

by Mary E. Lowd

A Deep Sky Anchor Original, December 2022


“I lost my tooth tonight, so you could meet Santa Claus. I know you will fall in love.”

Ella didn’t like apples, but she’d been trying to wiggle her loose tooth out for an hour.  Now it was almost bedtime, and if she didn’t eat something with a big CRUNCH, then she wouldn’t get to introduce the tooth fairy to Santa Claus.  So, she took the crunchiest looking apple from the kitchen counter — one of the horrible green ones that her mother liked — and sank her teeth into its sour flesh.

Bingo.  She spat out the mouthful of apple into her palm… and her tooth too! Continue reading “Pen Pals with the Tooth Fairy”