Images — photos, paintings, designs — are not primary human expression.

Words are fundamental, dense, often objectively chosen, and the most primary way of communicating thoughts.

Asking someone to read your thoughts that you didn’t actually even think, because you’d rather save the time writing them, is profoundly disrespectful to the reader, who has to invest the same amount of time reading generated words as real ones.

Which is not to say that I think passing off generative images as one’s own work is not disrespectful. Or that extensive, unreal body sculpting or skin retouching is not — as a photographer I believe that to also often be not just unethical but immoral.

But a judgement on a retouched image is less of a burden of time.

I would likely judge someone who uses ChatGPT to communicate personally with me as harshly as I would judge them editing a photo to deliberately lie to me.

(Which is not to say that I don’t think GPTs have inherent grammatical advantages for cleaning up poorly-written text; I do think generating entirely new text is disrespectful to the reader, though)

When I think about Photoshop it is so tied in my mind to its history as an offshoot of ILM and the VFX industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop#Early_history

ILM's famous t-rex scene from Jurassic Park contains very little text/dialog, but emotional, expressive, synthetic imagery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc_i5TKdmhs

In this case the scene is not made up of "generative" images in the current definition of the term, but synthetic images generated from polygons, virtual lighting, etc. It seems that there could be artistic utility to manipulating text in a similar way.

I don’t think I mind it in explicitly artistic contexts so much, putting aside the fact that all the GPTs I have seen write in a banal, unimaginative, equivocating way that is exactly the opposite of what you want from creative dialogue.

I can see narrow uses for it in that sort of way.

But it’s being marketed as a tool for businesses to use to talk lazy crap at people who would prefer to hear from humans: it’s fundamentally a disrespectful thing in that context.

Artistically constructed images may not be primary human to human expression, but posture/silhouette is one of the most powerful human to other mammal expressions.

You can't communicate much beyond imperatives, but you can communicate those fairly strongly, even in the absence of time working on the shared vocabulary needed for the precision of words.