AI Usage Acceptability Spectrum

Article • 999 Words • Artificial Intelligence • 11/19/2025

Background

People are understandably puritanical about AI usage, but I do believe that it veers into a bit of a moral highground taking that is ultimately unhelpful. I believe that it is your right to be able to abstain and detest AI usage but I do think that it is an ultimately losing battle. I think AI is a tool but that corporations will almost certainly abuse it. As for personal use, I generally think that in a non-commercial setting people should be able to do what they want as long as they don’t reproduce or share it.

In the meantime though, I hope that we’ll figure out how to compensate artists; either via paying to include them in training data or by giving them royalties by output tokens usage (we may be able to figure out input from LLM output).

At the same time, I think that we will see lots of “Made by humans” taglines as well. I think that attention to detail and total commitment to craft will be increasingly viewed as attractive and will be positively differentiated.

My Intuitions

• Centrality/Essentiality: Is the AI-generated content essential or central to the work?
  • Composability: Is the AI-generated content a part of a greater work or is the entire work AI-generated?
    • Ex: AI-generated drum pattern versus beat versus song
    • AI assistance versus complete AI generation
• Availability of Alternatives: What is the next best AI-free option? Would that reasonably have changed the work?
  • Could you have paid humans to do the same thing? Why didn’t you?
• Intentions: Was it done with the intentions of cost savings or disrespect of craft?
• Creation: Did this bring into existence something that would not have otherwise been able to be created (in a good way)?
  • I think when we empower smaller teams to be able to tackle larger projects, we will have different stories and other works that would not have otherwise been created (or greenlit) in a larger corporate environment.
• Quality of Final Output: Is it slop?
  • Wastefulness of resources/general frivolousness

Acceptability Spectrum

I think there are a few different contexts where since the goals are different, what is acceptable is different.

I have listed these in order of increasing taboo levels. You may disagree with me and that’s totally fine! As long as you can tell me why. This was somewhat inspired by Aella’s R*pe Spectrum Survey Results, but of course the subject areas are not really analogous.

Commerce and Art:

• A product marketplace uses AI into summarize user reviews and sentiment
  • This seems pretty benign to me but the style of AI generated text can make it hard to parse because the slant is usually toward positive sentiment.
• A social media influencer uses AI to generate titles or captions
  • If they copy and paste without an discernment then there’s a problem, but I don’t see a problem with using it to brainstorm/iteratively develop social media copy
• An Etsy seller uses an AI model to generate a crochet or knit pattern from a picture of a sweater, but they make it themselves
• An anime studio uses AI for lip flaps
  • This isn’t really artistic and can really help shift focus onto more meaningful tasks
• A movie studio uses AI to digitally age or de-age an actor
  • You could use prosthetics but these can be expensive and time-consuming
• A movie studio digitally alters dialogue/speech
  • This could maybe be done with an impressionist but unlikely
  • ‘The Brutalist’ Editor Says Filmmakers Used AI Tools To Enhance Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian Dialogue
• A manhwa artist uses AI to create background sketches, but they color it themselves
• An artist uses an AI created synthesizer to make a synth lead
• An indie game uses AI generated assets for something small like background set dressing plans
• An artist samples an AI generated loop
• A news company allows users to use AI to summarize articles
  • This seems like it could make it too easy to lose nuance
• An indie game uses AI generated live background music that’s reactive in context dependent
• A manga artist generates backgrounds with AI
• An indie game uses AI generated voices to voice their game
• An indie game uses AI generated background music
  • There is a wealth of royalty free music because the AI-generated stuff will likely be pretty generic as well.
• An artist uses AI background vocals
• An artist uses an AI generated beat
• A manga company uses AI to translate into different niche market languages
  • You should hire a translator or just let fans translate themselves
• A manga company colorizes manga with AI
  • Seems disrespectful to craft
• A professional interior designer uses AI to generate renderings for clients
  • What am I paying you for?
• An author uses an AI generated book cover
• A movie studio uses AI to generate a movie poster
• An advertising company uses AI to generate ads specifically tailored to you
  • This just seems like a massive waste of resources to me, but doesn’t cross many ethical lines for me (they already have all this data and personalize ads to use anyway)
• A restaurant/food service uses AI generated photos of food
  • Has anyone else seen restaurants using A.I to display their “food” | r/doordash
• A movie studio uses AI to use a dead actor’s likeness or voice
  • A horror beyond our comprehension
• A startup uses your old text messages so you can talk to your dead wife via an LLM chatbot
  • We should probably grieve properly and not let corporations take advantage of our emotions.

Students:

• A student uses AI to generate thesis ideas
• A student uses AI to ask ways to improve their paper
• A student uses AI to write their conclusion paragraph
• A student uses AI in their math proof
• A student uses AI in their computer science homework
  • Autocomplete versus chat is a little bit different but there is probably less editing going on here than in a paper because there is less wiggle room to change things
• A student uses AI to write their paper