Editorial of April 23, 2026
Art, Artifice and Advertising
On October 10, 2024, AllOtsego published an editorial titled “The Extravagance of AI,” in which we explored some of the benefits of artificial intelligence, but also the ways in which the increasing use of AI is negatively impacting our energy and environmental resources.
At the time, we wrote that, ChatGPT, “along with its recently conceived competitors at Google, Amazon, and Meta, is now on the leading edge of a fast-growing market, solving problems in a variety of fields from automotive to climate to research and education, with many interested companies and organizations using it for their own benefit and, it follows, their own financial success. Indeed, ChatGPT holds a massive corpus of high-quality text data—in the range of hundreds of billions of words—that allows it to generate coherent responses to a wide range of topics and in a wide range of languages and styles.”
According to a January 2025 article by Adam Zewe in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “MIT News,” AI energy usage presents a paradox, enabling significant sustainability advancements while creating massive demand for electricity and water. In summation, Zewe explained that the benefits of AI energy use include optimizing energy grids, driving efficiency in transport, and accelerating climate research. Conversely, negative impacts include massive carbon emissions from data centers, high water consumption for cooling, and strain on power grids.
There is no doubt there are advantages to AI, including advanced data analysis, increased productivity and efficiency, the use of AI-powered robots in hazardous environments, enhanced fraud detection, earlier disease detection and reduction of human error. At the same time, in addition to the massive amounts of energy and fresh water AI requires, the cost of implementation in general is high, people are displaced by automation and there are ethical concerns, among other drawbacks.
On Facebook these past few weeks, folks have been expressing their dismay at the growing use of AI to generate promotional materials for businesses, nonprofits, and local governments—fliers, social media posts, newspaper advertisements and the like—their concern being for the many artists and graphic designers whose work AI may be replacing.
This very dilemma was heralded in a piece written by Sachin Waikar in May 2025 for the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The article, titled “When AI-Generated Art Enters the Market, Consumers Win—and Artists Lose,” examines how the introduction of generative AI to a popular image platform boosted sales while squeezing out human creators.
Waikar wrote, “The results were striking: Once generative AI (GenAI) entered the market, the total number of images for sale skyrocketed, while the number of human-generated images fell dramatically. On the flip side, consumers showed a taste for the influx of AI-generated images, choosing GenAI images over human-generated ones.”
The news was not all bad. Waikar reports that total sales for the platform rose by 39 percent after AI images arrived, but purchases of non-AI images dropped. But Samuel Goldberg, an assistant professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business said, “We as a society believe that art created by humans is somehow better than art created by machines,” Goldberg notes. “So one question you might ask is whether we’re at risk of these markets being completely dominated by generative AI, squeezing humans out. That’s a real policy concern.”
But we digress. What we see happening is consumers opting to use AI to create their own promotional materials, and we think what it all boils down to is money. Money and convenience. Just as Facebook and social media have changed the evolution of news consumption and caused a shift in advertising spend that has negatively impacted newspaper revenue, our artists and graphic designers are now feeling the pinch. Believe us when we say we know it hurts. But railing against and shaming our business community, our charitable organizations and our neighbors for taking advantage of an affordable tool now readily available to them is not the answer. We recognize the temptation, and we applaud the defense of our artists, but we doubt AI is going away any time soon (nor is social media) and we need to come to terms with this.
As of now, there are no rules or regulations for AI. We hope this will change, for a variety of very good reasons. In the meantime, we have confidence that our tremendously talented creative community will meet this challenge head on successfully and will continue to move forward in spite of the changing times. After all, we are.
