AI Position Statement

Human Artistry First: Pinch River's Position on AI

Let’s talk about Artificial Intelligence.

If you’ve been looking around the internet lately, you'll know AI is impossible to ignore. Generative AI is flooding the world with photography, paintings, illustrations, poetry, songs, and don't even get me started on all the bad graphic design. Sadly most people don't even care how these things came into existence because it's convenient, fast and it's free. But the one thing it's not, is human and because of that it doesn't have soul. It cannot create from lived experience, it cannot tell you why it made the art. There is no story to AI generated art - that will always remain a truly human input.

I want to be clear though: I don’t hate AI. I think it’s an incredible technological milestone. When used ethically as an assistant—to help automate boring administrative tasks, organise workflows, or act as a digital sounding board—it has a legitimate place in today’s society.

But there is a massive difference between AI as an assistant and AI as an appropriator.

As a result of Meta's announcement regarding upcoming policy changes that it's rolling out on 20 November, 2026 I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and what I found shocked me to the core. As far back as 2007 Meta and other tech companies, including OpenAI, Midjourney, Google and Anthropic, have been scraping websites across the internet, hoovering up generations of human artistry without consent, without compensation, and without credit. They hide behind the legal shield of 'fair use', but let’s call it what it is: it's corporate theft. They are harvesting human expression to build commercial products designed to mimic and dilute the very culture they stole from.

I recently watched a piece by Fuzz Culture called 'AI Is Attacking Artists. Here’s How You Fight Back'. While he was talking about the music industry, every single word resonated deeply with how I view visual art. He pointed out that we are entering an era of infinite, hyper-optimised, automated content—endless polished graphics, images, and text. But AI doesn't actually create anything; it imitates. It pulls from past data points to create a statistical echo of what already exists. It pulls from human made art!

As a visual artist, my work doesn't come from a database. It comes from a lifetime of lived human experiences. It comes from specific context: the landscapes I've walked through, the Australian light at golden hour, personal experiences, memories, and even the beautiful flaws and mistakes made when my hand slips with a brush. That is stuff a machine cannot replicate, because a machine cannot feel. It can output a picture in seconds, but it can never tell you why it made it, because it has no intent.

My process, my perspective, and my human imperfections are the heart of the Pinch River brand.

Because tech companies refuse to respect the boundaries of independent creators, I have to protect my work... yes, can you believe it, the onus is on the artist to protect their work! This just adds so much more work for us, just for the privilege of showing up online. Moving forward, I am implementing digital tools like Glaze and Nightshade across the platforms I use. These are invisible, pixel-level shields designed to confuse and disrupt AI scrapers if they try to look at my art without permission. It doesn’t change what you see as a human visitor, but it protects my intellectual property from being digested by a black-box algorithm. Frustratingly, before 20 Novmeber, 2026 I will also have to switch my social media account from a Business Account to Personal Account, to stop Meta from linking to my website and stealing my work to train its AI, but I encourage you to keep following on social media, because at the heart of what social media was initially intended for is connection. 

In a world that is quickly becoming flooded with automated, soulless fakes, I believe that real, human-made art is going to hit harder than ever.

Thank you for supporting independent, human artistry. Thank you for supporting Pinch River.