As AI becomes commonplace, some Garfield County organizations and businesses begin using it for marketing and more

Generative AI is being used in multiple ways in Garfield County, from police department social media accounts to artists, businesses and in classrooms from Carbondale and New Castle. What is this new technology and what is the cost?

Artificial Intelligence, like ChatGPT, Grok, and many other AI systems aren’t intelligent in the way they’re marketed to the public as near-sentient beings. Works of fiction like Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot” commonly depict AI as sentient and capable of independent thought. In reality, generative AI was created in the early 1970s, but boomed in the early 2020s, with DALL-E, Midjourney, xAI, and more, ranging from essays to videos and photos. 

These AI models are trained on large datasets, including books like “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka and “The Odyssey” by Homer. While some of these novels were already part of the public domain, many pieces like “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris, and “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien are not. These implementations have resulted in lawsuits from the authors and Author’s Guild. 

Midjourney is using works from Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Banksy, and Vincent van Gogh. Amid Midjourney’s data set were artists as young as 6-year-old Hyan Tran’s drawing for a fundraiser for the Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2021. 

Generative AI is also used for mathematics, coding, and daily internet searches, the information isn’t always accurate and users can ask it to cite the sources it’s using, but not everyone will. AI is generally unregulated and its usage has resulted in criminal investigations in some cases.

Grok, the generative AI attached to X (formerly Twitter), created by xAI in California, owned by Elon Musk, has been used to produce pornographic images of women and children across the internet. This is currently being investigated by California Attorney General Rob Bonta. 

With the surge of generative AI use across the country and world, Garfield County residents are seeing an influx in their internet feeds, such as the Facebook pages for the Parachute Police Department, which recently used an image of the Cat in the Hat in a police uniform, and the Rifle Police Department posted a caricature AI trend on Feb. 3.

Students from Garfield County are running into generative AI through school, like James Miller Roe from Coal Ridge High School, entering junior year at the time, when he found out an essay he turned had been graded using ChatGPT. 

Some businesses in the valley are currently using generative AI and have specific reasons for it. 

Anahi Gazga from Carbondale, who runs Gazga Studio Fotografía, has used generative AI images on her business page. Gazga does event media, such as senior photos, family photos, birthdays and quinceaneras. 

Gazga works with the Spanish-speaking community in Garfield County and her answers have been translated from Spanish. 

“I practically use the available artificial intelligence tools to promote my business with an attractive image, which is fashionable right now,” Gazga wrote in text messages. “It’s basically to attract the attention of the audience.”

Gazga says she hasn’t seen a difference in the amount of business she’s been seeing. 

“The use or not of this tool has not made a big difference, since my prospects make their decision mainly based on the quality of the photographs and the work I publish,” Gazga wrote in text messages. 

While Gazga is selling her skills as a photographer, she finds AI easy to use.

“In an ideal world with plenty of time, I would do it (advertising) easily because I love photography,” Gazga wrote in text messages. “My reality today is different: I am a new mother and, in addition to being a photographer, I dedicate myself to the home. As an entrepreneurial woman, I also carry out other activities to be able to build a quiet life in this valley.”

Gazga views generative AI as a tool — not a replacement for human creativity. 

“Every day I look for practical and efficient options to create content,” Gazga wrote in text messages. “I firmly believe there is nothing wrong with using the tools that currently exist to make us known and continue to grow.”

The issue, Gazga says, is time. 

“Having a baby is very demanding and absorbs everything from me,” Gazga wrote in text messages. “I’m not worried about people using artificial intelligence to experiment, I think you can never match the experience of living a real photo shoot with your family, the real memories you create with them, the unrepeatable moments together, that can’t be given by AI.”

Another photographer, Jenn Cleary, who owns SoJourney photography, agrees on AI being used as a tool, though she does not use it to generate images. 

“I’m in a unique situation where I’ve rebuilt my niche and AI is in almost everything, even in Adobe Lightroom,” Cleary said. “There’s a lot of AI tools which have helped me save time and deliver a quality edit to the customer, I want to produce an image that’s as true to life as possible.”

Adobe creative software, like Lightroom, have had this technology for a while, where an object in the background could be erased and replaced with surrounding pixels or similar pixels. 

“I use AI in my editing software to take out annoying objects, like a man in a chicken suit for instance, and we’d usually have to paint over it. Now I can take out the objects and it’ll replicate something as close to the rock or tree next to it,” Cleary explained. “Because my customers want to remember each other next to a fence, not chicken-suit man.”

Cleary photographs couples’ elopements in places you wouldn’t expect – hikes up cliffs, fields, even traveling to Scotland.

Cleary holds a writing degree and currently uses ChatGPT for suggestions, but rarely copy and pastes it. 

“I don’t want to use it as a sole crutch, because I absolutely want to learn things,” Cleary said. “Building a photography business has so many facets, and I love learning from people in the group, where some love taking photos or love editing, and they hate the other one.”

Cleary says she wants to learn the machinations of her business, but not everyone does or can. 

“If you want a business, you have to learn photos, editing, consultation calls, business management, communication, and way more, and people get overwhelmed and look for quick solutions,” Cleary said. “We’re in a society of quick fixes and instant gratification, and we see this dream we have, of a business in these cases, and we think, ‘How can we get there faster?”

Cleary thinks if she doesn’t use generative AI, she’ll fall behind, but doesn’t want to replace her originality with efficiency. 

“I think bringing humanity back into what a robot wants to take,” Cleary said. “An editor told me if I wanted to use AI, he understood, and I said, ‘If I have the means, I would use his work’, because he has a human touch. He also taught me how to do the editing. AI can’t do that, because it does it for you.”

Cleary is torn between using AI because she sees the downsides of it, but she focuses on her work. 

“Every photographer has different things going on in life and they want different things for the end goal,” Cleary said. “An authentic photograph of somebody is a real thing and my clients want a particular thing.”