A few weeks ago, just for a bit of fun, I used AI and shared in a Joomla group a picture of a mate dressed up as Super Joomler! Let's be honest, it was also a bit to show off!

Bad move on my part! 

Even though it took me 30 seconds to drag and drop the image of our beloved colleague, type in a four-word prompt, copy the image and paste it into the thread, everyone thought I was some kind of AI god! 

You know the rest: ‘Can you write an article about it? (implying: you who are so talented)’ Answer: ‘Yes, of course (bragging!)’

And here I am gathering all the information to explain why and how AI should be used for images, but also for everything else. I'm questioning AI too, while I'm at it.

After a while, I had enough information to explain why Joomla site owners could use AI for both their articles and images.

Indeed, there is a significant advantage to using what is known as AI.

Whether in terms of time, energy or even creativity, AI has a lot to offer those who know how to utilize it and who need it.

The progress is spectacular, with a new, ever more powerful AI model appearing almost every day.

Image editing software and photo applications incorporate AI image editing, but AI assistance tools can also create images on demand, and everyone's reflex is to ask ChatGPT or Gemini to create an image after asking it to generate text.

And you know what? It does the job!

I was about to list all these solutions, including how to implement them in Joomla, when I felt a sense of unease rising within me.

The same unease I felt when, instead of looking for images to illustrate my website, I asked a robot to create four stylized images to represent my activities.

I saved time, and probably money, but something wasn't right: what had I lost in the process? 

In fact, on the rare occasions when I have used AI, I haven't really mastered the process: admittedly, for some images the rendering was spectacular, but rarely what I had initially imagined. A trained eye could see that it was AI, and then either I tolerated the imperfection or my frustration made me start over to achieve perfection that never materialized.

There is always that little extra soul missing that makes an object a work of art.

Well, let's say we don't need that touch that would make the work human, but the fact remains that artificial intelligence has other flaws.

AI image creation causes us to lose originality and creativity, but also skills and independence: how long will it take before I forget what I used to be able to do, now that I delegate it to a robot? Will I still know how to create when the system crashes?

AI creation tools train on our own creations, which raises issues of copyright, but also of standardization, since AI content tends to become predominant and the system trains on its own creations.

Needing more and more content for training, the trend is also to search private content, including content to which we usually deny access: emails, private clouds, social networks.

The players in this gigantic money-making machine do not hesitate to violate our right to privacy.

Do I really want to be part of this?

Let this sink in: AI is used by certain regimes and certain leaders to promote their demagogic ideas, to lie, and to seize or retain power outside of any democratic process. 

Do I really want to be like them, to betray the truth for my own interests? 

And finally, AI is an ecological disaster: a single generated image consumes as much energy as a light bulb left on for an hour, not to mention the environmental cost of storing media that may not necessarily be useful.

It was with this feeling of bitterness that I finally decided not to write an article on AI and not to lecture anyone.

But wait... what have I done?

In fact, everyone must act according to their conscience, exercising their free will and following their own interpretation and commitments. We are beings filled with feelings who must act with our own dilemmas and contradictions, and that is what it means to be human!

Let's just be human.