marrow #28 | posted 10 june 2026
i made this in like 4 hours on an empty stomach for the manifesto jam 2026 but i'm considering it a marrow post as well. "meant" to be read in the embedded love letter version but there's an html transcript below (that might not be 1:1 because it's based on the markdown draft).
photos and drawings by me. all instances of synthetic content have been omitted.
read on itch if iframe doesn't work.
i would like to not be killed with hammers for artistic choices
i've joined 4 (well, now 5) itch jams this year and all but one explicitly forbid "AI" (i hate the vagueness of the term "artificial intelligence", hence the quotes, but i'm not gonna go into it). last year i did 3, all with "AI" use forbidden (including, i thought somewhat ironically, the robotic romance jam). and obviously i followed the rules — i don't even work with the medium that much nowadays, and what's the point of jamming if you don't follow the restrictions. but that i feel the need to clarify that: oooo it miffs me.
i have a lot of bones to pick with the defining technology of the 2020s. but i also have a lot to pick with my peers' relationship to it.
ⓘ for the sake of this thingy i'm not gonna touch on environmental concerns. for one because i don't even really entertain the thought of environmental impact as the main reason my peers hate the tech, because you don't see such fervor when it comes to other cloud-based and datacenter-reliant things. this is not to dismiss that the tech industry is harmful as fuck, but to keep my focus on art and aesthetics (inb4 "all art is political" including the media it's made with, obviously). i just don't wanna be here all day explaining you can generate stuff on normal ass laptops and retreading online discourse, because the fact that said discourse eclipses all discussions of "genAI" is one of the bones i pick! call it a copout if you want, i don't care.
i suppose my first contact with synthetic images (a phrase that's really only marginally better; it serves its purpose to talk about these things that aren't drawings or photographs etc but purely images) was with deep dream, but it was when artbreeder entered my radar in 2020 that i was truly smitten. it was the "name one thing in this photo" era (that tweet is actually from 2019, but when i saw it i don't think i was aware of how it was made, or that i could create more of that). i found the indeterminacy captivating. the model was really good at creating photorealistic textures and lighting (artbreeder uses biggan, trained on imagenet, which is all photography) but couldn't resolve them into concrete objects, it couldn't give them meaning, as it were. those two characteristics made it really unique when compared to painting: photorealism is a very difficult technique, and the human brain and hands are very good at resolving things. painting in imitation of these earlier images is tough, and i found it a delicious exercise, something i did in tandem with manipulating the images themselves.
as image generating models changed (i hesitate to say evolved, for it implies some linear progress) from secret horses to fairly high fidelity with fucked up hands to just fairly high fidelity, that indeterminacy was phased out as undesirable [by whom?]. the idiosyncratic artbreeder sliders replaced with text-to-image, prompt engineering. the machine became a tool to wrangle and bend to your exact desires, instead of an interface to the latent space. that's sorta of what my bachelor's thesis was about btw. the uniqueness of the medium was lost, and sludge won (i avoid slop here because i'm tired of it but also because i've been using sludge to describe this sort of homogenous aesthetic for ages).
well. sort of. the previous models (well, and images) still exist. the legacy artbreeder interface is still up, if a little convoluted to access. i managed to get the delightfully crusty and open source ganbreeder working locally on my laptop. these visuals that captivate me so much are still extant, and i can still use them for my projects yay. except. well, the mood has shifted.
i started by talking about jams here on itch. i understand why jams are no-AI: it's in part the dni effect (due to the techs' association with right wing chuds), in part taste (the mainstream uses of the techs are fucking ugly), in part fair play (generating assets is faster than making them by hand etc).
the last point i think is interesting, it ties to stan wixbuster's manifesto, shut up about how much you hate making games: generative tools allow individuals to make things in a volume and level of polish otherwise impossible to achieve. and that's like. kinda based and awesome actually (i think it's cool when people have tools to make stuff, i don't have to like what they make) but ☝ when paired with "this belief, unconscious or not, that 'videogames' are entirely analogous to 'games industry products'"
, it creates this scenario where the specific aesthetics that already "work" for The Industry are incentivized in detriment of anything that could be read as "amateurish".
when the organizers of the toxic yuri vn jam say "If you personally don't think you're very good at a particular artistic endeavor (e.g., art, music, writing), we would still rather see your best and most sincere attempt than generated assets"
, that's what they're speaking / working against. homogenization of standards and aesthetics, the expectation of professional polish from a six-week jam. this explicitly lowers the barrier of entry: just make something, starting where you are.
but ughhhh!! i can't help but roll my eyes a bit whenever i see the no-AI rule!!
i'm not saying the synthetic images I'm interested in are Purer than the homogenous polished sludge, and so I should be allowed to use them in jams. what i'm saying is that i wish generative images, audio, video (and sure, text) were seen as media with creative value!! choosing to generate music vs make it on beepbox vs record it from acoustic guitar can be a meaningful creative decision, and it really pains me that we (let's say generally progressive artists) have resigned ourselves to leaving synthetic media to idk the musklings. since when do we all believe in the sanctity of copyright and the immortal human soul?
when i used ganbreeder images for like an animal yes, i kinda just wanted an excuse to use them since i had the local setup going. but i also chose the medium because it's a depiction of robotic imagination — in this literal sense of "images made by an algorithm" and the fact they look like the fuzzy incomplete images in our minds.
i don't want my robot masturbation vn to be surrounded exclusively by thin pale women clicker games in the "AI graphics" tag! i wanna see fucked up weird images from "obsolete" models being used in fun and experimental ways! i wanna know what people can come up with when the medium is treated not just as a novelty or a way to maximize anime women output! i wanna see images and listen to music no human would intentionally make! and i want people to chill the fuck out about "AI" so we can do all of this without feeling like fellow artists are gonna come for our heads, without AI disclosures feeling like a liability instead of a neutral tag like "godot" or "pixel graphics"...