Raw LLM Responses

So I feel like it'd be helpful to share my experiences here. I have dyslexia and dyspraxia, which makes fine and gross motor control challenging - specifically, it takes me a lot longer than normal to learn the specific coordinated movements required for any kind of physical activity, including drawing or painting. I've always been really imaginative and creative, and (due to my dyslexia), my imagination has always been really visual. So I've had a pretty frustrating situation, where my imagination is constantly generating images, that I've struggled to translate into shapes on a page. This experience is quite different to people with physical disabilities, who have the neurological capability to adapt to using other parts of their body to create - it's my motor neurones in my brain that are the problem, not my body. Now, there is no reason in principle why I couldn't have overcome this. If I'd have been given adequate time and support in the classroom as a kid - as I was for reading and writing, which I also found really difficult - I'd have been able to learn to draw. The problem was that my art teacher at secondary school gave me a pep talk when I was about 14 (on how art was not a "doss subject" and I'd have to work really hard), that I interpreted as her way of saying I wasn't good enough, so I chose a different subject instead. In retrospect, she was probably just used to jocks doing art as an "easy option" and fell back on that little speech as a reflex - but the damage was done. I didn't get a chance to practice drawing for long. Now I'm an adult, I have way less time than I would have once had to practice draftsmanship, and so progress I make learning it is really slow, and it's frustrating. So when Midjourney was launched, I decided to give it a try. And it was amazing. It was so, so, so liberating to finally have an opportunity to generate images (I mainly used it to create mockups of screen captures, as if the novel I was writing was a film or TV series) that actually reflected what I could imagine. I was on annual leave at the time, and I went into a massive creativity binge, using concept images of characters that had lived in my head for decades to inspire me to write new scenes and chapters for my novel. It was wonderful, if a bit intense. But I have stopped using it all the same. Why? Because once I found out how exploitative and environmentally damaging the current way this technology works is, I couldn't justify it to myself. I always find it slightly frustrating how disability is often deployed rhetorically as a reason not to take important steps to address problems that harm everyone. Efforts to curb the use of plastic packaging preferred by mega-corporations are attacked because that packaging happens to make preparing food easier for disabled folks. 15 minute cities with less focus on cars are attacked because of the needs of people with limited mobility being met by cars. Efforts to critique AI image generation for stealing art from its makers and then undercutting them is attacked because it has the potential to give people like me a slightly easier time sharing my visions with others. These are vitally important considerations, but they are not reasons not to proceed with important change. Can't we find solutions that work for everyone - or if that's not possible, compromises we can all live with? I really don't like the idea of learning difficulties like mine being used to justify what AI is doing to artists. For example, I'd far prefer a world where I was free to spend the years I'd need fully concentrating on learning how to draw, without risking losing my house because I can't keep up with mortgage repayments, or (better yet) where kids aren't discouraged from learning art at school, rather than a world where a computer programme took, unacknowledged and unrewarded, the labour of others to bring my dreams into being.