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When I first made this website, I didn't know what to put on the homepage, so I added a cat photo. Since artificial-intelligence (AI) image generation was so rare back then, it was novel to show off a picture generated by ThisCatDoesNotExist.com. This was back in 2020, before AI really took off — i.e., before it was cool. Fast forward to today, AI is everywhere. It's so common, that it's generally nothing more than an annoyance, pointless inferior content that would be better off not displayed. I would have no difuculty generating a considerably-higher quality AI cat picture of today, but there isn't anything unique about that anymore.
I've always been cautiously optimistic about AI, and that hasn't changed. Nevertheless, in today's age, AI-generated media is extremely overused. I always thought of it as a quick and cheap solution for when something decent-looking is needed but the quality doesn't truly matter. Instead, people are treating AI images as an equal substitute for genuine artistic material. Human artists are missing out on opportunities because some people feel that there is no difference in quality between a human-made drawing vs. a machine-made one.
I don't consider myself anti-AI, but I'm still strongly against the idea that AI-generated content is equal to human-made content. And that's not even to mention the environmental impacts that add up from the high-load computational power required to train and run AI models. So, to summarize, this has been a long-winded explanation of why I decided to show a random cat photo on this website's homepage.