10/21/2026
I don’t, and I won’t, use AI on my photos to clean up backgrounds, make photo ads, or write my text.
It’s not like I haven’t tried it out of curiosity. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never tried to see if it could whiten up a tail on a horse in winter or cleaned up the shavings on the stable floor. I have.
But the couple times I DID try it, I noticed something: the horses had changed.
And that’s because AI doesn’t just change the background. It recreates the ENTIRE image, pixel by pixel. So even if you ask it to stay the same, it doesn’t.
And in my book, that’s false advertising. Even if it looks similar, once you zoom in you start to notice the nuances. Markings have changed. Hairs have been moved around. Feather may be added. Even the shape of the faces can change.
I don’t care when people use AI for fun projects for themselves, or to create horse show flyers, or whatever else they may do that doesn’t actually require a real animal. While I don’t do it, it can be a good way to get a lot of information into a single image.
What frustrates me is that people will create AI ads of their horses for sale or at stud, and when they use AI, it’s not even a real horse. It’s a digital representation of a horse; an abstract reality of a horse. The real one was gone and was replaced by what ChatGPT thought were better pixels than the actual image. And then people oooh and ahhhh over this false representation of a horse.
I don’t want people to guess on whether my horse is real or not, so my images are real, taken by me (or a professional) with minor edits, which may include cropping, adjusting lighting, removing flies/stray hairs/poop piles/poop stains…that’s about the extent of my talent.
I’m a better writer than photographer, if I’m honest. If I like taking pictures, I love writing. Which leads me to: The Text.
The Text is just as bad. It’s all the same, as though it’s written by the same person. ChatGPT and other tools don’t seem to understand the use of some basic punctuation, paragraph structure, or tone. Every horse ad is too long and they all say almost exactly the same thing, while trying to be unique. Half of them I start to read and either (tl;dr) or get bored because I’ve already read ten like it today.
So kudos to you writers, artists, storytellers, and content creators out there who have an ounce of talent and actually create your own stuff, and even to those who don’t and hire a real person to do it for you. AI is fast, cheap (in the short term, though I suspect it will cost us greatly in the long run), and often inaccurate. You, those of you who take time to learn how to make your own stuff, are not.
One last thing: before you buy, or even go look at, any horse, run the photo through an AI filter. It has become the new fad to add feather and change the shape of horse’s faces. If you’re not buying from a well established, reputable breeder or trainer, make sure you see the horse in person first. If the seller isn’t someone you know and trust or who was recommended to you, always ask for seller recommendations. This isn’t just a rule for AI, but AI plays heavily into it and a lot of unethical sellers are enhancing photos with AI these days.
By the way, generating one AI picture takes the same amount of power as running your microwave for an hour. Remember that next time you are thinking about generating a picture just because it looks fun.
Photo: a real horse
Photo credit: me
