Images — photos, paintings, designs — are not primary human expression.

Words are fundamental, dense, often objectively chosen, and the most primary way of communicating thoughts.

Asking someone to read your thoughts that you didn’t actually even think, because you’d rather save the time writing them, is profoundly disrespectful to the reader, who has to invest the same amount of time reading generated words as real ones.

Which is not to say that I think passing off generative images as one’s own work is not disrespectful. Or that extensive, unreal body sculpting or skin retouching is not — as a photographer I believe that to also often be not just unethical but immoral.

But a judgement on a retouched image is less of a burden of time.

I would likely judge someone who uses ChatGPT to communicate personally with me as harshly as I would judge them editing a photo to deliberately lie to me.

(Which is not to say that I don’t think GPTs have inherent grammatical advantages for cleaning up poorly-written text; I do think generating entirely new text is disrespectful to the reader, though)