I'm not sure if generative AI is 100% inevitable, but the technology keeps developing at breakneck speed and poses unprecedented impacts to various aspects of the environment and society, including the realm of creativity, an aspect that make humans unique. As a digital gardener who pursues transparency in creative process and with the the escalation of public discourse on AI, I sense the necessity and responsibility to address how AI is used across my works and thinking.

This garden adopts a clear rule: thematic / creative / editorial approach and art / text execution are solely done by, and should be only done by me, and other real-life humans if the project is a collaborative effort. No generative AI tools, e.g. ChatGPT and MidJourney, can get involved in the following activities, including but not limited to:

  • Initial brainstorming session for idea, themes and seedling questions for an art project / a piece of writing, which I need to have specific ideas / themes first
  • Development of art project / writing ideas
  • Development of conceptual framework
  • Development of artistic perspective
  • Gathering textual, conceptual, and visual inspiration
  • All production of visual and verbal materials, including but not limited to street photography, illustration, writing (e.g. field notes and deep dives), and zine-making
  • Production of social media graphics, videos, and captions
  • The design (verbal and visual elements) of this digital garden website

The use of generative AI is restricted to the following activities:

  • Title refinement for SEO optimization of a piece of writing
  • Non-sycophantic assessment and iterative co-anaylsis / sparring of a human-created first draft / idea pool / seedling questions in terms of the following aspects:
    • Level of originality / cliché
    • Effectiveness on discussing the theme the artwork attempts to address
    • Feasibility on an art project idea
    • The workflow: I come up with an idea / draft, the AI tool assess the quality of it based on the above factors, then I choose whether to refine / change the material and how to change it. I decide the creative direction and editorial approach.
  • Objective advice on possible directions with the contemporary context of the subject and pattern recognition considered to improve the draft
  • Discussion of content strategy and tactics of the social media account

The generative AI tools this garden uses are DeepSeek (expert model for items 2 and 3) and Perplexity. From 2026 July 1 onwards, any human-AI conversations that is related to zine project development will be archived whenever possible in the digital garden for public reference and critique.

With generative AI's sycophantic / hallucinating nature, its response being a result of complex calculations of probability and mathematics, its fluency not automatically meaning logical, and significant environmental and labour cost, I fully understand my complicity as a generative AI user and strive to limit the use to the above listed activities in my works. I limit its role to an intellectual sparring partner who has a vast database, never needs to rest and can catch up with my thinking / working speed when I'm fully immersed in a project, which helps ease anxiety on it. Nevertheless, I will need to learn to tolerate the anxiety for long-term mental wellbeing, which the mental capacity needs time to be developed. Generative AI is a double-edged sword, where one's confidence towards their ideas can be inflated if the user does not pay enough concentration and skepticism during the AI conversation.

For the trajectory of the thoughts on the AI usage, please refer to the below 2 articles that were written in 2023 and 2024.

AI ‘street photography’ and street photography (2023)

New frontiers, same essence: how AI will change the design process (2024)

Note: the digital garden's rule is subject to change in order to reflect the workflow as transparently as possible, particularly in the context where creative process is messier than the documentation of it.