I often want to include an image in my posts to give a sense of a situation. A photo communicates the most, but sometimes that's too much: some participants would rather remain anonymous. A friend suggested running pictures through an AI model to convert them into a Studio Ghibli-style cartoon, as was briefly a fad a few months ago:

House Party Dances

Letting Kids Be Outside

The model is making quite large changes, aside from just converting to a cartoon, including:

• Moving people around
• Changing posture
• Substituting clothing
• Combining multiple people into one
• Changing races
• Giving people extra hands

For my purposes, however, this is helpful, since I'm trying to illustrate the general feeling of the situation and an overly faithful cartoon could communicate identity too well.

I know that many of my friends are strongly opposed to AI-generated art, primarily for its effect on human artists. While I have mixed thoughts that I may try to write up at some point, I think this sort of usage isn't much of a grey area: I would previously have just left off the image. There isn't really a situation where I would have commissioned art for one of these posts.