Cameras and Photography Explained

I know you’re all waiting for my site refreshes and the launch of byThom MAX. 

MAX is coming, but a funny thing happened along the way.

As you probably know, my sites have thousands of pages on them, many (particularly news) dating back 15 or more years. Coupled with my wanting to refresh most of my content with editing, extension, and better wording, I took on a massive job. Really massive. Including rebuilding the sites from scratch. 

Turns out I didn’t have to do that last bit. 

I got so frustrated with a continuing problem using my old commercial site software that I asked my AI a question recently. My site structure, style, and content live in a proprietary file type. I asked my AI if it could understand that file. Turns out that everything had been so well created that it did. Everything from structure to design to my words and images. During our exploration together, the AI discovered some bugs in my current software, but didn’t find any deficiencies or masking in the data structures. So first task: suck up all that information and put it in a file I own and manage. Second task, build an app that uses that file. 

Today you can see (or actually, not see) the result. I say “not see” because I’m keeping the basic site look and structures intact. But what’s managing that is completely new.

The mothballed sansmirror.com site has now been completely republished using my own software. It looks pretty much the same as it used to. Except if you look closely. When you do you’ll notice some things. Things people have been asking me about for years and I never got around to doing. For instance, the last thing on the top menu bar is a search icon. Click that and you’ll be presented a search box that does a search of the entire site and lists out all the articles with your search request in it, showing an excerpt around the found text. This search doesn’t actually touch the usual Web search services. Instead it uses the data file for the site. Your searches aren't tracked by anyone.

Here’s another thing people have been asking me for (I used to do it, but then the commercial software I was using broke due to a macOS update and the developer never fixed it): every time I post any new article on sites handled by my new application, it generates a short summary and posts that to my XTwitter account (@bythom). This goes beyond the RSS notifications that have been in the News/Views section for years. While I’m not a fan of XTwitter, it’s currently the best way to broadcast a short update note widely.

Try out how all the new stuff works. Go to sansmirror.com, click the search icon in the menu bar, and type Nikon Z8. You’ll get more than fifty hits on that. All result in live links you can further investigate. 

The above is now true of dslrbodies.com, too, as I’ve updated it using the same application I wrote. I’ve applied the same technique and updates to it. So take a visit on dslrbodies, do a search, browse around, and enjoy the new styles in places. There’s even a new article about what’s still available in the News/Views section.

But that’s not all. You’ve all been asking for the date of the article creation or modification at the top of the page, not the bottom. Yep, that’s been added to sansmirror and dslrbodies, too. Indeed, there are a ton of things in my new application that I’ve built that I’m not going to waste my time on adding to the sansmirror site because you will really want those on dslrbodies.com, zsystemuser.com, and bythom.com. Don’t worry, you’ll be getting these new things soon. The log-jam is about to break. I’m doing this site by site. I still have a little more testing to do on sansmirror and dslrbodies to make sure everything is being done correctly, but once I’ve performed that testing then I’ll work on updating bythom.com, and then add some really snazzy updates for zsystemuser.com. No data will be harmed in the process.

I’ve gone a bit insane with this change of direction. The tool I used for over 15 years has been completely re-written, by me, from scratch, in a language that didn’t exist when that original tool was built. With my AI’s help, my new tool also understands all the structure, style, and content I’ve ever created, and moreover, I can use a chat engine directly to do a lot of the work (“add a light blue bar behind all Heading 2 elements using the site’s primary color so that headings stand out from the text better” via MCP). Yep, that works. You can see it in action on sansmirror and dslrbodies already (along with new site-wide styles for block quotes and other site elements). 

So between now and the end of the year, the existing sites will pretty much look the same and have the same content, only they’ll all be controlled from a different app, a lot of content will have been refreshed and re-imagined, and I’ll probably be a lot less frustrated and publishing more often. Plus you’ll find lots of interesting surprises as you start moving through my sites in the future. Search, more consistent styling, better organization, rating widgets, and more.

Wait, what, better organization? Yes, and this starts with mobile. With the previous site software on phones the menus became a scrolling monster. With my new app in charge, that changes to a simpler two-level pop-up when you tap the hamburger menu icon. In essence, I’ve been able to take a once popular commercial product, rewrite it, add all the features that were never done by the original creator, fixed all the known bugs (!), all while keeping the actual structure, content, and CSS styling intact. 

What I’ve done is not a restoration. It’s a complete restomod. The good things are all still there. The infrastructure is better, and there’s new goodies everywhere I’m looking forward to exploit. I’m very happy with how this is turning out. One benefit of doing things this way is that it preserves site filenames and structure, meaning that news archives that date back well more than a decade are all being preserved.

Timetable:

• sansmirror — Complete, all 2235 pages. Now running completely on the new software. Missing links have been fixed or removed. A few remaining bits that should have been cleaned up earlier (e.g. sidebars you couldn’t see) are now gone. This site was my proof that the experiment with the new application worked, as the content is now all static (i.e., not updated). 
• dslrbodies — Complete, all 1945 pages. I updated some styles, removed bad links, and any other issue I noticed. I even added a new News/Views article about the current state of buying new DSLR bodies and F-mount lenses. I should point out that I’ve got a lot of even older material (1999 to 2010) that I hope to eventually get re-added to this site, but obviously this has a low priority compared to my other projects in progress. My long-term goal is to make dslrbodies “complete,” at least in terms of my coverage of Nikon DSLRs.
• byThom — Goal is to have this done by Thanksgiving. There’s a bit more going on with that site, as new articles, rewritten articles, and some slight structure shuffling is involved. 
• zsystemuser — Goal is to have this done by Christmas. This will be the most aggressive update, as there have been a lot of changes I’ve wanted to make to that site to make it more useful and to be more complete. 

I’m pretty sure I can hit those dates, and then I can kick off the new year with the new goodies I’ve been promising (and continue to create and refine in the background).

Be sure to let me know if you see any site anomalies on sansmirror or dslrbodies. Also, if you have any specific request for these four sites that I didn’t mention above, let me know, as now that I have my own application (NewBox), I might be able to change something on the fly.

For the last two weeks I’ve been barraged by people asking me to comment on the appearance of the ArtCraft clones of Adobe and Microsoft products. Whatever I have to say about them, though, will pale against the what both users and courts will eventually say about the clones. 

My first take is this: the (now) team behind this effort is sure good at storytelling and marketing. I’m also intrigued by the “Made by Artists, for Artists” tag line given that it really should read “Copied by AI, for AI users.” I’m not being coy with that switch: if you hit the Pricing link you find “Your subscription helps keep ArtCraft free and open for everyone.” Say what?

Given the scope of the project—copy all Adobe and Microsoft apps, with Autodesk next in the queue—putting ArtCraft all together took a pretty large up-front cash and time commitment. I’ve vibe coded with Claude for awhile now, and getting the big models to do this much work probably cost in the thousands of dollars a month, possibly far more if it was done agentically using API credits. Someone is going to have to pay that investment back, and it seems that ArtCraft has picked a near-same model for that as Adobe: subscriptions that come with AI use credits. 

Most of the questions I received have had to do with how legitimate the ArtCraft programs are. Well, note that they are all labeled either as “Early Alpha” or “In Development,” with no definition of what that means. Historically, Alpha means not feature complete, and In Development has no agreed upon meaning. Since ArtCraft is creating true clones of products, I also wonder how they’re doing that without breaking a license agreement they must have agreed to at some point. Section 17 of Adobe’s onerous license agreement uses the words “We…don’t allow you to recreate or attempt to recreate our products.” We don’t even have to go to Copyright law—which has a long history of dealing with software copies—to find the likely thing that Adobe’s lawyers are probably working up at the moment in order to stop ArtCraft. 

The back-story that keeps getting promoted about ArtCraft also seems disingenuous at best: “[Adobe] charged me the ‘cancellation fee’ on multiple occasions and I’ve hated them ever since.” Founder Brandon Thomas almost always emphasizes doing something for users, but doesn’t point out that such a large project will need money to keep going, and that will only occur via subscription. 

I was amused in playing with their In Development products to find that they aren’t just cloning UI, but they appear to be cloning bugs and limitations, too. In ArtCraft’s version of Microsoft Word, for instance, you’ll find the same 2GB file size limitation (due to use of 32-bit memory, not 64-bit found on modern CPUs), as well as one well-known, never fixed bug. Both those things were reasons why I moved from using Word for creating my books ;~).

While I might seem negative in my consideration here, there are some very positive bits to consider. The first is OS parity. Because these products are being developed in Rust (a language) that runs in almost any environment, suddenly we have a Lightroom look/work-alike that can run in Linux and even in a Web Browser tab. The other positive thing is that the apps are all OpenSource and available on ArtCraft’s GitHub to download and modify on your own. 

It’s instructive that the ArtCraft GitHub promotes a different “story” than what’s being discussed in the photography sites. Instead of cloning Adobe, there’s a clear identity statement: “ArtCraft is the IDE for interactive AI image and video creation.” IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. If you go to app.getartcraft.com I believe you'll see what Thomas actually was trying to create. But if you’re going to create AI-generated images and videos, you also need something to edit and modify them. And you'll need AI subscriptions or a need to be running a local model yourself.

My biggest problem is that I don’t know that I can count on ArtCraft. Nothing quite seems finished, there are gaps (can’t read Nikon High Efficiency raw, for example), and there’s the legality problem that will only get addressed once Adobe and Microsoft decide how they’re going to handle this cloning. 

Meanwhile there’s an interesting dynamic going on in most of the emails I’ve been getting: the same people who would be enraged if someone (or AI) copied their images are essentially saying that they want to use something that’s a copy. In other words, their real complaint is about the money they pay Adobe. My response would be: if you’re not getting value back for the money you paid, sure, look for another solution, but are you sure you want to encourage copying?

I find my own stance on things being challenged some by ArtCraft. AI is definitely a tool that allows us to do things that we couldn’t do before (e.g. clone an existing program). However, there’s this persistent issue with AI use that keeps arising: AI model makers have been sucking up all human knowledge and patterns, ignoring intellectual property and ethical standards along the way, all in order to build a Goliath that can live among the other tech Goliaths. There’s money chasing money going on here, and I’m getting more than a little peeved at that as an all-encompassing life philosophy. I was never a fan of Venture Capital as a funding source and have watched that corrupt what were good ideas and potential products. 

I am a fan of building things that solve user problems and expand user knowledge. And yes, I charge for those things, otherwise I wouldn’t have the time to create them. But it’s not the pursuit of money that drives me, it’s doing what I’m doing better and better for more and more customers that really drives me. And that’s exactly where I can’t quite position ArtCraft yet. They claim to be trying to free the artist. But I don’t see how they do that long-term without money getting involved somehow, particularly once they have to hire lawyers to try to protect what they’ve already done. And once money starts talking…

My basic advice is this: try the ArtCraft (and other emerging clones) if you’d like. But I don’t think you can count on them. I wouldn’t, for instance, drop my Adobe subscription just because LightCraft seems to do much (or most) of what Lightroom does. There are real risks involved in doing that. Thing is, I saw Lightroom as a risk when it first appeared, too. That’s why I’ve kept my photos structured, stored, and backed up in the same heirarchical file system I first created in the 1990’s. If I lose access to a photo, it’s my fault, not some software program’s fault or that I’ve been locked out of modifying it because a subscription lapsed. 

Over my now 50-year course of dealing with ever-changing software, I learned one thing fairly early on: you need to control your data, not let someone else do it. You need to be diligent about moving data forward to new storage and sometimes file types. Programs that “help you” create and organize your data come and go. Some have tortoise-like lifespans (i.e. long), while some are fleeting butterflies (i.e. short-lived). 

As many of you know, I’ve been on the fence about continuing to recommend Lightroom (see Recommended Mac Software). Adobe created a solid product over time, but it’s now showing its age while the monthly tithe is annoying for what you get in terms of long-term value. It’s clear to me that AI is changing how people browse and find images, too, even outside Lightroom, so the whole catalog-develop approach may be nearing its end.

What I see is that we’re at another fork in the road. We’ve had several big forks in my 50 years on both sides of the software business. AI is creating another one. How that plays out is unclear at the moment. However, after each forking there’s been a small handful of Big Winners and a great number of Large Losers. 

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Bonus coverage: Adobe and Microsoft are the two first targets of ArtCraft. Those are not identical targets. I’d argue that Microsoft has completely lost the way with Office. Features seem to go away at the same rate that toolbars get added. Performance sucks. The Officeness (as opposed to individual apps) never evolved. Word never made it to 64-bit memory. Microsoft Word 2.0, which was an early DOS product, had arguably better features and performance than the current version. Microsoft has consistently gone for lowest-common-denominator choices over making a better product. Frankly, they deserve to be cloned out of existence given their poor stewardship of their product.

I can’t really say the same for Adobe. While I don’t always agree with where they steer their ships and there have been some culdesacs they got themselves into (remember 3D in Photoshop?), Adobe seems to be quick to move to new technology (OS changes, AI, etc.), and has continually expanded (most of) their products in ways that a fair number of users find useful. I was worried when they went to subscriptions that they would get lazier about keeping their products current, but that hasn’t seemed to happen. 

The camera makers weren’t ready for smartphones (again). 

That’s right, the smart folk in Tokyo have once again not been ready for something that was extremely predictable in the phone market. What did they miss this time? The inevitable sales plateau for phones, particularly given the cost increases for the latest models as the smartphone makers try to cram several kitchen sinks into their camera slabs.

Depending upon whose surveys you believe, smartphone unit volume is anywhere from flat (0% growth) to 7% growth over the last two years. Smartphones have reached the top of the growth sigmoid. Many makers now are seeing flat or even declining unit volumes. Moreover, when you couple that with another bit, you'll see where the camera makers weren’t ready to exploit this.

Think about smartphones for a moment. They work incredibly well as a phone. Designs for the last five years using 4G or 5G communications are way more than adequate for virtually everything smartphones do except for two things: photos and AI. You wouldn’t need a new phone unless you broke yours if all you’re doing is phoning, interneting, and entertaining yourself with streams from afar. Yet virtually every smartphone maker is dropping full new product lines of phones every 12 months still. And what is being updated that justifies you paying US$2000+ for a new phone? Better camera, more AI capabilities. 

But as the smartphone makers update their camera systems, they’re adding higher cost components: bigger image sensors, more image sensors, advanced lenses (IS, apertures, periscope telephoto, etc.). And the bill of materials costs for that keep going up, so, in turn the smartphones are pricing themselves out of having people upgrade every year. It’s a classic Silicon Valley attempt “to make a wave on the sigmoid plateau” to keep growing. I was looking at one estimated bill of materials for the iPhone 17 recently, and the camera component costs were responsible for about 25% of the retail price (and 20% of Apple’s actual component costs). Those percentages will be lower for the iPhone 18, as CPU and memory costs have skyrocketed as Apple tries to embue more space and speed for AI into the latest units, but still, look at how much the smartphone companies are touting that the camera portion of the phone is one of the key reasons why you should upgrade to a new one. “Hey, we have apertures now…” 

I’m pretty sure that the camera makers could make a dedicated camera that beats the smartphone photo capabilities and sell the result for under US$1000. User problem solved: they want a better camera but don’t want to pay for a new US$2000 phone every year to get that. Buying a US$800 camera would save people money while giving them better results and more control. Their phones would still work fine for everything else. (Yes, I’m being loose with the numbers here, but I’m trying to illustrate the overall point, so I need to generalize some.)

So where are those <US$1000 dedicated cameras that would allow smartphone users to keep their current phone instead of paying US$2000 a year to get a camera upgrade? Oh, and how would those missing dedicated cameras communicate better with the phone so that they didn’t cripple the social media use these people want? Tokyo doesn’t know. They’re so gun shy right now that they’re chasing small niches they think might keep them afloat. 

It’s almost as if the camera makers want to be bit players now. I don’t see the future in that. But then again, Sony just introduced a US$6000 Walkman, so maybe that’s the future of cameras: low volume but gold plated.

Agentic AI is becoming somewhat a norm. Instead of you doing something directly, you tell your agent to do it and the thing is done indirectly. This is both useful and dangerous. However, it doesn’t stop applications from still being important.

Let’s begin with that last sentence. The notion that applications (and application-producing companies, such as Adobe) will go away is dead wrong. At least in the short- to mid-term. There’s too much built up capability and performance in them for anyone to give up to a server farm somewhere to reproduce from scratch. It’s just not going to happen that you suddenly have a full AI replacement for Photoshop (or most other deep, broad applications). I’ll demonstrate that later in the article.

To understand AI today you need to also understand the dicotomy between centralized and decentralized computation and data. The big tech companies will always push centralization, mostly because that gives them control over you. They have your data. Only they can operate on it. They control what you can and can’t do with it. They charge you for dealing with your own information ;~). We consumers, however, prefer decentralization. We want to own and control our own data and do with it what we will. We don’t want to keep paying someone else for things we can do ourselves. Mainframes were centralization. Personal computers were decentralization. 

When things are centralized, you need more communications bandwidth. When things are decentralized you need more computational power in the individual devices. We’ve been in a constant push/pull with the whole centralization issue from the very beginning of computing, but note one thing about today: billions of people (and small-to-big companies) have their own devices and (mostly) control them. Trying to tell these folk they can only use a giant mothership of a server to do anything is Orwellian, and ultimately not likely to work. You may believe that the future is dystopian due to all the dystopian media these days, but note that the central theme of most dystopian movies and television shows is that individuals rise up to change the situation. That would be you, dear reader (except for you Elon ;). 

With that out of the way, let’s talk about my thesis here. Basically that’s AI will not get rid of applications any time soon.

I have a pretty long history with AI dating back to the 1980’s, so I’ve watched how it's progressed. Currently we’re in a Silicon Valley-style Race-to-Dominate cycle with AI. Profits be damned, it’s who gets the most customers first that will ultimately win. We’ve seen how this plays out before, particularly with the so-called Internet 2.0 wave that crashed in 2000. There’s a handful of well-funded players trying to lock up users with the free-sample-now-pay-me-later approach. If you haven’t read Cory Doctorow’s Enshitification, do so now, as it will tell you what happens next.

Meanwhile, we have this media-hyped idea that AI will do everything, and you won’t need apps any more. What mainstream media hasn’t recognized yet is that those of us that employ AI (see my personal use statement, below) don’t use it that way. Most of us use AI within applications or externally to instruct applications. This is the infamous “Can you magnify that image and pull out more details?” approach that television procedurals have made famous. No one is intensely writing code and using sophisticated UI in those programs, they just press a button and something somewhere in the machine they’re looking at does the job (e.g. AI). 

I’ve been using that type of approach with Xcode (programming), Elements (Web site design), and Excel (spreadsheets) for some time now. I know what I want to do, and I know it will often take a lot of typing to do it. Indeed, that’s generally the crossover point: saying what I want done is simpler than doing it. Thus, telling an AI agent to “give this spreadsheet a heading, style it with my current style, apply my logo, check all the formulas and spelling, and make sure the column sizes are appropriate and matched wherever possible” takes me all of a few seconds to say (or type). Minutes later, my AI will have done exactly that, I’ll review that it did what I wanted, and I end up saving a fair bit of time. This is not AI doing everything (as in “from scratch, create a final document all by yourself that has columns and rows with this data and performs these operations on the data,” etc.). 

What’s happening in this AI-handoff approach is distributed processing. My local computer is running Excel, which recognizes commands and executes them, while some server somewhere (currently moved to my desktop on another computer, and sometimes living on the same laptop as I’m working on* ;~), tells Excel to do a series of things based upon its knowledge of how Excel works and what spreadsheets should look like. 

Now, you might think that’s all well and good, but what does that have to do with photography? Simple: Adobe has recently opened up their apps to agentic AI. So you could say or type “adjust the image currently opened in Photoshop so that the shadows are lifted, skin tones are kept intact, but saturation is increased some.” That’s a chain of things you’d normally do with multiple different UI controls within Photoshop. The chain and complexity can get quite large with some requests, which means that if you had tried to do this in Photoshop itself you’d have needed to know where all the appropriate controls live, how they work, how to adjust them and control for interdepencies, and so on. Generally this style of work becomes useful when it takes less time to tell the AI what to do and review what it did compared to you doing it yourself. It’s also very valuable for batch work. As in a wedding photographer instructing an AI like this: “Image A has had all my adjustments I want applied. Make all the other images in folder X match this look. Pay careful attention to keeping skin tones, colors, and background blurs consistent, apply only the level of skin smoothing and sharpening you find in Image A, and if you believe an image should be cropped, confirm the crop with me.” That would be a lot of work to do image by image by hand. But it’s easily done by AI these days, though you have to keep a careful watch over results. Think of AI as an assistant. Manage it as you would an assistant.

You might be seeing why I say that applications won’t go away any time soon. They’re a useful tool. Not just for individual users, but for AI, too. Apple seems to understand this in the way they’re approaching AI in their OS’s. It’s more agentic and specific AI agnostic, processed on device much of the time, and allows deep application integration (if the application developer integrates it). 

The more sophisticated the application—Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Excel, et.al.—the more it’s likely to stick around. Application developers become the repository for creating sophisticated specific tool actions (and interactions), AI becomes a way of instructing the tools in the applications. But even simple applications aren’t likely to go away, because by definition a simple application does one or a few thing(s) well and directly, and it’s faster for a user to just do that directly. It’s only the applications that live in the gray area in between simple and sophisticated that I’d worry about going away, as they’re not simple enough to be directly user controlled and not sophisticated enough to expose useful tools to AI.

You’ll note that I haven’t mentioned generative AI. That’s a different thing. AI is pattern-based. It was trained on patterns, it outputs patterns. The early AI application in photography was generative and generally fell into one of three categories: (1) take out recorded anomalies (e.g. noise) that doesn’t belong; (2) correct elements that are compromised (e.g. sharpen edges that have been aliased); and (3) replace or add a section of the image with pixels that reflect the rest of the image. The first two are very useful, and better than the brute force tools we used to use for noise reduction and sharpening. The third is controversial because the resulting pixels were not generated photographically. That said, on occasion I’ll use #3 on a background distraction that I couldn’t control in the field and then evaluate whether the result is likely what I would have gotten had I been able to remove the background distraction in the field. If yes, then I’ll allow it. If no, I’ll just live with the distraction. And that’s actually no different than I did in the darkroom (yes, you can add/remove things on the enlarger, but that was a hellish task, so mostly avoided).

Note that I’m writing about AI fairly narrowly here. Specifically, as it currently and is likely to apply to photography.  The whole “AI will destroy the world” doomsaying going on in mainstream media is a whole different story, and not photographic specific. I’m talking more Topaz here than ChatGPT. In other words, targeted tools versus generalized do-anything ones. Targeted AI tools are useful and aren’t going to make our best applications go away.

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* You probably want to know how I do that. I use LMStudio and an open-AI model that is appropriate for the job at hand. Both are free, but both require a large amount of local device horsepower (Mac users think M3 with 32GB RAM or better, preferably current processor and 64GB or more). As for model, dozens are available. Some are targeted at coding, some at math, some at words. I’ve got several loaded in my machines. To make a local AI work with a language, both need to support MCP (Model Control Protocol), which will probably take some geeky setup to get right, but once connected, I can type “In Project byThom MAX add a page for Flexible Picture Controls (Recipes). Populate it with my header and footer, set a Container in the middle that includes cards that I’ll populate with individual data later, so use a placeholder image and text.” When I do that in my AI, it uses the MCP connection to step Elements through all the things implied by what I typed. A minute or two later I evaluate what it did and start making small changes to the results.

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Disclosure: Does Thom (and byThom) use AI? The answer to that is a bit complicated, but let’s start with an easy point: if you’re reading something on byThom or by me, it was typed by my fingers from instructions from my brain. If you see a photograph on byThom or by me, it was taken with a camera on instructions/settings from my brain, and processed with instructions from my brain. If I were ever to use an AI-generated statement or photo on my sites, it would labeled as one. 

However, I do use AI for some work. For example, I use it to instruct XCode (for program development), Elements (for Web site design), and Excel (for spreadsheet verification and reformatting). Generally I’m doing the same things with AI I would do with a human staff: delegating a specific job to be done to my goals and specifications, and reviewing it once it is done. So when I designed my first new app (coming soon, with more following), I did a full MRD (Marketing Requirements Document), a full mockup (design shell), specified an architecture and coding approach, wrote a full manual (!), and then and only then handed off some function-creation to Claude. Upon Claude’s completion of a task, I review it. Sometimes I adjust something, sometimes I scold Claude, sometimes I accept what it did, all pretty much what I used to do with a human staff of programmers. As most programmers using AI now do, I have Markdown documents that contain the plan, concerns, testing requirements, and much more, and both Claude and I are constantly conversing in and adjusting those documents. Did I write a lot of the code for the first app I’m going to launch? No, though I did some, particularly in the UI area. Did I doublecheck everything the AI created? Absolutely. 

Finally: yes, I will use AI-controlled noise reduction and sharpening on my images at times. I’m convinced that AI does a better job than the previous brute-force tools we had for those things, without introducing new problems or incorrect/misleading information. But like any tool, I use these in moderation, not extremes.