feat: add AI art, ethics, and dopamine blog post

posts/ai-art-ethics-and-dopamine.md

@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+---
+title: "AI Art, Ethics, and the Dopamine Tax"
+date: "2026-04-02"
+summary: "An honest reckoning with my one vice, why I can't quit it, and whether the good I try to put into the world counts for anything."
+---
+
+Okay so. I've written before about [where I stand on AI ethics](/post/ai-bigots-and-media), and I'm not going to walk any of that back. Data sourced without artist consent. Environmental costs. Underpaid labellers doing genuinely traumatic work. I believe all of that. I believe it *deeply*.
+
+But I use AI to generate images of myself. And I want to be honest about why.
+
+## The Dopamine Problem
+
+[I've written about my brain before.](/post/living-with-mental-illness) ADHD. Depression. Schizophrenia. A handful of other things that all interact in fun and exciting ways. The short version: my brain has a *broken* relationship with dopamine.
+
+The reward signals other people get for free? I don't get those. The small glow of finishing something. The warm buzz of a nice afternoon. Simple joy. My brain charges me extra for all of it. Constantly.
+
+But there's another layer I haven't talked about as publicly: I have a BPD diagnosis. And one of the things that comes with that is that emotions don't land at normal intensity for me. They land at about 10x. Negative things feel catastrophic. But positive things? When they're *good*, they're *really* good. Like, genuinely euphoric. Joy doesn't arrive quietly for me, it arrives like a wave.
+
+So when I find something that reliably produces genuine happiness? That matters. That matters a lot.
+
+> Finding a reliable source of joy, when your brain chemistry makes joy genuinely hard to come by, is not a small thing.
+
+What I've found is what my friends and I call "Naomi art." Images of a character that looks like me. Wavy brown hair, blue eyes, fangs, always barefoot. Rendered in an art style I love. There is something specifically and powerfully good about seeing yourself depicted beautifully. Not in a photograph. Not in a mirror. In *art*.
+
+I am a transgender woman. I spent a long time not seeing myself clearly, or seeing myself in ways that didn't match how I understood myself at all. Past-me would have found these images incomprehensible. Present-me finds them genuinely joyful. That joy is not nothing! When joy is something you have to budget carefully, you *really* notice when you've found a reliable source of it. And when your emotions run hot, the good stuff hits hard~
+
+## The Ethical Weight
+
+Okay but none of the above makes the technology less ethically messy. lol.
+
+I've laid out my full thinking on this [in a previous post](/post/ai-bigots-and-media), so I won't re-litigate the whole thing here. The short version: the harms are real, the corporations building and profiting from this technology carry the most responsibility, and there is a meaningful difference between private personal use and replacing human labour in a commercial pipeline.
+
+I've looked for a clean way out of my own complicity and I haven't found one. The technology exists. I use it. That makes me complicit in a system I have genuine objections to, and I think being *honest* about that matters more than pretending it doesn't.
+
+## What I Try to Do Instead
+
+I cannot fix the AI industry from my living room. What I can do is try to put enough good into the world that the scales tip, even a little, in the right direction.
+
+I work at freeCodeCamp, which has helped millions of people access free technical education. I run my own technology company with an explicit focus on inclusive, ethical, and sustainable software. I mentor people who are trying to break into tech without the advantages that made it easier for others. I build community tools. I write about things people don't usually talk about openly.
+
+[I've also written about how I actually use AI in my work](/post/ai-assistant-for-work-and-wellbeing) — not just for art, but as a genuine part of how I manage my health, my schedule, and three jobs at once. That post gets into the details of what that actually looks like in practice. It's not uncomplicated. But it's honest.
+
+I'm not listing these things to pat myself on the back, I promise! I'm listing them because I think about the *balance*. A lot. Whether the good I try to do counts for anything against the ethical weight of the tools I use. Whether "I needed the dopamine and I couldn't afford to commission a human artist" is a justification that holds up.
+
+Honestly? I don't know. I don't think anyone can answer that cleanly.
+
+## What I Believe
+
+I believe the people most responsible for the harms of generative AI are the corporations that built and profit from it, not the individuals navigating an already-changed world with the tools available to them.
+
+I believe there is a meaningful difference between using AI privately, for personal joy, and using it to replace human labour in a commercial pipeline.
+
+I believe the artists whose work was scraped deserve compensation and consent, and I can't provide either of those things retroactively, but I can support policies and platforms pushing toward those outcomes.
+
+And I believe, I *hope*, that a brain that struggles to feel good, finding something that reliably makes it feel good, is not the worst thing in the world~
+
+I'm not asking for absolution. I'm asking for honesty, including from myself. This is what that looks like, from where I'm standing. 💜