The Democratisation Paradox: What History Teaches Us About AI

Every technological revolution has triggered waves of anxiety about the obsolescence of human skills and professions. The current fears that AI will replace artists, eliminate writing jobs, render illustrators obsolete, and devalue creative work follow a well-established historical pattern that’s worth examining critically. The Democratisation Paradox When photography emerged in the 19th century, painters predicted the death of portraiture. When home cameras became accessible, professional photographers feared obsolescence. When smartphones put cameras in everyone’s pockets, the same concerns resurfaced 1 2 . Yet professional photography hasn’t vanished—it’s evolved. What actually occurred was a democratisation of image creation, while simultaneously elevating the appreciation for truly skilled work 3 . ...

March 23, 2025 · 9 min · 1811 words · Sam McLeod

SDXL LoRA Training

A talk I gave to some peers on creating your own SDXL LoRA models from my tinkering around over the last few weeks. ...

October 30, 2023 · 1 min · 37 words · Sam McLeod

DALL·E 2 - Selected works

Over the past month I’ve been playing with OpenAI’s DALL·E 2, below are some of the interesting images I’ve generated. “DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.” “A renaissance oil painting of two developers arguing over which javascript framework is the worst” “A Ralph Steadman painting of 7 cats sitting on a fence, and one raven” ...

July 8, 2022 · 4 min · 751 words · Sam McLeod