How I Quit Using AI, and How You Can Too

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I know, I know. You hate me. I hate me too, so we’ve got that in common. 

But don’t worry. I’m not here to moralise (too much) or lecture or tell you that the time you used ChatGPT to check what the best restaurant in Omaha is was the worst crime against humanity.

I’m here to tell you the how, and maybe just a little of the why.

Where it all started

Let’s roll it right back to 2022. The heady days of Will Smith’s bug-eyed visage as his jaws detach like a snake and he shovels bizarre spaghetti-like goo into his gaping maw. 

I’m writing hypnosis scripts and wondering how I pair them with some sort of visual. Visuals grab attention. They’re visually arresting. They matter, in the difference between you clicking on my file or ignoring it.

I tried stock imagery, and then I felt weird about putting someone else’s face on my content. It seemed unfair to some poor woman who just posed for a sexy picture for a stock site that she might become the face of a hypnosis creator. I don’t want to share my own face, so that was a little bit of a problem. Legally, no issue. Ethically I’m unsure. 

This is a time of prehistoric AI image generation. Of low quality images. Of six-fingered, dead-eyed creatures. It felt like a novelty. A silly new tool to experiment with. I used it with little critical thought. New things come, life changes, we all move on. The horse and cart becomes the car becomes the flying spacecar (one day, maybe).

So I toss my face into an image generator and get something that is and is not me. Something that resembles me and obfuscates my identity. This is good. Helpful.

Content is released. All is well. A few people dislike the images. I brush off the criticism. There are bigger problems. Frankly, I’m a solo creator, in a world that wants to banish me and everyone else who makes hypnokink to the shadow realm. I’ll take whatever leg up I can get, and I won’t be apologetic for that. 

Art by Aleriia V

Fast forward. It’s 2025

Searching erotic hypnosis on YouTube yields a sea of what we’re now calling ‘slop’. It’s impossible to stand out. The ethical arguments have increased in volume. Every second thing I read is AI generated. I have come to hate the thumbnails, but I have no idea how to expunge them from existence. There are too many. Almost 300 files posted across multiple places. A website, videos, tweets, a game.

I always wanted to get proper, human made art. A lot of it. But the need grows, the pace of content grows. No one could keep up with what I’m putting out. Illustration is slow, I’m not slow. I work fast. How can I find an artist who can keep up?

The answer… I can’t.

So there’s your preamble. Now you’re thinking, Calia, shut the fuck up. That’s too long of an intro. Don’t you think ChatGPT could have shortened that down?

Don’t you enjoy my inane rambling?

Alright, let’s talk about how to remove AI from a lot of content.

How to remove AI (from a lot of content)

First, we’ll talk about what to replace it with.

Because art… not cheap, not easy.

My first step was to commission a Vtuber model and have it rigged. These are two separate jobs. This was… not cheap, I’ll say that again. Mostly because I’m fussy and particular, but still. It’s detailed design and illustration, followed by another person creating animation. 

I got my model, it looks great. I tried using it for videos, recording myself delivering a script to camera with the vtuber overlaid. That was… impossible. It required me to make no mistakes or to have lots of jump cuts. That meant I sounded worse, or it looked jarring. 

Not good enough. The vtuber is reserved for special occasions. That’s fine. But that was one solution dead. 

I do know that you can buy a more generic vtuber model online for a relatively low cost. I used one for a game to get a hucow character image, when I couldn’t find one anywhere else and I didn’t want to spend the full price on a commission as it was replacing something in an already released project.

On the excellent suggestion of fellow Irish creator Jockout, I commissioned art that could be used repeatedly. A character illustration with no background. 

Backgrounds are not cheap. This is a problem. Illustrating a character and a detailed scene are different skillsets. Some artists can do both well. Getting that at the scale and pace I needed, impossible.

The solution?

Well, there are a few. One is to use stock imagery. Sadly most stock sites are swimming in AI images now, but you can usually filter it out with some success. A real world image with the character art overlaid works. Well. More, it’s fine. It does the trick. A little blur on the background image and it blends reasonably well. I even came around to using faces here and there, mostly I avoid it and crop them out though.

So that’s great. But I have hundreds of files and not hundreds of art pieces, so I’ll zoom in sometimes and show just the face, or a body part. I’m commissioning more and more art, and making content too fast to keep it novel anyway. I will never, I think, have enough to have a new image for each file, but I can keep up a lot of variety with the volume of images I have now. It’s over 50 at this point, and more are coming in regularly. I still have gaps for certain costumes or creatures when I do a monster girl file, but I’m close to having something for every type of release now.

The thing is, it took months to get to that point. Before I could even consider fixing the backlog of content with AI images, I had to collect up art in huge numbers. Commission from about 6 different artists. 

You don’t want to know how much that cost.

Trust me, you don’t.

Then I had a few additional complications…

I have a game out in the wild, CaliaQuest. That required images of elves and slimes and wood nymphs and lamias. 

That, plus making a visual novel, took me into the world of stock illustrations on websites like itch.io. I was digging for days to find good backgrounds, character art, and trying to match it all up. 

Not easy, when those sites are also a pit of AI generated stuff. I had to attempt to validate each piece I used. It was hard going, but it’s done. The sites have some great images you can use, but they aren’t consistent art of what you really want, so far from perfect.

I got CaliaQuest re-built, re-uploaded to Steam and Itch, and… someone complained one of the characters had the wrong eye colour now. Can’t please everyone, I suppose.

It’s easy to just use the human-made art on the new content, but picking apart everything from a litany of projects is not simple. It’s time-consuming, stressful, and easy to screw up.

I also had actual thousands of tweets, and a bunch of bluesky posts, and a Throne page. All needing to be updated. Throne was simple. Bluesky just about 100 deleted posts.

Twitter. Oh my. I had to pay for a service that bulk deleted old tweets, and that involved downloading a data archive of everything I posted, ever, and killing anything with an image attached, or a video, before the date I stopped the AI imagery. It still took quite a long time even with the automation.

Other media

I deleted every AI-image based video from Pornhub and Hypnotube and made everything on YouTube private. I tanked my views.

I removed an AI chatbot from my website and watched visitors dip by 20%.

You don’t give a hoot about that, because maybe you hate AI, and think ha, karma, bitch. And I guess fair enough. I should have made this move sooner, but for my content creator friends reading this, there’s a material consequence to your choices.

Re-making content for video platforms was tough. It was taking forever. Happily a few wonderful people who frequent my Discord server were kind enough to assist. One even re-exported about a hundred videos for easy re-uploading. There are automation tools to be found, but they require some coding knowledge, of which I have none.

I got as much as I could back up. One was removed by YouTube that had been fine with the AI images. Same audio, just a new image. Gone. Naughty Calia. I scheduled those videos to go back out slowly, over months into early 2027. People keep asking where the content has gone.

How much?!

In all, well over 250 files, about 125 videos, a game, and multiple other website pages, even a book were re-made without AI. It took several months. I went extremely fast, I committed hard to the change.

What I felt worst about was removing a ton of fan-made content that used the same AI imagery. Creations people made for a fun communal event. Art pieces of their own. That hurt. 

The other side is… I should have done this ages ago. It would have been less work. By allowing myself to use a tool I wanted to replace for such a long time, waiting for the perfect moment when I had enough art to use, I made life harder for myself. I made it so that what could have been a simple, easy task turned into weeks of remaking thumbnails, of removing and replacing images on websites, of re-making a game, pruning AI art from written pieces. Poring over my website for images I missed, places where I deleted an image and failed to replace it.

I made things near impossible for myself.

So why would anyone do that?

This is not something to undertake lightly, but people are excited for art. They appreciate it, they enjoy it. The reaction is overwhelmingly positive. You’re not just making your content look better, you’re supporting creativity, humanity, passion, joy, the things that bring meaning to existence. You cast aside any doubt about your talent. You prove that you are committed to human-made work, and you leave behind questions about the scripting or the voice. The doubts that come along with using a massive shortcut can dissipate. You no longer cheapen your own creativity, by failing to respect the creativity of others. 

I wish I’d realised that sooner.

The people we make content for appreciate all of this. They see creators helping creators. The way some of the community always did. The way someone like BeeGeeWanders does and has always done. 

To conclude…

Does it help make more money? Jury is out. 

Is it the right choice? That’s up to you. 

The reality is that the longer you use AI, the harder it becomes to extricate yourself from it. The more it bleeds into your content. The more it becomes a crutch to lean on, not a tool to help you.

I used it for images, but it’s available to do scripting, ideation, everything that a creative mind should be handling. What are we doing, as creators, if we don’t create? What are we doing as hypnotists if we let a computer choose our words, or speak in low, hushed tones to lull someone into trance? Why are we here, if we’re not pursuing something valuable, human, and real? 

If art is the mirror we hold up to ourselves, why on Earth was I stupid enough to outsource that? 

I suppose I did end up moralising a bit. And made a case to not change anything, it’s hard work.

But there is a path to do it. There are ways to make it easier. You do not have to spend a fortune to find great artists. You don’t have to lean on ChatGPT if you don’t have ideas, the community has enough. Ask. Join in. Participation is ideation. Creativity is born in the Discord channels, the reddit posts. If you struggle with scripting, ask for help. Get feedback. People are helpful and kind, for the most part. 

I doubt many people who use AI have nearly the volume of content I do out there. If they have any inclination at all that they might move away from it, the best time to start is now, before the work becomes untenable.

Before Will Smith consumes us all. 

Art by Rielilu