Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Social media and pattern sights are now rife with AI crochet. It is everywhere and nearly everyone who crochets and suffers the horrors of social media has had someone send them some stupid AI image and ask them to make it up for them. Of course, this is impossible because AI works from a stitch dictionary that has never been, and will never be, possible. Stitches blur and morph, they change heights and directions in weird ways, enlarging and shrinking without working a single decrease or increase stitch. They drape or stiffen when they should not or in impossible ways.

Upsetting Aunt Sally because you cannot make the gigantic cat she wants for her living room, and that has clearly already been accomplished because there have been pictures on Facebook of someone’s grandmama standing beside just such a cat, is not fun stuff. Aunt Sally knits, for heaven’s sake! She doesn’t know a thing about crochet except that it is weird and not for her. But then there’s you, bless your heart. You can do it and she can have the best of both crafts. Despite all your shortcomings, and she will enumerate them, you could do this one little thing for your dear Auntie, couldn’t you? The “loser” is implied.

Of course, you cannot! Perhaps, if you had the skill, you could make a giant cat. In fact, I am sure someone could. Awesome as it would be, it would look nothing like the AI cats, though. And therein lies the danger. When the AI version of anything is more visually and aesthetically appealing to our internet jaded eyes than what an actual human can make, and we do run that risk, then, no matter how awesome what the human produces is, it will be inferior. (Just like Aunt Sally always knew you were, loser).

Sure, you can only look at the AI pictures and never produce the actual items, but wait, what if we could? There is a really terrible Ted Talk floating around about how to reduce clothing waste by, wait for it, buying your garments as digital items that you can superimpose on your image, pictures, or avatars on social media and other online things. There you go! In your pictures, in your online persona, in a zoom call, in a world that is not real, you can be fabulously dressed! You can wear the newest fashions in the best fabrics! Your entire closet can be high-end couture, and you will have minimal impact on clothing waste, not to mention the environmental and human degradation that goes along with that industry! Go you!

Of course, you do need to cloth your actual body, too. So I guess, then, we can wear our rags at home in the dark corners of the house we never leave and just live like kings online? Charming world.

Getting back to our brave new world, we’re going to want to decorate the “rooms” we take our pictures in online, right? Enter the giant, AI, crocheted cats! We can buy those images up, paste them into our backgrounds, and boom!, we have awesome crochet art. Aunt Sally didn’t even need you. She knew it all along.

My example has not come to pass yet, it’s just the horrified ramblings of someone who remembers when TV only had thirteen channels and one of them was just colored bands of endlessly repeating community announcements that we watched, sometimes for hours, because something to watch was better than nothing to watch. But there are real-life consequences right now to the rise of AI crochet. 

People are being tempted to buy amigurumi patterns with super cute AI generated pictures that produce blobs at best. It isn’t a matter of bad crochet skills that make these projects flop. They were never going to work. The image you are working toward and the instructions you have are not the same. It was all a lie and the buyers are being scammed. People are buying yarn, making promises of gifts to come, and diligently working toward utter failure. It isn’t fair. At best, it is disheartening. At worst, it kills the love of craft in someone starting out who doesn’t know why the project failed. Of course, Aunt Sally is super mad at you. She needed that doll for a baby shower! She paid for the yarn, or she says she will, so how dare you fail her! Loser, loser, loser!

If people are off buying fake AI patterns, you know what they are not doing? Buying real patterns from actual craftspeople that have been made and tested and really work. These people need our love and attention. They will not be able to keep making patterns if no one buys them. Their patterns are way better than the AI patterns, even beyond that they actually work. They reflect the eye, touch, and talent of real humans using yarn and a hook and, possibly, a pile of stuffing. It takes time to learn how to design really good stuff in crochet. We should be rewarding these people with our pattern buying money, not the people who are just good with a computer program and can make pretty pictures because all they will ever be are pretty pictures.

Lion Brand, to pick one brand out of many guilty ones, got into trouble showing AI art and declaring they just wanted to show what crochet can be. I have no idea how showing impossible AI images demonstrates anything about real-life crochet. They could have stood with real crafts people and artists to show how awesome crochet can be. They could have been the voice standing up for reality in a sea of bad AI crochet, but they chose to be seduced by the dark side. There. I said it. AI is the dark side and so, maybe, is Aunt Sally.

Seriously, though, an AI image is only ever going to be an image. You cannot hand it to your child as a shield against the dark; it will not be passed down three generations and lauded because it was made by the hands of a loved one; it will not hold memories the way a real hand-worked item will because the AI image is only as real as its glowing pixels. Cut the power and the image dies. Cut the power around a crocheted afghan and you still stay warm thanks to someone’s hours and hours of time and dedication.

There is one more risk to AI crochet we need to be aware of. We get so much of our information online these days. We can scroll right past the AI stuff and look for the real stuff and that’s awesome. It’s definitely what I do. But that quick scroll could also make it so we overlook some amazing new work in the mistaken quick glance that something amazing is just another dumb AI-generated piece of nothing. We need to lift up the people doing amazing work in every craft, the new discoveries and the old techniques mastered. As a crafting community, we need to laud our own and let the AI overlords know we can tell the difference. 

So you tell Aunt Sally she can make that giant AI cat herself and good luck to her.