The Ethics Alibi

The Ethics Alibi

Meta pulled a feature of Muse Image this week and the industry called it a win for ethics. I’ve spent thirty years in creative rooms, and I think we’re using “ethics” to dodge a harder, more embarrassing conversation: most of this work isn’t dangerous. It’s just bad.

When Meta removed the feature that could use public Instagram photos to generate new images, the takes wrote themselves — privacy, consent, a line held. All true. But sit where I sit, watching creative teams and clients try to make things with these tools every week, and a different pattern shows up. We reach for the ethics frame because it’s the flattering one. “This is dangerous” is a far nicer thing to say about your output than “this is mediocre.”

1 — Ethics is the easy conversation

Ethics can be legislated. You can write a consent policy, add a watermark, tick a box and feel resolved. Taste can’t. Taste requires someone to stand up in a room and say “this isn’t good enough” — the single hardest sentence in any creative organisation, and it’s getting harder as the tools make “finished-looking” trivial. So we’ve quietly swapped the hard question — is this any good? — for the easy one: is this allowed?

2 — “Finished” is not “good”

Generation has collapsed the distance between an idea and a polished-looking artefact to about eight seconds. That feels like progress. It’s anaesthetic. When everything arrives pre-polished, the muscles we used to rely on — judgment, restraint, the willingness to kill a good-looking thing because it’s saying nothing — start to atrophy. I’ve watched genuinely talented people ship the third generation instead of the thirtieth, not because they’re lazy, but because the work already looks done. That Muse feature was the same disease in a louder costume: technically impressive, creatively empty, and nobody stopped on the far more basic grounds that it simply wasn’t worth making.

3 — The consent debate lets us skip the taste debate

This is the uncomfortable part. Arguing about whether the Muse feature had consent conveniently means we never ask whether it was any good — and the answer, plainly, is no. It was a party trick. But “it violated consent” is a conversation the whole industry can have together, righteously, from a stage. “It was creatively worthless” implicates all of us, because we’re all shipping our own quieter versions of worthless every week. Ethics gives us a villain out there. Taste points the finger back into the room.

4 — What I’m actually doing about it

I’m not writing this from a pulpit; I’m working it out in my own lab. Testing these tools on my own films, I’ve started forcing one rule before the ethics question even arrives: would I defend this on a stage on the merits — not “is it clever,” but “is it good”? Most of what I generate fails that, and it should. Consent and provenance still matter; I’m not waving them away. But they’re the second gate. The first gate is taste, and we’ve been letting the second one do the first one’s job because it hurts less.

5 — Conclusion: stop hiding behind the villain

Meta didn’t have an ethics problem this week. It had a quality problem with an ethics-shaped alibi, and the industry grabbed the alibi with both hands because it let everyone off the hook. If we’re serious about the creative future of this technology, the hard move isn’t tighter consent policy — that’s coming anyway. It’s saying the thing that doesn’t legislate: most of this isn’t good enough yet, including plenty of mine. Ethics will tell you what you’re allowed to make. Only taste will tell you what’s worth making. We should stop using the first to avoid the second.