We have arrived at a crossroads in the way we communicate as human beings. Social media has become an extension of our consciousness and, for way too many of us, it’s the first thing we consume in the morning and the last thing we digest at night. With this growing and insidious obsession – and how social media sort of ‘paints the walls as we walk through life’, influencing everything we think, see and believe – an infection has begun to spread. This infection is all rooted in the idea that with the right cocktail of posts, photos, videos and a unique brand of personal charm, a person might be able to fish full-time and never have to work again.
At the core of this active volcano lies the algorithm which relies on the hopeful ‘content creator’ to post regularly, and generate engagement, an elixir that feeds the algorithm and, in turn, pushes their posts to new audiences, where the algorithm will allow their content to be seen by new eyeballs. Engagement only means that they trigger some kind of a response (negative or positive, it matters not). This has fueled a panic state across the internet, where anyone who’s clawing to pull a living from social media is constantly desperate for engaging content. And now Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entered the chat.
For some reason, I naively assumed that fishermen wouldn’t stoop to the ‘core of the earth’ lows required to use AI to prop oneself up as a fisherman worthy of clicking the follow icon. I was very wrong about this. In recent weeks it seems to have gotten so much worse. Some of it is comedy, purposely obvious; you’ll see painfully hokey posts of some dude holding a barrel-plump striper that couldn’t exist in nature. That’s fairly harmless, but still pretty lame.
But as AI has become openly accessible, it’s dragging frantic posters into the depths of the bargain basement, where prominent anglers, desperate to stay relevant, are using AI to make their fish look bigger and their photos more impressive, simply for the engagement. The algorithm doesn’t care if you call them out for posting “AI slop” or if you simply give it a “like,” it all counts the same when it comes to engagement.
Just this morning, I saw a photo posted as a recent catch that showed this surfcaster holding a clearly augmented striper, but he didn’t look closely enough to catch the fact that whatever AI he used to generate this supposedly more impressive version of his original photo, gave him six fingers on one hand! Another photo actually fooled me a few weeks ago, a guy holding a striper standing in a crashing surf, somehow I missed that the stripes continued into the rays of the tail and that the water being thrown into the air on the otherwise dreary day depicted in the image was strangely patterned and glittering like a sequined dress on a Kardashian.
Now here’s the hard part. These images, as attention-grabbing as they might appear at first glance, are designed to get you to respond. Familiarize yourself with the hallmarks of AI image creation, things like extra fingers, hands that are twisted the wrong way, too many stripes on a striped bass, odd patterning in places it doesn’t belong. And then train yourself not to respond. Don’t call them out, don’t do anything that gives them the engagement they crave. The harshest reality we can deal to a “content creator” is the deafening silence of being abandoned, cast aside for taking us all to be fools. If you want to do something that carries even more weight, unfollow their account.
I want to be clear, when someone uses AI or Photoshop to remove sensitive background details or to make a fishing rod across their face disappear, to me that’s smart and aesthetic photography; as long as they’re not changing the truth about the size of the fish, I have no problem with it. But these desperate acts, turning an 18-pounder into a 38-pounder reek of weakness and they perpetrate a lie that the poster can’t back up in real life. The truth about fishing is that even the very best anglers have bad days or even bad weeks and if you want to engage an audience that strives to reach your level, show them that humility, show them the great times and the hardest times, too. We can all relate to that! But in this business – and now more than ever before – our credibility is our only true currency, and it’s harder than a Bitcoin to earn it back once you’ve given it away.
Trade away your credibility, and you will never be taken seriously again.
