Hi! I feel awful right now for making a wrong assumption. This is my first post on here so I’m sorry if the format is wrong anywhere, but just wanted some opinions.

For context, I(22F) attend an art college, and our entire year is putting together an exhibition for the end of the term. I mostly stick to working in my studio space and we only really all get together as a year for weekly briefing lectures. In those lectures I mostly just focus on what the lecturer is saying and don’t really people watch. I can also be pretty bad with remembering people if I’m not seeing them constantly.

Over the past month or so there’s been a couple instances where my friends and I have complained about people in our vicinity and year group using ai to generate art (kept within our group chat). I’ve never gone out of my way to call someone out for using ai directly, it’s just a personal grievance I have with the morals and ethics behind it (mostly just within creative industries) that we’ll usually all grumble about together in private.

To get to the point, a draft website was uploaded for our exhibition by a group of students who took on that role. It had been less than 24 hours and so every image on the website was an ai generated placeholder of just random fake art pieces. Each person in our year had their name and then a different fake image next to it, and clicking on their page would show the same copy and pasted ai generated text too - for where our own writing will eventually go.

I was scrolling through the website and one student had a picture of them next to an art piece. I thought that was strange as the rest of the photos didn’t have people in them, so I looked at the hands (having been taught that ai struggles with generating hands/fingers). They didn’t have the correct number and weren’t in the highest quality so I made the assumption that this person wasn’t real as their page also had the same placeholder copy and pasted text. Every single other image on the website was ai generated at that point.

I sent a screenshot to my group chat of friends to double check and one of them said no, that’s a guy in our year. I wasn’t initially convinced and pointed out the hand and arm looked wrong and said the anatomy made no sense. I’ve also never seen him before in person, we don’t have any lessons together, and I don’t recognise his face since there’s a lot of people in our year. After she reaffirmed I said it was ‘my bad’ and went to sleep.

The next morning I woke up and a different one of my friends said she didn’t think I realised that what I said was fucked up, that I was really judgy, and shouldn’t comment on anything to do with ai again anytime soon. As well as not everything is an evil ai scheme made by another student.

I then immediately apologised for coming across offensive and tried to explain my thought process with the context I had at the time. I had no intention of being rude or insulting and I know now that I made a completely wrong assumption, but still feel semi-justified in the logic behind how I came to my original conclusion. AITAH?

Update: I completely understand now that it was really cruel of me to say those things and I was definitely an asshole. My intentions were never meant to be hurtful, but that doesn’t negate how callous it came out! My behaviour was mean spirited even if unintentionally, and that’s on me to work on myself and to not jump to any conclusions in the future. Thank you for giving me a slap of reality I didn’t know I needed! I’ll do my best to be more kind and thoughtful going forward with how I think and what I say. 🫶🫶