I think I found an acceptable use of AI, however it's not going well.

I'm anti-AI. Even more so now! Ethically, it is bad for using it for artistic forms. It adds no value.

I created the site, altarschedule.com, about a year ago. It's going well. I've been making more updates and fixing things. I've been using a placeholder logo for the site. It's an image depicting Saturn, my favorite planet :)  Recently, I thought about making it look like a professional logo.

This site is offered free by me. I actually pay for it and provide time to update it and fix it. It's fun though, I'm not asking anything of anyone. But it is a net debit for me. Hosting is pretty minimal, and I use Google workspaces. I think I'm in it for like $14 a month all-in. Not bad. Thanks Google!

This is the ethical conundrum. I've gotten logo work done before. It's pretty expensive, as it should be. You can go multiple rounds with a designer, making tweaks, starting over, etc. Would it be ethical to have this logo work done by AI, namely Gemini (what can I say, I'm all in on Google), which would be free for a site that I don't make money on, and mainly also considering I'm running a deficit on it.

I think it would be ethical.

I'm not talking about ideal. Ideally I have a lot of money to burn and can find a good designer to have extensive back and forth with and come up with the best logo. I think you run into ethical issues when you are running a for-profit operation and skimp on logo design by going to an AI. Ethically adjacent, I feel, would be something like the idea that it's not required to provide a homeless person with a 5 star meal, e.g. steak and lobster, in order to be seen as a sufficient gesture. This is a form of charity, after all. The audience isn't as needy, but they do need it!

However, ethics aside, AI is not good at logo design! Haha. ChatGPT came up with something a little closer to what I was looking for, but then subsequent asks to modify it slightly to move to exactly what I want either didn't go anywhere, or went the wrong direction. It's bad. A human would do a much better job. Gemini came up with a fancy logo that would go on a business card or something, but I really want something more like a single icon for the website.

Here's Gemini's first attempt. I mean, it's fancy. But not what I was looking for.

And here's ChatGPT's. It's a little closer to what I actually want, and I specified for this one what background color I wanted, so it's pretty different from Gemini's.

In the same vein of charity and ethically required minimums, if I were to ask a human to do this for free, I'd expect the absolute minimum, or maybe a step above. Compensation is  a requirement, don't go giving your stuff away for free! AI is the (so far free) alternative to talentless effortless free work :D

Update! I think Gemini knocked it out of the park with this latest one. I specifically asked for “curvature” and specified the color. I used GIMP to make it transparent. It's nice!