A few days ago I watched a man get torn apart in a Facebook group for fans of the Texas Renaissance Festival, and I haven’t been able to shake it.
He said his family had gone to the faire since it opened. He posted a batch of images as a tribute, showing him and his people in period costume, in castles and forests and torchlit halls. None of it was real. A computer had generated every frame from his old photographs.
Within hours there were over a hundred comments. They called it slop. They called him an idiot, and worse. Somebody mocked his age. Somebody called him a name that would get you thrown out of any bar in Texas. One person cheerfully admitted to showing up because they love a good dragging. He fought back, badly. That only fed it.
Eventually he took the post down. The mob kept going without him.
Was the post a mistake? Yes. Did it deserve that? Hell no. Would any of the people throwing punches have wanted it done to them?
A sword from the big-box store
I’ve spent whole afternoons at blacksmiths’ booths with a camera. Picture walking into one at the faire, forge running, the smith sweating through his apron, and handing him a sword you bought at a chain store for twenty bucks. You tell him it’s a compliment. You love swords. You’ve loved his booth for years.
He’s not going to thank you. He’s going to look at that stamped, shiny thing and feel everything that’s wrong with it, because it looks like his work from across a parking lot and cost somebody nothing to make. Your intent was kind, and the object still insults everything he does.
That’s what this man did. He walked into a room full of costumers, leatherworkers, painters, jewelers, musicians and photographers, and handed them a machine-made sword.
Now picture what happened next. The blacksmith doesn’t hand it back and explain. Every smith, weaver and potter on the lane comes out of their booth, surrounds the guy, and starts screaming at him. A few of them take swings. The crowd cheers. That’s what that thread was, and I hate it.
Why do Renaissance faire communities reject AI-generated images?
The people who were upset weren’t wrong about the substance, and they deserve credit for that.
A renaissance faire is a monument to handmade things. People drive hours to watch a glassblower work, to buy a mug somebody threw on a wheel, to see a costume a woman spent six months stitching. The artisans there make their living off that craft, and AI image tools were trained on the work of artists who never agreed to it and never got paid. When free fake art floods a community like that, the people who make the real thing get squeezed.
The fans in that group have been saying for at least a year that they don’t want AI in their space, and they’ve earned the right to say it.
There’s a simpler reason too. The images didn’t show the faire. They showed made-up castles that could’ve been anywhere on earth except the Texas Renaissance Festival. A tribute to a place ought to show the place.
So yes, he broke the group’s rule. It wasn’t written down anywhere, but everybody who’d spent five minutes there knew it. That’s a real mistake, and it deserved a real response.
A real response is somebody saying, “Hey, this group doesn’t do AI art, and here’s why.” Several people did exactly that, kindly, and I respect every one of them. It isn’t a hundred strangers lining up to call a man stupid.
Why do online dogpiles happen in fan groups?
I wrote about this exact pattern in Dogpile, after watching two authors get stoned in writing groups for asking perfectly ordinary questions. This thread had the same shape, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.
Somebody makes a mistake, or just does something the crowd doesn’t like. The first few replies are fair. Then the thing tips. People who never saw the original post pile in because they smell blood. Nobody’s correcting anybody anymore. They’re performing for each other, trying to land the funniest insult, the cruelest GIF, the line that gets the most laughing reactions. The person at the bottom of the pile stops being a human being and turns into a target.
And what’s the target supposed to do? Think about it. You post something you’re proud of, something you believed was a sweet tribute to a place you’ve loved for fifty years, and a hundred people you’ve never met start calling you names. Would you calmly thank them for their feedback? Would anybody?
He didn’t. He told them they were the problem. He told them to get a sense of humor and a life. He mentioned he’d been friends with a shop owner at the faire once, like that would buy him some mercy. It was defensive and clumsy and it made everything worse. It was also exactly what a cornered person does. I’ve watched that happen more times than I can count, and it breaks my heart every time.
Can AI-generated images replace real Renaissance faire photography?
No, and I’d know. I spent eight years photographing renaissance festivals. I went to more than 300 of them and came home with roughly 980,000 pictures of belly dancers, jousters, pirates, blacksmiths and every kind of oddball who shows up in a kilt and a feathered hat. Performers hired me to shoot them. I know what these places look like at six in the morning when the vendors are hauling crates, and at dusk when the dust hangs gold over the jousting field and everybody’s exhausted and happy.
You can’t generate that. You can generate something that looks like a faire from across the parking lot, the same way the chain-store sword looks like a real one. You can’t generate the dancer who rehearsed for months, the jouster with a bandage on his wrist, or the kid on his dad’s shoulders watching the fire-eater with his mouth hanging open. Those people were real, and the photos prove they were there. I still love going back through them, and that’s where all the value lives.
This man had decades of real photos on his hard drive. He posted fake ones instead. That makes me sadder than anything else in the whole mess.
What makes a good photo tribute to a Renaissance faire?
Think about what that tribute could have been. A family that’s gone to the same faire since the day it opened has something nobody else alive has: half a century of pictures of the same gate, the same lanes, the same kids growing up in costume. The grandmother in her first bodice. The teenager working a season at a shop in the village. The toddler who’s now bringing toddlers of his own.
Post twenty of those in order, oldest to newest, with one line under each. That group would’ve wept. People would’ve tagged their own families. The shop owners would’ve shared it. It would’ve been the post everybody remembered from that season, for all the right reasons.
He had the real thing, and it was better than anything a machine could make. Somebody could’ve told him that. A few people tried. The rest were too busy piling on to notice.
The mob didn’t protect anybody
The people throwing insults thought they were defending the artisans. They weren’t.
Did the blacksmiths sell one more sword because a stranger got called an idiot on Facebook? Did a single weaver get paid? The man didn’t come away understanding artisans any better. He came away convinced faire people are a pack of vicious haters, and he’ll tell everybody he knows. The mob made his worst reply look reasonable and handed the people who dismiss the anti-AI crowd a perfect example to point at.
Then the defenders showed up and were every bit as bad. They called the critics an anti-AI cult, rabid skunks, armchair activists shaming people from their toilets. One of them told the whole group to go do something anatomically unlikely. It turned into two mobs screaming at each other over a man who’d already left the room.
A community that exists to celebrate craft, courtesy and fellowship behaved like a bar fight. Is that who we want to be? It should embarrass everybody who took part, on both sides.
Does intent matter when you post AI art to a community?
It matters for how people should treat you. It doesn’t erase what you did.
If you hand the blacksmith that chain-store sword out of honest affection, he’s right to be offended, and you need to understand why. He should also go easy on you, because you’re a fan who didn’t know better. Good intentions don’t buy you a pass. They damn well buy you some grace.
That cuts both ways. The critics were right on the substance, and a lot of them threw it away with the way they said it. Being right doesn’t give anybody a license to be cruel to a stranger who made an honest mistake.
What should you do when you see a dogpile starting online?
Don’t join it. That’s the whole rule, and almost nobody follows it.
If somebody broke a rule, say so once, kindly, with the reason. Then walk away. Your one calm comment does more good than your fifth snarky one, because the person can hear it. Better yet, send them a private message. People take correction far more easily when a hundred strangers aren’t watching them take it.
And if you see the pile turning cruel, stand next to the person at the bottom of it. You don’t have to agree with what they posted. You just have to say, out loud, that nobody deserves to be treated like that. It takes one voice to break a mob’s rhythm, and it’s usually the voice nobody expected.
This isn’t the first dogpile I’ve written about, and it won’t be the last, because they’re getting worse. If you want the pattern laid out, start with Dogpile, then read what it’s like to be gang-attacked online and how review bombing works. My faire years are in what 980,000 faire photographs taught me about writing, and the rest of my thinking on online behavior lives in the Social Media Hub.
The blacksmith didn’t need that chain-store sword. He sure didn’t need a hundred people beating the guy who brought it. He needed somebody with enough decency to walk the man over to the forge and show him what the real thing looks like. That’s what a community built on craft is supposed to do, and I’m tired of watching them forget it.