07/27/2026
I want to take a moment to rant about something I'm seeing a ton of lately, and that's Generative AI.
I'm not a huge fan of AI in the first place, it's been proven to be unreliable and intentionally misleading in certain situations. But that's not the issue I want to address right now. My issue is towards Generative AI used in the horse industry.
I'm seeing so many "For Sale" ads using it, or horse people using it to make photos of their horses "more flattering". The issue lies in the fact that Generative AI is not simply copy+pasting your horse from your photo onto a different background. Instead, Generative AI analyzes the picture and tries it's best to re-create it onto a specific background or sale advert. I've seen sale posts where the horse has an extra fetlock joint or deformed ear, and the seller didn't notice.
As the horse industry is becoming more expansive, more and more people are forced to buy sight-unseen. That is already a huge leap of faith and involves a lot of trust between both buyer and seller. Using AI for a photo or sales ad runs an extremely high risk of changing small elements of that horse, and you're no longer accurately representing that horse. I'd be willing to bet that a majority of the time when people are buying sight-unseen it's because one element of that horse caught their attention in the photos, whether it was a kind eye, the slope of their shoulder, the dish in their face, or even their whorls. And Generative AI changes that. Maybe not a lot, maybe not noticeable to the seller who has seen this horse so many times that they didn't notice the slight change. But if a buyer bought that horse because of that elements, when it gets off the trailer, they're gonna notice.
Not only that, but taking a photo of your horse and asking AI to move it over a more appealing background is also intentionally misleading to buyers. Maybe I'm alone in this, but as a seller I feel it is the buyers right to see where the horse is living. That's not to say you need to have the fanciest setup (hell mine is pretty rough around the edges) but a lot of the time you can gauge the level of care and attention the seller dedicates to their horses by how they maintain where the horse lives.
Does taking nice photos take time, effort, and practice? Absolutely. But the horse world is already plagued with scams left, right, and center. Generative AI will quickly become a tool for scammers to become more efficient and breed more dishonesty in the horse industry.
The horse industry deserves better.
