Something appeared “off” to me about the image of a bull that accompanied Dan Glenn’s well-written article “Terminal or Maternal Sires?” in the November 2025 issue. Out of curiosity, I contacted Dan to inquire about the image and was disappointed to learn that the image is not a photo of a real bull but instead an AI-generated projection of what one of his yearling bulls will look like at maturity.
Using AI-generated imagery in this manner — with no disclaimer that the image is fabricated — strikes me as distasteful at best, and perhaps deceptive. This “bull bred to raise replacement heifers on grass” does not exist, and such artificial imagery does not belong on the pages of a natural-minded agricultural publication written to farmers who work in the real world.
A few pages prior to the offending image, Mark Shepard opined that “AI is everywhere. AI is destroying the farmer’s personal relationship with the land, the soil and the livestock.” I agree with Mark’s lamentations over AI — and technocracy at large — and encourage the editors of Acres USA to keep their publication unsullied by AI-generated content.
Yours truly in semi-Ludditism,
Matt Oursbourn
Thanks for reaching out, Matt. I apologize for this — you’re absolutely right. I’m sorry I did not catch this. I offer no explanation other than to say that my eye for picking out potentially AI-generated images and text has improved a lot since we put this issue together last summer. It’s a fast-moving technology.
Our philosophy for this magazine on this topic is that HI (human intelligence) will always exert sovereignty over AI. While AI can be a powerful tool in assisting with some auxiliary editing tasks — researching topics, drafting headlines and subtitles, audio transcription, basic spelling and grammar checking, etc. — we will never employ it without robust human oversight. We will seek, to the best of our ability, to only publish articles that are human-written. We will never manipulate photos to represent real events or situations and will let readers know when we do use it for an infographic or an explanatory figure.
Optimistically, I do think that the proliferation of AI images and text is going to convince people that they need to move back to established and reliable sources of content. We obviously want Acres U.S.A. to continue to be one of those trusted sources. We promise to be much more careful in the future.
Always humanly speaking,
The editor
