We put a moose in a hoodie once.

A few of them. Also bears, beavers and the occasional fox. It was the early days of AI image generation, and we had fun with it. They were obviously fake. Nobody mistook them for real (at least we don't think they did!). They were a joke we were in on with you...and we were actually pretty good at it.

Then the tools got better. The photos started looking less like a joke and more like a lie. A lake that wasn't quite a lake. A dock no one had ever stood on. Light that almost matched the light we'd seen a hundred times, but not quite.

Close. Just not Muskoka.

The internet was about to flood with AI Muskoka. Generated docks, generated sunsets, generated loons calling across water that wasn't quite water. Everyone with a prompt and a phone could mint a version of this place.

So we stopped.

The shots felt wrong in our hands. Pure Muskoka has only ever been about the real thing. The cold of the dock at 6am, the slap of the screen door, the bug on your collar, the smell of the lake after rain. None of that lives in an AI model. You can describe it, but you can't render it. And if we stopped going out to find it, we'd be a brand about Muskoka without Muskoka in the room.

AI would have a hard time creating photos as real as this one.

We still use AI. Of course we do. Sometimes we use it to touch up a photo, to draft a subject line or edit our text. To make the labour a little easier, just like everyone else. We're not pretending we're above it.

What we won't do is let it take away the lived part. The photos in our journal come from someone actually standing there. The ideas come from someone who got there by boat or by truck or by sitting on the dock long enough to notice something. The shirts come from things we saw, heard and felt.

We don't want to grow lonely in our connection to Muskoka. We don't want to let the tools replace the going.

She still inspires us just the way she always has.