Don’t use AI. For anything. Please.
That’s the last time I’ll say please. It’s the last time I’ll be nice. From here on out, if I see you use AI content or share AI content or do anything with AI content other than wage war against AI you are dead to me. I encourage you, reader, to also do the same when you see someone else use AI — delete the user from your mental Rolodex of people whose thoughts and opinions are worth respecting. Maybe even make fun of them online. Shame them until they stop.
Every time I see a “writer” use AI to create the cover image illustration for their article, I die a little inside. Are you a creator? Do you care about other creators? Then don’t use tools that steal from other creators. Seems pretty cut and dry.
If you can’t pay for an illustrator or a designer, just do it yourself. Maybe it will be bad. So what. The next one will be better. And the one after that will be better still. And all of them will have a soul.
There was a minute where AI seemed fun or at least funny to play around with to see what you could make it do. That time is gone. It probably was never really here at all. It was just an illusion because we were ignorant of what was actually going on with the technology. It steals. It’s bad for the environment. The biggest chuds in the world are the people who profit off it. Fuck it forever.
I was thinking about whether there are any “good” uses for AI, and I remember hearing about a program that could take medical data and analyze it to predict the future chance of getting certain illnesses. In a good world, this would be good, as a computer can analyze bits of data faster than it would take a team of humans, and can recognize patterns never caught by the human eye, and — you know — help people. But we live in a bad world, where this data would most likely be used to deny the person health care coverage because of some new “potential preexisting propensity to compromise profits” or whatever. So until we topple this system, or change the law to protect people, AI can suck eggs in the medical field as well.
We’re better than this. Creativity is one of the beautiful parts about being human. Why are we willing to outsource it to machines to churn out soulless garbage in the name of being consumers? I feel like this has been slowly trained into us, to just want stuff to watch and not actually care about the thought behind it and the people who have the thoughts that bring it into existence. It’s something that will take effort, time, and yelling a lot about slop when we see the slop to undo.
Again, in this “good world” I keep mentioning, when robots take our jobs, people are protected and taken care of, and are free to live their lives as they wish — which would include a lot of creating if we lived by our natural instincts. But in the bad world, it’s another tool used to separate and pit people against each other and make us compete while the people at the top laugh because they’re collecting all the money.
They laugh, while we ignore what’s happening as we watch videos made by nobody that satisfy a superficial need to be distracted while missing every feeling and thought and bit of soul that connects us and sparks us and drives us forward toward the good world that should exist.
So no, sharing that AI picture of an action figure of your friend with his laptop, Moleskine, and oat milk latte accessories isn’t harmless. It isn’t fun. It’s a slow creep of evil rot that should be cut off before its roots hook into us so deep we can’t untangle from the mess.
Come with me if you want to live.