The irony of my current stance on A.I. is not lost on me.
When I started this site over four years ago, I was simply playing with A.I. considering it a tool to help create the things I thought I could not on my own. Of course at the time I didn’t realize the massive problems with the current systems considered to be “A.I.” Even though I used A.I. at the time to write a few books, and make coloring books, all of my shirt designs were still 100% of my own.
I soon figured out that I could definitely write a better book on my own, so I did. I really fell in love with writing. After finishing my first book I tried to get it published, and though I ended up querying literary agents without much success, I did get involved in the writing community. That is where I learned about the A.I. debacle, you know, the one where all the A.I. models were trained on stolen books. Some of my friends were directly effected by this, and it really highlighted one of the main problems with A.I.:
A.I. has been developed as a way for people to create art, without having to pay the artist.
This goes for writers, graphic artists, musicians, anyone creating art that has been fed back into the A.I. models having had their art stolen from them. This has happened without consent and without compensation. In return the A.I. models return art that has been robbed of its soul, ideas, methods and styles scraped from humanity. What, Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki has been quoted as saying about A.I. animation:
“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.“
And the problems go far deeper, environmental devastation from data centers and concentrated water use, for example Memphis Tennessee dealing with Elon Musk’s data centers that provide the data crunching for X’s Grok. If that wasn’t enough A.I. is being pushed for mass-surveillance [Flock], and the very life and death decisions of war and genocide [Palantr]. A.I. is showing us the worst of technology, and nothing like the utopia the tech bro’s are hocking.
Do you want Terminators? Because this is how we get Terminators.
