What if I told you that you could become more stupid, work to actively atrophy your talents, be less able to form a coherent thought, and at the same time develop a rapidly inflating ego (which is entirely misplaced because you actually have fewer interpersonal skills now), all while existing in a sycophantic feedback loop on a rapidly dehydrating planet? And also that you could screw over creatives, (you know, the ones who are the heart and soul of civilisation), AND be demonstrably yet confidently wrong far more than ever before? All while giving money to one of the leading supporters of the right-wing resurgence?
Yes?
Excellent. Well let me tell you about a new fangled thing called generative AI
A lot of people think that I have all the opinions, and look, I can see why that is. I can be vocal and loud and yes, opinionated. But I like to think that my opinionatedness is of the more curated variety- I’m only ever confident when its an opinion that I believe strongly, or if I’m absolutely sure I’m correct. If I’m having a discussion and the topic of Douglas Adams comes up, or maybe Jack the Ripper, or some specific areas of Old School Doctor Who then I’ll back myself. But apart from that, I am seldom very opinionated, and even less often, confidently wrong.
But one thing that I’m loud and proud about is how much I hate AI. Generative AI specifically but I have room in my heart to detest other facets of it; I contain multitudes, after all. But a lot of people don’t hate it. They love it like ice-cream. Do they just not realise how appalling it is? Or do they not care? I guess people often embrace things that they enjoy yet know they’re bad, or destructive. Like meth. And Kardashians.
But why do I hate AI?
So many reasons.
First of all, data centres use a truly staggering amount of water, and a request made through chat uses 10 times the electricity of a google search. There’s a myriad of other ways that data centres and also AI in general could mess up the planet, but I guess people don’t really care about that.
At the moment people are asking it to make pictures of themselves, which is actually just a data mining exercise. When you upload a picture, it can use it for training and you have no idea where it could end up. And unless you specially turn it off then all your chats can be used to train the system. But I guess people don’t really care about that. It’s the internet, right? Everything is out there. So what if someone is undressing a photo of your kid and making porn out of it?
And it’s making us more stupid, damaging our critical thinking skills and making us lazy, but I guess people don’t care about that. Look at all the time you save when you don’t have to write that email yourself anymore! So much more time to scroll TikTok.
It’s bleak and soulless and can never make anything actually new, it just regurgitates things that have already been made. Everything is utterly derivative. That’s how I can tell when Insa and FB posts or tweets are written by AI. They sound like this…
No hacks. No grind.
Just a smarter way of quietly finding ways to make your words land.
When you read something that goes ‘Its not X, its Y,’ or uses ‘land,’ ‘quietly’ or a trash pile of other words that AI has decided sound appealing to people, it’s increasingly feeling like AI.
Also, it’s a mindless sycophant that blows smoke up your arse, tells you that you’re a visionary, congratulates your perceptiveness and may well say that people don’t understand you because you’re a rare and special human. Chat induced psychosis? It’s increasingly thought to be a real thing. People are literally using it as their therapist and its giving… terrible advice. And it’s making those people more lonely.
We can talk for hours about the hidden messages in the texts we’ve been getting from our latest hook-up, and instead of going ‘fuck me lets go out and see a movie,’ as an actual friend would, it will interpret them in ways that makes us feel better about ourselves. Or make the other person out to be a narcissist. Or it tells us that we aren’t the problem, we have a rare insightfulness that is seldom seen in today’s world. It tells us we’re special, and clever, and unique, all the while making us dumber, and more self deluded, and increasingly disconnected from the ways that we could be deepening human relationships, real ones with challenges and questions and less sycophantic cowtowing.
It’s also FUCKING WRONG a large proportion of the time. You know how I said I try very hard to never be confidently opinionated about things that I have no idea about? Well Chat GPT is the polar opposite of that. It will loudly and proudly bellow absolutely insanely incorrect facts as if they are utterly true, and if (by a stroke of good fortune) you happen to have the clarity of mind to go ‘actually I don’t think that’s correct,’ it will go ‘Oh yeah, good catch I was wrong lols soz, hope you didn’t eat that mushroom/fish/small blue pill that I said was totally safe and not toxic in any way at all!’
Also there’s the whole rabbit hole of how AI is connected to facsism, anti- intellectualism and the rise of right wing ideology and that’s a whole post on its own, I think, but for now the fact that the President of Open AI is a major Trump supporter should be a reason to stay well away from it.
My main issue, I think (because I hate so many elements of it it’s hard to work out what I loathe the most) is when it intersects with ‘creativity,’ both in the way that it steals from artists of all kinds, and how lazy people try to pass off AI generated content as legitimate artistic endeavour. Pieces of creative work are used; stolen, to train AI. Copyrighted materials, pirated books, pictures, teaches AI how to make it’s own stories and pictures. Which are soulless uncreative slop, yes, but are also having real world impacts of the lives of creatives. Some publishers have to limit unsolicited submissions (the only way that those of us without an agent can get our manuscripts in front of them) because they are being inundated with ‘books’ created by AI and submitted by people who like the idea of being a writer more than, you know, actually writing.
But a lot of people don’t care. A lot of people don’t care about a lot of things, I guess, which is why the planet is *gestures around* and politics is *gestures around* and we seem to be sliding into a anti-intellectual right-wing hellscape of laziness, signposted by feel good mantras and ‘why can’t we all get along’ protestations.
But that’s a topic for another day.
Eva Leppard 