This is a rant about AI and its use in a professional setting.
With every technological advancement that improves human productivity, we (as a society) have faced a choice. For example, when a new invention can improve the output of an office worker by 100%, we can either let that human being spend half the time they used to in the office and spend more time with their family and more important things with no loss of productivity, or we can make them stay in the office, being paid the same amount to produce double the value to the company.
Every time we have chosen the latter. And with artificial intelligence, that lack of empathy, humanity, and common sense, I fear, is coming back to bite us in the rear.
To begin, a short story:
This morning I was blessed to start my day with a message from one of my clients. It was about one of the pieces I had written for them. It read thus:
“[We] ran the story through an AI checker and it spit out that it was “likely’ at least partially written by AI.”
Thankfully, the person I was talking with believed me when I said that I didn’t use AI to write the piece, and that I have never used AI for my writing work. Naturally, they had to reiterate their “zero tolerance” policy regarding using AI.
Anybody who actually knows me, knows that I am passionate about my writing. I believe that if I used AI, it would be taking away the fun part of my job and leave me with the boring part of fixing grammar and facts. Why would I want to give AI the whole reason I write in the first place? I’ve been asked by a few people why I don’t use AI because it’s hard for them comprehend a job where my purpose isn’t to just crank out lifeless spreadsheets and make the number after the Dollar sign get bigger. I actually enjoy what I do.
I was indifferent to the AI industry. I thought that if I simply wrote my own stuff, I could ignore the growing AI threat. I didn’t think that having one of my pieces confused for AI work would feel as insulting as it was.
Apparently, I was wrong.
A brief search online showed me that I am not the first artist to suffer this insult about my work. There are numerous examples of people having their true art derided as AI-generated or their writing used (without their permission) as training for AI, rendering their actual work entirely useless since it was then indistinguishable from the AI content. I was able to find hundreds of writers, artists, designers, coders, and programmers who had lost work because they were being replaced by AI.
If you’ve ever created something that lives online, you should know that it has probably been used to train AI — and the content that AI produced has probably made money. If you’re someone who uses AI to produce content for you that you couldn’t otherwise create yourself, how do you feel knowing you are profiting from someone else’s work without their permission and without compensating them fairly?
Sounds like a great win-win for brain-dead drones in the finance department. But I would love to hear the justification for this blatant theft.
Who’s actually benefitting from this super cool technology? None of the artists, writers, or creative people I’ve met. None of the programmers or coders I know. The only ones I see who brag about the benefits of AI are creatively impoverished, lazy, or greedy middle-managers who want to save a few bucks by making a machine do what they’re unwilling to pay a fair wage for someone else to do. It definitely isn’t the audience who has to sit through the AI content being hawked at them. Sure, it’s pretty cool to see what AI can generate, but that novelty will quickly die off and we’ll be left with social media feeds filled with AI garbage; movies, games, and music generated by a computer; articles and books written by something that can’t possibly generate the humanity and passion that we long for in our content.
Wow. Real art.
Yes, there are examples of AI being used in more worthwhile areas like medical research, combating climate change, and more. But why is it that all the money and the attention is being spent on how well AI is replacing artists? Could it possibly be because those who spent their whole lives sacrificing their family relationships and artistic talents bent over a computer screen screwing over the less-privileged and underpaid can now produce a pretty picture for free? Of course those who spent all their lives accumulating wealth have the means to promote the “artistic” abilities of a machine because they don’t actually understand the true purpose of art. They don’t actually understand what makes art “good” or “bad”.
AI is not the next cool thing. It’s not a fun toy. It is a sign of the decline of our society by taking away the purpose of life — the joy of creating art — and giving it to machines so the humans who actually have to slog it through daily life are relegated to the bleak, lifeless realm of cubicles and sweatshops.
I’m not naïve enough to believe that this problem will go away. I’m fully aware that this isn’t the last time AI will try to ruin my day. In fact, it will probably get worse as AI advances. But I love my art, and I’ll continue to write even after every greedy, morally-corrupt corporation has replaced any worthwhile human with a machine.
Fuck AI — all the way to the garbage pit of terrible human ideas. When all the content you enjoy is lifeless, passionless, AI-generated bullshit, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourselves. But hey, at least we saved a few bucks along the way, right?
