The current generation of AI is profoundly immoral, requiring huge amounts of power and doesn’t work, and is attempting to be memed into existence by techbros and venture capitalists who have violated the copyright of pretty much everyone who’s posted any creative work on the internet ever in the pursuit of the ultimate lock-in technology. They want this because it represents the ultimate lock-in product, and the intent if it DID work was to use it to entrench their wealth even further by allowing the robot to give them access to expert advice on topics, without having to actually pay them.
The evidence on this is available; I wanted to compile it but it’s been said better elsewhere by other people and I don’t feel the need to rehash it at this point. Suffice to say:
I am absolutely against the current iteration and generation of AI and its owners.
However, what next? I do believe the genie is out of the bottle in this regard and it’s not going back in. And there’s a long history of new techs being opposed by people, which is part of the reason marijuana was banned in the 30s, and the term “Luddite” exists.
Last year, the now-defunct NaNoWriMo site started promoting AI use in their novel writing contest. This was felt as a deep betrayal of their values by most, and as the organization was already reeling from a number of prior scandals, this was I believe the last straw. (Honestly, the fact they were taking AI bro money to begin with feels like a desperate attempt to salvage the situation that was already extremely bad). One way they defended against the accusations of betrayal were to say “AI hate is ableism”.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, because using ChatGPT in your 50000 word novel trivializes the exercise. Its like riding an escalator up Mount Everest. The achievement means nothing because it becomes too easy to brag about and you did no work.
But I had to think about it more recently. as AI has, despite my best efforts, started to make it into my feed anyways. And I was thinking a bit about it lately. I’m old enough to remember the tail end of the Photoshop wars, where there was active debate over whether say, photomanipulations or digital artists were “real artists”. And I can foresee a future like this for AI under certain circumstances.
To be clear, if AI does all the work based off your request, yeah, that’s bullshit. But, assuming a more efficient, ethically trained AI, I can see where it could become a legitimate argument about physical ability. There are MANY technical tools these days that assist creatives. Word processors, spellcheck, text-to-speech, digital audio workstations, photoshop or similar.
There are writers/authors who can’t write cursive with a pen, or can’t even write because of a human limitation. Some musicians these days compose entirely on computer and couldn’t play an instrument if they tried. And digital artists…well, that battle’s over.
I think the difference is more in intent and process, myself. Where the AI becomes a productivity enhancement to the overall creation process, rather than the black box that spits the finished product out from a line of text. If you want to write a song, and you write out the lyrics, and the instruments, and everything, and then have an ethically developed AI sing it back…I find it hard to argue you are less of a creator than a songwriter who does all the same work and then hires a session musician to sing it. Would it be ideal if a human was hired instead of a robot? Absolutely would, but at that point the perfect is becoming the enemy of the good; you could very easily slip back into how other assistance tools put copyeditors, or transcribers, or others out of work.
Again, before we even think about starting to allow “AI” stuff we need to resolve the copyright infringement and power usage issues. But if those can be solved, I think that there’s a case to be made for such a theoretical future use where it enhances the actual process of creating the final product by doing certain levels of ‘busywork’ that the creative might not have ability to do themselves. That’s what I think NaNo was trying to get at in my most generous interpretation, at least.
Still hate the current gen, though.
-Arrow