I think I have a lot more grace for people who use AI for fanfics than I have for people who use it in the professional setting. Like, yes, it hurts the environment, but those servers are going to be running anyway because of actual companies utilizing them and not because this person is paying peanuts to write their fanfics. (Apparently, the specific AI fanfic-writers were using was pay-to-use). But ultimately, they're the ones hurting themselves in the long run. What are they going to do when their favorite tool is offline? Or if it changes databases? What happens when the company raises prices and it becomes unaffordable?
That's what gets me about these AI tools. It's convenient and so easy, but is anyone really thinking about the long-term consequences it has to our minds and how they're being used? I struggle to remember words and names when I'm not using them regularly, and it takes time for me to get back to things if I've been away for a while... Imagine doing that to yourself for writing and whatever else you turn to AI for?
I have zero grace for people who use this specific type of ai, because while creativity is hard and many creatives struggle for years to produce even one single thing, ai is nothing but stolen work that those same hardworking, yearning, and agonizing creatives put in.
The type of ai used to write fic or any sort of writing, is not something conjured up out of thin air by the computer. It’s an amalgamation of work created by actual people. Ai books and fics are trained on real work belonging to real authors, and the generator does nothing but throw all that fed info into a mixing bowl and plucks out whatever relevant parts it needs from these thousands of stories if not millions, and rearrange them into something new. So why have grace for that? It’s stolen intellect.
Sure the servers will run anyway, but if you’re not willing to at the very least call out and shame folks at the lower level using it to make even one person less inclined to do so, which eventually leads to lower use and lower sales thus less interest from the masses which tends to always turn into less funding by the capitalists, then what’s the point?
You approve of generative ai on some level and that’s your right, but, “How will they cope if it goes out of stock?” is a naïve position to take. Because so long as you say, “It’s fine, because they’ll be at a loss once the servers crash.” does not mean anything for the present.
It’s a true statement, of course, but if people are even passively encouraged to write with ai for the next decade for example, and authors and filmmakers and animators and clothing designers and graphic designers and so on get rich by “prompting” a generator to mix them up a bowl of other people’s ideas, with no creative effort put in of their own, then does it matter if in a decade, the server is gone? No. They’re already rich and living a better life than the struggling creatives who are dying in the same places these data centers are being built.
So while I can have grace for people not realizing they’re consuming ai to an extent, and I do understand that ai could work in some regard, I don’t think it being allowed into the creative field makes any sense. Generative ai should be used to conjure up scenarios and prognosis in the medical and science field, when trying to find cures and vaccinations, so that we can stop testing as much on humans and animals. Generative ai should be used to try and predict weather disasters and how search and rescue teams could operate. It can be used scholastically to create unbiased (to some degree) curriculums.
Generative ai should not be used to write scripts and books, to bring deceased actors back to life, or to “recreate” police footage and photos. All the information these servers collect is built off of data of real people, stealing our creative intellect and physical likeness. Ai like this mimics personhood. It mimics life to the best of its ability, which is theft. Because as I explained above, ai writing is a mixture of other people’s stolen intellect, whereas ai medicine/science would not be taking from someone’s personhood. It!d be using the collected data to narrow down commonalities in a virus or disease to better treat humanity as a whole. Recreating deceased loved ones steals their autonomy. Enhancing extremely blurred images leaves too high an error window to deliver false positives, resulting in potential false imprisonment. Whereas using collected data to create lesson plans and such could help educators narrow down exactly what their districts need for funding, for example.
And even then, that doesn’t make using ai for these things great. It means if it’s going to be here, we need to use it in ways that don’t kill the earth thus humanity too horribly. It means stop using it for recipes, directions, and interior decorating ideas. Stop using it to create playlists and asking it what to order at fast food joints you’ve never been to, so that we can at the very least cut down on how many data centers are needed. But as you mentioned, people have gotten to a point of being unable to do for themselves. The consequences of placing their brains into a computer’s proverbial hands has already happened, and it’s ridiculous, but there should be no grace given.
