Honestly I've had French people complain about how French youtubers are just mediocre assholes making money being the biggest fish in a tiny pond, but seeing how the whole cast of JDG embraced AI I'm never changing my mind on this.
There's something to be said about English speaking people expecting their cultural issues to instantly translate overseas, and I actually think these expectations are putting off a lot of in this case French people from like... keeping up with foreign news. But it is also just profoundly upsetting seeing in real time how my countrymen are just NOT keeping up with the discourse surrounding AI as a whole. Most of what I see in reaction to and in defense of that kind of behavior is "oh but it's not GENERATIVE AI it's just a bunch of filters" "oh it's generative AI but it was done in a rush at the end of production with an impossibly short deadline so it's not like we would have found an artist for that anyway" "oh but it's to generate music for our ad segment, nobody wants to do that so it's not putting anyone out of business" which is not at all covering the breadth of issues with AI. We've hit a point in the economy where loans to fund the construction of data centers have dried up a year ago in the United States, and most of the ones that broke ground are laying in state unfinished because the construction companies were not paid -because the AI bubble may not end up popping but it's certainly deflating like a wet fart- AND YET in France you're just now hearing in the news about elected officials coming up with financial incentives for new data centers. Not only is it bad for all the usual reasons, but French people should care about this even more because GOD DAMN WE LOOK LIKE COMPLETE FUCKING DUMBASSES. DUUR LET'S INVEST IN THE INSOLVENT TECH ALREADY ON THE WAY OUT CAUSE WE CAN'T BE FUCKED TO READ ENGLISH SPEAKING NEWS. DE GAULLE WAS RIGHT ENGLISH PEOPLE ARE WITCHES. And now apparently during a guided tour of the D-Day museum in Normandy, JDG, a French youtuber, asked Claude about the exhibit while the tour guide was standing right in front of him.
So if you're French, and you don't know yet, AI art is kind of obvious in its stealing from creators, but you have to understand it does the same thing with just text based answers to queries, or anything it does really. That's just how a large language model works, it needs a large database to approximate what looks like an answer to your question, based on averages. It doesn't stop being an illegal theft machine just because you're working with too short a deadline to hire an actual artist, it doesn't stop being a theft machine just because you assume nobody would take that job. In these situations either manage your project better or buy clip art/stock music, something that's been available for decades and should be a known quantity to any creator. Those LLMs have been let loose on the internet to scrap literally anything not bolted to the walls, meaning any interaction with any publicly available LLM right now is based on stolen data, no ifs not buts not excuses. Using AI is enabling theft and plagiarism. Furthermore and more importantly, the infrastructure required to power those LLMs, for picture or text or whatever generation, is a massively wasteful, hugely extensive amount of servers and data centers that heat up like motherfuckers and consume more water and power than most countries do to function, and are linked to several health issues due to air, water and noise pollution. So they destroy the environment on a local scale but also a global one with how much power they consume.
As an artist I don't say this lightly, but the copyright issue is fucking peanuts compared to the environmental damage. AI is gonna do irreparable harm to the creative industry sure, but that is to some degree mitigated by how the entire business model of publicly available AI models is completely unable to turn a profit; meanwhile the damage done by any data center will linger and compound, and it will probably stay in service to fulfill whatever business model tech bros will find for this junk tech, probably mass surveillance and guiding Israeli missiles. Cause yes it's doing that too.
So do not normalize AI, do not stay silent when you see it used, and do not for a second buy those half baked excuses from youtubers using it. Nevermind the borderline pathologic level of stupidity from a grown ass adult asking an AI right in front of a person trained to give the information he's looking for, there is never a time where normalizing AI is worth whatever you're doing. Just delay the release of your fucking video. Buy stock music. Anything else. We've survived so far without AI, if you suddenly NEED it now that's just a lie you made up because you're lazy.
