1) uses literal slave labour in countries like Kenya - Once again, Black slaves are being used to "improve" the world with absolutely no care to their welfare or wellbeing. In fact, they're being deeply traumatised by the images and information they have to see as they load all the info into the computers. So slavery and trauma. Good job.

source source source source source

Frankly, that should be fucking enough for everyone to make it stop. But no.

2) emits an absurd amount of CO2 and uses a crazy amount of power and water, and is quickly undoing what progress we've made against climate change.

source source source source source source source

3) destroys communities with the e-waste-- primarily marginalised communities- Once again, screwing primarily Black neighbourhoods

source source source source source

4) steals material from people with no compensation or credit. Most recent example, ScotRail stole the voice of a voice actor for their announcements and refused to notify, pay or credit her. They've recently backtracked on this because of the backlash, but they've got away with it for some time.

source , source

5) It's bad for your brain, with one study saying it 'atrophies' your brain, and another that 'warns of a phenomenon known as "mechanized convergence," in which reliance on AI leads to less diverse and creative outcomes. As more users accept AI-generated suggestions without sufficient scrutiny, there is a growing concern that originality and contextual nuance could be lost. AI’s tendency to generalize information may lead to homogeneity, where different individuals working on similar problems arrive at nearly identical solutions — often missing the complexity that human insight can provide.

Other key concerns include:

Decline in independent problem-solving skills – With AI handling much of the cognitive heavy lifting, workers may find themselves engaging less with deeper analytical processes essential for innovation.

Increased risk of misinformation – AI models, despite their advancements, still generate errors, outdated information or biased responses that require human oversight to detect and correct.

Reduced diversity in thought – Overreliance on AI suggestions can lead to standardization, minimizing original perspectives and creative approaches'

source source source

There are multiple sources for all of this-- these are just one or two links to prove my point. The fact is, there are dozens and dozens of sources for each of these, I just ran out of energy.

But all this means

Rod Serling warned us. SO MANY TIMES.

Star Trek tried to warn us.

2001: A Space Odyssey tried to warn us.

Westworld tried to warn us.

Philip K Dick warned us, and we've had a variety of versions of this.

So did Asimov.

Terminator 1 & 2 warned us.

The Matrix shouted very loudly. Begged us to listen. They didn't even fucking TRY to make it subtle.

Hell. Fucking even Wall-E tried.

And we clapped every time, we oohed and ahhhed and marvelled at all the warnings, nodded in agreement-- this is all a bad thing.

And then we did the one thing that all of this shit begged us not to?

fucking released it into the world.

No holds barred, no accuracy, no way to control it, no ethical way to use it.

And then encouraged the world to become as dependent as possible as quickly as possible on it whilst the world burns.

BUT

This is not to say that you need to love every second of every part of writing to be a good writer, but I find people who dislike the actual act of writing don't usually make good writers.

I think that this is, in part, where the AI stuff comes from--people who like the idea of writing but don't like (or know how to do) the mechanics of writing choose to rely on AI because they see it as handling the mechanics, which they see as the less important part.

But the mechanics are a huge part of it. The plot, the characters, the world, the idea--all of that is important. But writing is also about the paragraphs and the sentences and the words. It's about playing around with wording or sentence structure or phrasing to see what works best. It's about literally writing the sentences--all of the sentences. It's about choosing where the paragraph breaks are, where scenes end, where chapters end.

And if you hate doing the mechanics of it--if you hate putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or however it is you draft--you will hate writing, and you will come to hate your writing. Because you will resent the actions required to do it. You will hate having to sit down and do the writing, because you hate actually writing.

There's nothing wrong with not enjoying actually writing. You can tell stories in other ways. Record a podcast. Sing. Tell stories to your friends.

Or teach yourself how to enjoy writing. Figure out what parts of it you do like and make those a bigger part of your process. Is text to speech easier? Do that to start. Do you not want chapter breaks for your first draft? That's fine.

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

'i'm a grown adult i should be able to control my own sleep' or 'i'm a grown adult i should be able to read curse words in subtitles' - both of things are clearly true, but why are they exclusive to adults?

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination