It's Not a Bandwagon; Reasons I Hate AI
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For some reason, when large amounts of completely unrelated people with drastically varying interests collectively agree on a particular thing, the word bandwagon gets thrown around. As if people just see a popular thing and without a drop of critical thought decide to hop on board regardless of their own tastes or opinions.
While I'm sure this does happen, I do notice that the people who tend to use the term rarely level it in the opposite direction.
Regardless, although no one needs to justify their reasons for being anti-AI, here are ten of the many specific reasons I hate it, in no particular order.
- Potable Water - AI is not possible without datacenters that gobble up drinkable water, a process which renders the water no longer suitable for human consumption. These datacenters are often built in places that already struggle with drought, like California and Utah, or that struggle to provide drinkable water for their citizens.
- Desertification - Similar to above, the datacenters that run power AI are responsible for the destruction and unnatural desertification of the environments they're built in. No matter which way you look, AI is destroying our environment at a completely unprecedented rate.
- Consent Violations - There are currently no laws prohibiting users of AI from creating content using other people's images. This isn't just something celebrities are struggling with; everyday people are discovering their faces are being used to create images without their consent, including children. These images are often pornographic or otherwise explicit in nature.
- Falsification - Related to the above, AI is being used to push misinformation and outright lies at yet another unprecedented rate. Between AI deepfakes and the fact that any user can prompt an AI bot to return the answer "fish" to the question "what color is the sky" makes AI not only unreliable, but downright dangerous. Especially when it is marketed as a truth-telling tool and fact-checker. AI doesn't know what's true or false, it just returns the result that is most likely to be accepted.
- Brain Rot - People who rely on AI have been proven to lose their ability to think and react critically. If you let AI write all your e-mails, you will lose the ability to write a coherent, useful, informative e-mail without it. AI is worse than a crutch to human intelligence; crutches help you to heal. AI is like taking a sledgehammer to your knee and then using the sledgehammer as a crutch and going "look how useful this sledgehammer is!"
- AI Isn't Actually As Useful As You Think - Related to above, there are now studies showing that the AI everyone claimed was so helpful in fields like medicine and engineering is actually killing professionals' abilities to do their own work. Because doctors began to rely on AI to detect micro tumors, they are beginning to lose the ability to accurately detect them independently. When technology is being used to discover cancerous growths before they're detectable by human eyes, that's good! That's very good! But when it's used to look for cancerous growths INSTEAD of a human doing the work, the human's skill begins to fade, which is fucking DANGEROUS.
- AI Stole My Work, the Work of Friends, and the Work of People I Respect - AI is trained on stolen work. Period. It's a plagiarism machine. More than fifteen years of my own personal fiction has been scraped. Friends of mine have had their writing and art scraped. Authors and artists I know and love and respect have had their work scraped. We do not hone our craft through blood and sweat and tears over the course of decades so that some fucking doofus can hit a few buttons and have AI put all our work in a blender and then shit it out onto a page and then call themselves an artist. It's not elitist to expect someone to do the work to be an artist. It's part of the experience. When people say "you need to suffer to be an artist" they don't mean you have to be miserable and have a hard life, they mean you need to do the WORK. The work is part of it! The work is what gives your art a soul.
- AI is Actually Stealing People's Jobs - This isn't hyperbole. People's careers are being eliminated as the already disgustingly rich are sniffing out more and more ways to cut costs and salivating over the pathetic amount of money they can "save" by replacing human beings with technology that is actively destroying our planet and our society. Even in the cases where people aren't actually being fired, they are pushed to utilize these idiotic slop machines to do their work, often times spending more time fixing the diarrheal output than they would just doing it themselves. I've seen a lot of people quit because of this, and even more continue to suffer with the stress of it because they don't have the means to leave their job.
- Child Labor - The servers required for the data centers that fuel AI are built using massive amounts of cobalt, which is not only driving up the costs of other, more useful technology, but is mined primarily by children in Congo, who work in such dangerous conditions that many are permanently disabled or even killed. AI isn't the only benefactor from such child labor, but sure is an easy one to boycott.
- People are Becoming Dangerously Deluded - Finally, listening to the AI tech bros talk about their AI girlfriends for two seconds should be enough for anyone to "jump on the bandwagon." Who can honestly take these guys seriously? They're treating a random number generator they designed like a human being capable of true emotion and feeling. It's SAD. They're deluding themselves into a relationship with a calculator, and they want you to be as sad and miserable and pathetic as they are because they've lost the ability to relate to other people. Go to therapy. Touch grass. Interact with another human being. If my autistic, anti-social, anxiety-ridden ass can manage it, so can you.
I am not anti-technology or anti-progress.
I do believe that technology should exist for the betterment of our lives, not to the detriment of them. If that makes me a Luddite, I'll wear that badge proudly. Afterall, we have the Luddites to thank for modern worker protections, such as fair pay, safe working conditions, and the prohibition of child labor (comparative to the early 19th century and prior; obviously we still have issues with these, but it's thanks to the Luddites that they aren't worse).
AI isn't working for us. It's working for the already ultra-rich to further stuff their pockets at the expense of our environment, society, and general well-being. There is quite literally no good reason to continue using generative AI. Every "benefit" is rapidly being revealed to be a detriment, or at best a massive over-exaggeration of usefulness. Even AI that we previously thought useful is proving to operate at the expense of human proficiency. It is quite literally making us dumber, and when I look at the people who continue to defend its usage, it becomes even more glaringly obvious.
Typically, I would include a plethora of citations and links to support my claims. I'm not doing that this time. I'm tired, I'm mad, and the information is out there and easily accessible. I may edit to include citations later. We'll see how the weekend goes.
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