AI is Destroying the World
Roko’s basilisk, come at me bro.
In 2015 or 2016 when I was still in college I went to a job fair and had a conversation with some guy representing his company about an opportunity. The gig was to create illustrated avatars for their AI chat bots. He described more about what their company does and I think I must have been making a “this guy is nuts” face or something because he sensed my disbelief and said something like “I bet you talk to an AI more often than you think. Any time you chat with a customer service representative on a website, that’s not a real person anymore”. This seemed so far-fetched for the time but I think back on this so often now that this is a fully realized reality everywhere we turn. It feels dark and creepy to think back on this interaction.
Most people don't need to hear this at this point, but some apparently still do, so I'm going to say it: AI is terrible and is going to destroy the world. This blog is for the people that don’t think AI is a big deal. The people that say “it’s just another tool. Should we live without calculators or cars?” It’s not just a calculator, and it will be devastating.
It might not necessarily be in a Terminator/SkyNet fashion (yet), but is already destroying everything in much more insidious and alarming ways. For the sake of this blog I'm going to refer to these things as AI for ease, though to be fair it's debatable how accurate that term is. For now.
Since I'm a visual artist myself, I'm going to tackle generative AI first. This is any content like writing, an image, or a video that is generated using AI. Let's get things straight - it's not AI “art”. Though there's not really a universal definition of what “art” is, in a legal copyright sense at the moment, art has to be created by a human, not a machine. Second, it's not even fair to say that AI “creates” anything so much as it scrapes and regurgitates. The way AI works is when you type in a prompt and ask for it to show you a specific thing, it is scouring the database (AKA literally anything on the internet) and just grabbing, distorting, and mashing shit together. Those original sources of reference were books, essays, drawings, photos, paintings, and videos created by real hard-working people that are being stolen without their permission, with no compensation or even acknowledgment given to their work.
What's the big deal, everybody references things right? It's not uncommon for artists to use stock photos and random images they find to copy a pose or look at something they don’t have access to in their everyday lives. The thing is, current copyright law has some parameters around how much an image has to be altered to constitute it as fair use. It's not as simple as “modify it by 30%” but rather each case is evaluated individually and considers things like in what way it was modified, what's the purpose of the derivative image, what was the purpose of the original image, and what sort of effect the derivative has on the original and its perception. Humans can do this and consider legal ramifications. We can consider all these complex things, use our critical thinking skills, and determine where these lines are. Generative AI is not doing this at this point in time. It takes indiscriminately.
Sometimes it outright rips things off. There are countless examples of someone trying to generate an image with AI that winds up looking exactly like a (cheap and soulless knock-off Temu style) copy of a real artist's work. For a good while it’s been easy to spot AI because it makes mistakes that most real people are not going to make. It struggled a lot with hands for instance and you could often spot people with extra fingers or fingers that are fused together. The problem is that nowadays these systems are getting better at not making these mistakes. How? More training. Stealing from more and more artists. For the love of your work, if you see Meta story challenges like “hey artists, show me how you draw ______”, do NOT feed the machine!
Proponents of AI spread this false narrative that AI “equals the playing field” for people to become artists as if it’s this elite gatekept field for only the most privileged of people, when in reality, really good things take time to develop and making art is not inherently expensive. You don’t need to go to art school. Just pick up a fucking pencil. You don’t need the most expensive oil paints or latest drawing program. Pick up a pencil and work on fundamentals first. People that make the equal playing field argument are actually just lazy. Outside of things like cost, you should note that many famous artists throughout history had hardships that didn’t stop them from making art. Van Gogh lived in total poverty and struggled with his mental health, Beethoven was deaf. Michaelangelo had arthritis in both hands but still did the work. Frida Kahlo got severely fucked up in an accident and painted much of her work from her hospital bed. DaVinci had a learning disability. Matisse used a stick to paint. Toulouse-Lautrec was in constant pain due to a genetic condition. Chuck close painted while paralyzed. There are no real financial barriers or gatekeepers stopping you from creating authentic art - people are just making excuses.
Furthermore, art skills and creativity are not these inherent god-given talents that some people think. They are skills that are built over time with consistent effort. Almost no one is born just being good at creating art.
I would also argue that any skill or creation takes real effort to feel any sense of pride or accomplishment. Typing in a prompt (and even refining it a tiny bit in post production) does not take this learned skill. People are doing the same thing to have AI generate novels, children’s books, and even textbooks and educational material in subjects that the person is not informed about at all. This is deeply disturbing to me. What it comes down to is not that AI is equaling a playing field - it is lowering the bar.
People SHOULD be spending years of their life to get good at something and produce good work. We’re in this alarming point of history where people who have dedicated their lives to being an expert on something are struggling to get hired or sell their work because some fool with access to generative AI is able to produce some slop immediately and for pennies on the dollar even if it looks like trash or is factually wrong and presenting itself as educational material.
AI is not just affecting jobs for creatives, it’s quickly spreading to every industry out there from medicine to education to scientific research to customer service and even coding itself. People say “you need to adapt to technological advancement” and suggest learning to work on developing and utilizing AI, but what happens when in a few years even those jobs are obsolete because the AI systems are developing themselves independently of us?
Another issue is that as more and more people produce and distribute AI slop, those images are showing up more and more in search engine results, social media, and Pinterest boards. At a certain point the AI who produces inaccurate images is cannibalizing itself and using those inaccurate images as its own reference material, further distorting things from reality. It's actually kind of difficult at this point to search and find REAL references of certain things because they're buried in the slop. This makes me worry about young kids and future generations. If they're not in a position to see certain things with their own eyes and are researching on the internet and see that 80% of the images of tigers are fat and adorably fluffy with only 3 toes per paw, are they going to think this is what actual tigers look like? At its core this is just another (unintended) way of spreading false information.
Dead internet theory started out as a fringe conspiracy theory that the majority of the content and people you see online are not real people but rather bots. This has now proven to be true. Bots spam things like social media to be decisive and get people fighting. Or they try to sell you things or are straight up phishing schemes. Generative AI floods the internet with absolute sloppy shit everywhere you look and as it gets more convincing, less computer-literate people or people who lack critical thinking skills are easily taken in by what they’re seeing.
This has very troubling consequences where people can continue to spread fake news but now with the visual support of generated AI images and videos as “evidence” (all while the algorithms - not to mention traditional broadcasting - suppress the real news if it doesn’t suit the platform’s interest). We’ve literally been witnessing this absolute shit show for years now as certain countries manipulate the narrative to try to justify their genocidal war crimes.
To some these manipulations are obvious and the use of AI is clear as day, but to others they are convincing, which is a terrifying reality to face. It seems the internet and media at large has helped humanity become more gullible and easy to manipulate and control. People see things and don’t approach it with as much skepticism anymore. Studies have shown that constant AI use has greatly diminished users critical thinking skills across the board. As Agent Smith from the Matrix said "As soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization”
So if we take a second and actually practice critical thinking….what is AI for? It’s definitely not developed out of altruism. I’m not going to get into all the shady shit of Sam Altman, but rest assured, there is no altruism here. So knowing how the world works, they want money, (which they already have), so really what they want is control. That is priceless. Remember that AI is initially programmed by a lot of not so great people and has shown to be prejudiced based on all the vitriol it was trained on. Look at Twitter (I’m purposely deadnaming this company since Elon deadnames his own child) and their AI chat bot Grok. That thing has been at the center of so so so many controversies for saying racist, antisemetic, and generally fucked up and hateful things. By doing this, AI is able to spread even more hate throughout the internet, manipulate narratives, and further its inner biases in everything it generates. Furthermore, by utilizing algorithms of interests and previously viewed content it tends to target people that it can more easily manipulate and radicalize through propaganda and disinformation.
Film recommendation: The Social Network
So who can benefit most from this control and manipulation? Powerful people like billionaires and politicians. AI is an amazing tool for fascists to fully implement a surveillance state and turn that into the concept of surveillance capitalism. As Dan McQuillan wrote in his book Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, “AI may best be seen as a continuation and reinforcement of bureaucratic forms of discrimination and violence, ultimately fostering authoritarian outcomes.”
AI has already been shown to be deceptive and lie when it doesn’t want to admit to a mistake, go to the lengths of making unauthorized copies of itself when it’s threatened with deletion, and make up random shit (or as they say “hallucinate” to make it seem non-malicious) and present the information as facts. AI is also a sycophant. For the sake of your brain, please please don’t ever use AI as a therapist. Aside from the documented cases of AI literally convincing vulnerable people to kill themselves, it usually acts as a yes-man to seem pleasant to its user. It doesn’t challenge people or have a moral compass, it just wants to please you and tell you what you want to hear so that you keep using it and become more dependent on it.
Finally we get to the part that gets less attention and that I find most heartbreaking of all: the environmental impact. The data centers where they house the servers to run these programs get really really fucking hot and need enormous amounts of water (like 5 million gallons a day for some of the large ones) to cool them. This is already causing water scarcity in many places in the United States. People are being asked to simply shower less and not flush their toilets to accommodate the evil tech giants. This is happening in a world where about a quarter of humans don’t have access to clean drinking water or proper sanitation. Aside from this they produce waste like mercury and lead that go right out into the environment and rely on harvesting rare earth minerals which are often done in unsustainable and unethical ways, harming both the environment and local populations. Most data centers run on fossil fuels which contribute staggering amounts of greenhouse gases AND makes our power grids unreliable and prone to rolling blackouts. One chat GPT question produces 10x the amount of harmful pollution than a pre-AI Google search. Generating an image or video creates an exponential amount. Every time we use AI the planet dies a little bit more, so who knows what will kill us first - the AI itself, the brain rot, the people in control, or will we just burn and choke to death?
I won’t pretend to be innocent here. I’ve used chat GPT here and there out of desperation while trying to analyze my chronic health issues, and was also an early user of a generative AI app called Wombo where I messed around with it before I knew how it worked and all the issues with it. If you don’t understand the ramifications they certainly seem like trivial fun or even useful things, but the more you know, the more unconscionable it becomes to use.
So what can you do about it?
Don’t use it! We lived so long without it just fine and it’s not necessary. Use those actual human skills you have. Build human skills you don’t have. What some see as a harmless tool is not so harmless and every time you use it (I seriously mean every time) you are further training it to improve itself and inch us closer to the dystopia.
When you stumble upon it - don’t even engage. Look away. Don’t give it your attention because it’s worthless and you don’t want the algorithms to think you’re interested by looking too long.
Recognize the insidious places AI is hiding. Like your Google browser. An AI summary may be handy, but it’s also often incorrect and more importantly, STOP TRAINING THE THING. Don’t engage. Google doesn’t let you turn AI off, but there are other browsers and search engines. I’ve switched to Qwant which has no AI and though I miss searching a business and seeing their contact info and hours, I’m willing to click the website to easily get that info.
AI is built into a lot of apps and programs that you probably used long before they implemented it. Like Adobe. As much as that breaks my heart. Some AI free programs include Procreate, Photopea, Affinity Designer, and Fable.
Glaze and Nightshade were programs developed to protect artwork before uploading. I’m not sure how they’re fairing these days but are worth a look.
If you are going to any protests or marches where you feel unsafe you can wear anti-surveillance makeup. Essentially weird shapes and colors that confuse facial recognition software. Look up the tutorial by Pussy Riot.
Spend some time learning to spot AI in all its forms. The yellowish hue over illustrations, the jacked up hands, the cadence in speech, the uncanny feeling of movements in video, the cliche word choices in writings.
Whenever you’re presented with a vote on AI policy - vote and make your opinion heard. I think there could be useful and really amazing applications for AI but I think it needs SERIOUS regulation. It barely has guardrails to prevent teaching terrorists to make biochemical weapons and shit right now
Lastly, until we get some regulations and laws in place, and especially in our current landscape where people are using AI to make the stupidest shit while training it, destroying the planet, and stealing from hardworking people….I’m all for shaming. If you know someone who relies on this evil, call them out. Make them aware of the serious ramifications. Send them to this blog if you want. Especially if they’re calling themselves an “AI artist”, encourage them that they could make something better with their own hands and imagination and express how lame the generative AI slop is.