Ay ya yI...

Okay, not that anyone has been waiting for it but I guess it's my turn to write about AI.

I'm a creative. You all know that from my grammar choices. Very creative. As such I view AI through that lense. And the AI we are generally talking about now, I hate. The large language models, the generative art. I hate it. Just flat out hate it.

When I was still on Facebook I used to argue with friend of mine who was "creating AI art" that he was not actually creating anything. Unless he wanted to call it creating a collage of other people's art and then he should really reach out the the artists and either get their permission or PAY them. I could never get him to see that typing in "Show a woman with bees for hair" was not in any way shape or form him creating a picture of a woman with bees for hair. He didn't make that. Someone else made that, typically a few other people made that, and the AI program just pasted it all together.

In any writing group online now you will see people defending their use of AI to "write." Why wouldn't they "write" with AI? How else are they going to "write" 30 books a year? They want to make bank and AI is how they envision it happening. They think they have a million dollar idea and this is how they are going to bring it to fruition.

But no idea is a million dollar idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. And that's probably being generous. The million dollar part is the talent to write the story. The perseverance to finish the story. The confidence to submit the story. The strength to submit it again when you get rejected the first through however many times. The luck to finally get published. And then the 3 sequels that need to sell well to get to your next series. Rinse and repeat and eventually you might get to a million dollars. Maybe faster if you are lucky a second time and get an option for a movie or TV deal. But the idea? Not the hard part.

Even when I sit down here to write and I write a long post about how I have writer's block I'm not saying I have no ideas. Even if I say I don't have an idea. What I mean is I have no idea how to get the fragment in my head, or in my notebook to be more than a fragment. The people won't people. The poem won't be poetic. The story won't flow. I still have three thousand and one ideas, I just can't make them work right then. And if I used AI to "write" what I would have is a story cobbled together from work done by people who could get it to work. It's not mine. The idea isn't the important thing.

I don't want to watch AI actors that are just computer programs pulling voice work from either a voice actor, best case, or culling together old scraps of voice work from past projects. I don't want to see TV commercials that are clearly AI slop. I don't want to watch movies written by AI.

We complain about reboots and no new ideas, if we let AI take over these spaces we truly won't see new ideas. Because it's not intelligent, not like that, it's a scavenger. It's a cobbler. It's a plagiarizing machine. It cannot come up with a new idea, that's not part of its programming. So all we will have is recycled story after recycled story eventually it will be recycling from itself and it will all be the same.

I hate AI (that sort of AI, the other things that fall under the umbrella we can talk about in other ways) and I won't use it if I can help it.

But...

I'm friends with a lot of people in tech. They are being forced to integrate it into their work all the time. And they need to learn how to use it in the most effective ways because they are being forced into using it. They need to know where the pitfalls are, where the mistakes are likely to happen. They need to know how to use it to make their work easier, not harder. The tool it can be instead of the "what a fucking tool" it tends to be.

I really hate it for them. The tech industry is treating it as inevitable. Like Thanos. And like Thanos it snaps its fingers and half the workforce disappears. Only to be brought back later when the realization is made that things are broken without them.

But anyway...

I'm not sure how to stop this forced integration into everything. The "chat" windows that pop up on every website now. The publishing houses that are downloading works into editing programs that are really just feeding that work into the AI machine. The fact that you are never sure if you are talking to AI or a real person anymore. Probably a good tip is if it's really obsequious it's AI. "That's a really great question. You are so insightful." No, no I'm not. I just asked if you have that in a longer inseam.

I'm also not sure how to get to the point where the usage of it is the correct usage. Because there is a correct usage, right? I mean being able to see the patterns in massive amounts of data. Finding things that might have been missed in a scientific calculation. Finding those sparks of genius that have already been made, but maybe not brought forward. Weather patterns. Cancer treatments. Rare disease causes. I mean, there's a place for these massive learning tools.

Just keep them away from me.