Hey there.
I haven’t posted in… 8 months! Many times I have thought about it and wanted to, but I’ve held back for various reasons., but mainly because of AI. I’ve read about how it scrapes the web for content and essentially steals people’s words, people’s art, people’s creativity, and regurgitates it back to us as AI slop. It makes me not want to share my writing and my art online because I don’t want to feed the beast.
That’s not even getting into the environmental impact of all the data centers being built to house the enormous digital brains of AI, which are devouring land and water and the peace and quiet of anyone living nearby. Why are we doing this? So we can make funny videos of animals walking on their hind legs or riding bicycles or whatever? Or deep fakes of politicians or famous people doing scandalous things?
Am I catastrophizing? Maybe. I am aware that I have a tendency to do that. But I feel so discouraged by how quickly everyone around me seems to be jumping feet-first into the glittering wasteland of AI-generated content with no regard for the repercussions. I hate it so much.
I understand that as a tool, it has its benefits. I mean, I have used it at work to proofread my own writing and offer suggestions for improvement. I have used it to give me ideas for stupid punchy taglines to use on LinkedIn posts (again, for work, this is not something I give two shits about in real life). I have seen it used to summarize long documents into digestable summaries, or scan documents and pull out key pieces of information. Sure, that’s cool and helpful. I’m sure there are other good uses for it, but can we slow our roll here? Haven’t we learned anything from everyone’s eager adoption of smartphones and social media 20 years ago, to which we are all now hopelessly addicted?
It’s especially disheartening when the people around me – people who I thought understood me as a creative being – suggest that I use AI to do certain things. Nearly every work meeting involves a “Why don’t you put this in Copilot to see how you can improve it?” or “I asked Copilot for such-and-such and look at what it did!”
The worst is hearing that someone took something I wrote or designed and put it into Copilot to “check” if it could be improved. It’s like my 20+ years of experience means nothing. I am not averse to HUMAN critiques of my work. If someone tells me there’s something not-quite-right about something I’ve designed, or they request a revision or adjustment, I’m totally fine going back to the drawing board and trying out different ideas. I do NOT want you to put my work into Copilot or ChatGPT or whatever and have it measured against some algorithm or whatever. I can’t even express how enraged it makes me.
I know. I’m an overly-sensitive flesh-bag of a human bean. I am really not against computers doing things for us. I certainly don’t have the brain-skills to do complicated math calculations or scientific notations or whatever, but I’m not about to take my colleagues’ scientific or mathematic calculations and throw them into AI to “check” if they did it right, or “see if there’s a better way”. Why is it okay for people to do that with people’s creative work? Argh!
Honestly, I’m also just kind of fed up with computers and smartphones now too. I feel like most of my waking hours are spent looking at one of my 3 work computer screens or my 2 phone screens. I cherish my weekends when I can shove them all aside and go outside and play in my gardens, or go for a hike or paddle board or hang out with other humans. (Maybe humans should be higher on that list, but it is what it is). I feel like I’m reaching some kind of breaking point where one of these days I am just going to snap and physically destroy them all. The computers, that is.
Anyway, I think I’ve come to the end of my rant. Maybe the AI-bots will scrape this and self-destruct out of shame. Here’s hoping!
PS. The header image is something I drew with my own hand, in a physical sketchbook with real ink late at night at my kitchen table, without a computer in sight.
PPS: After I initially published this, I pasted the text into an AI-detector, because I saw a post someone else had written about how their writing kept getting flagged as AI-generated. I swear to god I did NOT use AI at all to write this post, but according to zerogpt.com, 10% of this post seems like it was AI-generated. These paragraphs are the culprits:
I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended.
Uncommon Heather 