Generative AI has gone too far. Many have said it, but I need to add my human voice to the cacophony.
There are many reasons I dislike the growing use of generative AI. It is environmentally disastrous, necessitating massive, water-guzzling datacentres. In a world where many people do not have access to clean water and where countries like Australia suffer worsening droughts, people are unthinkingly wasting it to carry out basic tasks like sending an email or writing a grocery list.
Your cousin’s son is right now using litres of water to see what all the ninja turtles look like with his face. Of course, we all want to not send emails and to see what we look like as Raphael, but is it really worth the waste? The waste of the water, and the wasting of your brain, your inventiveness? People are already asking a machine to have their thoughts for them, and it’s just going to get worse. The technology arrived five minutes ago; you are not dependent on it, no matter what the marketing machine is telling you.
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And it’s not like it’s creating incredible things, either. None of the GenAI content I have seen – out in the world, or specifically for “fun” online – makes a convincing case for its necessity. I also find it disturbing, using it to create forus, accepting what it spits out as authentic, incorporating it deeply into our lives. It feels to me like we are stepping away from what makes us human, stripping ourselves of the capacity to think and feel that took us eons to evolve.
But none of these things is the worst outcome. Generative AI’s biggest crime is that it has ruined watching a cute video on the internet, which was one of the greatest and only joys left on the internet. Those brief moments of happiness are now destroyed. The thrill of seeing a video of a cute animal as you scroll (perhaps in an unlikely animal friendship) is gone. The little brain-and-heart zap that I used to receive from seeing a video of an adorable baby whale breaching beside her ginormous mother is gone. The joy I’d feel sending a video of a fat bird and a dishevelled bird to my girlfriend and saying “us” is gone.
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Being shown something glorious from nature helps remind us that there is more to life on Earth than a keyboard and a screen. That the world is big, and that beautiful moments happen alongside the brutal. That life is worth living. It was a small thing, but it was something, and it has now been drowned out by waves upon waves of AI-generated videos.
There is no coming back from here. Sure – real, sweet videos still exist. But AI has made it so that I can no longer enjoy those either. Clicking on a video and letting it send my little endorphins swirling around, a smile on my face till the end, is now a thing of the past. When I see such a video, before any other reaction I immediately wonder if it’s AI. Is the light weird, would a tiny horse really be friends with a crow, does that guy have four thumbs, etc. Then I go into the comments, half of which say it’s AI, half arguing that it’s not.
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It doesn’t really matter by that point whether it is or isn’t. The joy of the moment is lost to us all. Even if I then figure out it’s real and watch it again, it’s too late. Something has been lost, the little zap is now suspicion and disappointment.
So AI has not only gunked up the internet with fake videos, it’s also poisoned the real ones. “Charlie bit my finger” is not that funny in retrospect, but at least we knew it was real. Charlie bit that damn finger. I don’t want an AI video replicating cute things that exist in real life – they are special because they exist.
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A book is worth spending your limited time on Earth reading because it came from someone’s brain, and it took their human effort. I don’t want to listen to a song made by a computer that has never felt love or hate or horniness. I don’t want to see a movie starring not-quite-humans. And I don’t want to see a cute video, or any video, that is made by prompting a computer. I will never be impressed or delighted at something produced with generative AI. I want the real shit. I want books written by complicated people, bad drawings by sweet idiots, songs written by mentally ill gay people who have felt every moment of their life, real movies with actors that have lived, real birds, real biting of real fingers.
We don’t need fake animal videos, I promise you. Animals are already being awesome, cute and real out there. Save some water, be a human.
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