Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Just as I was about to start this blog post, a large pop up obscured my writing on this Google doc. Would I like to try Google’s AI for two months?
Nope. No, I would not.
Now, every single software app that I open forces me to endure those moments of friction before I can start the task I actually want to do. Just a few examples:
Adobe Acrobat: Would I like some AI help to answer questions? No, Adobe, I’m just trying to read through this PDF proof. Leave me alone.
Wix website designer: Hey, I see you’re writing a blog post, would you like some AI-generated post ideas for your blog post? No thank you, Wix. I’ve already written my post, and I just need to paste it in, thank you very much.
Facebook Messenger: Hey, do you want an AI-generated sticker to add to your message? NO! NO! NO! I want the sticker that I always use to send to my daughter. The fluffy pusheen cat with the pink heart above its head.
I’m just so tired of all of this obnoxious upselling of AI. Have tech companies forgotten about how to please customers? These companies have become so large and have so few regulations that they just don’t care how loudly they’re pushing something that I’m simply not asking for. It’s a sign of how much my life is tied to technology, I guess.
People keep comparing AI to when cameras were just developed. That was just a tool that made it so that people didn’t have to painstakingly recreate reality using paints, pens, and pencils. We still had photographers and painters creating art. You should just learn how to use this tool, they all say. Even worse, a writer who has already made his millions in the indie space is telling writers don’t worry about AI because people have always been stealing your content for forever, so you might as well create it for free. WTF?
To get back to the camera metaphor, it just doesn’t work at all. A camera recreated what it saw exactly. An artist could still choose their subject matter, create context, edit, revise, add a layer of their own humanity onto the photo to create art. And painters could still exist, because they no longer had to slavishly recreate reality. They could paint the surreal. They could make you glory in the beauty of their brushstrokes, relishing the process rather than trying to hide it. They could still create hyper-realistic paintings, and just adding a whimsical touch that only a painterly artist could add.
“AI” is just theft. It is literally stealing artists’ (fine art, writers, photographers, directors, graphic designers) work to develop patterns that produce least-common-denominator “art.” And, it is asking the artists to willingly give up their work for free so that this “art” can then be used by soulless corporations to sell to the masses as entertainment. This technology can only exist and create “new” work if artists continue to create new work. But if their work is stolen, artists will stop producing; it’s not a sustainable model. And then the suits in Hollywood or in Corporate America will have diminishing returns from the AI models they have that just keep mining work that has already been created.
I do not want a constant reminder every time I try to write an email, read a PDF, write a blog post, send a text message that some greedy company wants to steal my work. I keep thinking of all of the functions that I’d like Google docs or Adobe to have and when I search their forums, the reps are like, that’s a great request, maybe we’ll get to it in the future. Instead, they’re going to keep pushing crap that I’m not asking for and that I don’t need. If I’m writing a blog post about MY life, I certainly don’t need some AI generator producing mealy-mouthed pablum for me. I have what I need in my own brain.
Sigh. Now, I actually have to get back to what gives me meaning in my life, working on my novel.
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