A.I Sigh
Throughout my life been a tech geek. In fact, I’ve jumped onto the bandwagon of practically every technological breakthrough of the past 40 years. So why have I dug my heels in when it comes to AI?
For some of our younger viewers, it is not because I am confused by it or frightened. It is simply that I don’t think it is being used correctly.
The last blog I wrote was a rant against the way Adobe were gnawing on the hand that feeds them, by attempting to negate the creative people who buy their products.
Sadly, since then, every other commercial supplier of creative software has gone down the same rabbit hole. Slapping ‘A.I’ onto everything they produce, in the hope that they will be able to sell their products to cyber-shysters.
“Don’t have any talent? Buy our product and make people think you can draw or take good photographs.”
As a photographer, one of the sheer joys of my chosen craft/artform is the freedom to experiment. It is also the freedom to try, fail and learn from my mistakes. True growth can only happen through the process. Trust the process.
A.I slop creators, skip all of that. They don’t grow as people or gain any real skills. They type their asinine prompt into a free text box and generate thousands of wretched A.I turds. Each one designed to fool those people who are less technically savvy.
The sheer number of videos I’ve seen of dogs dragging babies away from cars reversing into garages, small animals on trampolines, kids making impressive wooden sculptures, people in wheelchairs who are sad because it’s their birthday and nobody cares is mind boggling.
It would be easy to simply discount the people who share these things as idiots; however, these are intelligent people who are only guilty of not sifting the information being presented to them online. Many of us are turning into journalists. We’re checking sources and analysing the images we see for those tell-tale signs of AI nastiness. Which is making social media utterly exhausting. I won’t share anything these days unless I have absolutely verified it to be real.
Don’t get me wrong. Machine learning (which is mostly rebadged as AI these days but isn’t) has been around for decades and does have a purpose in society. It is brilliant for pattern matching, so can take the drudgery out of tedious search activities. It can organise and index filing systems with a few prompts from the user and generate spreadsheets and presentations from raw data. In short it is great at doing the boring things, so that human beings can spent their days doing something more interesting.
However, the tech bros running things don’t want this. They haven’t had a single creative thought in their life, so do not value it in other people. They see the arts as a distraction and wish to liberate humanity from it, so they can sit mindlessly, staring at their smartphones, buying crap they don’t need from their companies.
Oh, and if you’re one of those people who are currently infesting DeviantArt with your AI slop. Just know that you are not an artist. You’re just some schmuck in your underwear typing alt text.
Oh and don’t call me ‘boomer’. I’m Gen X, bitchaz.
Lova ya!
x
