Now, I’m no big city lawyuh, but I do declare, I motherfucking HATE Generative AI and LLM’s. Deep down into the pit of my soul, on a molecular level, I would place top 10 in a Hate-off regarding the topic.
“Why does this bitch hate Generative AI so much?” I hear you ask. Excellent question, I guess. Let me tell you.
First of all, Generative AI (Shitty Skynet) is taking jobs away from real, living humans RIGHT NOW. As in, today, and for the last several years. The human cost of Generative AI and LLM’s is a clear and present danger.
Corporations like Amazon (and many others) use it for layoffs; healthcare companies have replaced humans who used to review your medications or procedures with AI assistants that no one fucking asked for, taking jobs away from living breathing assholes who could deny your claims.
It’s not just some innocent tool used to skip steps in the creative process. It’s rife with security issues, and is already breaking into other
MIT has an entire abstraction about all of the risks, it is a CHONKY read, but if you care to delve deeper into the topic, with facts and analysis from people way smarter than I, it’s worth checking out.
There are valid uses of Generative AI even in day-to-day use, science, medicine, and aerospace (et al).
Every day, more and more articles and news reports come out about how unethical and harmful Generative AI and LLM’s are.
Ethical issues within the Generative AI and LLM discussion cannot be ignored. In my opinion, trying to extricate Generative AI and LLM use from the societal and environmental toll it takes on the world is, in and of itself, unethical.
Still, it’s far from the only questionable moral quandary involved in the usage of Generative AI and LLM’s. Theft is another issue; you’re stealing real people’s work, and thus their time.
Some artists are even being accused of being AI themselves because their art or writing or music was scraped or fed into some LLM or Generative AI platform.
Peoples livelihoods are being severely impacted and sometimes even taken from them.
Another side of the human cost; mental health.
Fake companions like those that ChatGPT and Claude (for example) offer are actively making users more stupid and crazy. Users are degrading their brains.
Generative AI and LLM’s have already convinced several people to kill themselves.
This also circles back to ethics. You can get around the flimsy guardrails put in place by greedy AI corporations with relative ease, and the consequences are permanent in many such cases.
Then there’s possibly one of the most insidious uses of Generative AI and LLM’s; Consider the human children, teens, and women who’ve had harmful, exploitative images, videos, writings, and art up to and including CSA made of them entirely without their consent.
Enviromentally, this shit is using up clean drinking water and overheating the planet further than we’ve already been doing for years at an impressive clip. This paper from Stanford explores in more detail Generative AI and LLM’s environmental impacts.
Medium has published a series of articles by ecologists evaluating several aspects of the impact of training and using LLMs and their carbon footprint.
Not to mention communities surrounding Data Centers having to fight back against the corporations bringing ruin upon their communities.
OpenAI, one of the largest and most well-known Generative AI developers, funnels it’s money into supporting political candidates who turn around and make anti-human, anti-LGBTQIA, and anti BIPOC and WOMAN legislation, as well as lobbying against regulations.
OpenAI is not alone in its ties to MAGA. Companies like Anthropic attempt to push back with Democratic altruism; their hands are just as dirty in other ways, previously working with Trump’s United States Department of Defense. This new initiative is just backpedaling dressed up as donations.
The last, and least of my gripes is that any art you “make” with Generative AI or LLM’s in addition to being theft, just straight up looks like dogshit. I am also looking sternly at you, other artists.
Have a chat with yourself because you are harming your own community and work prospects in addition to the entire fuckin planet.
If you’ve read this far and still think that Generative AI and LLM’s are still the bees knees, I don’t know what to tell you, if you can ignore all these issues just to make a flyer, or write your ‘novel’, then we’re just built different.
These things are important to me, I’m no activist and I’m not perfect.
I use Amazon from time to time, I don’t always properly sort my recycling. My carbon footprint is probably smaller than many, but larger than most.
I’m certainly not perfect, but one of the easiest contributions I can make to humanity is avoiding the use of Generative AI and LLM’s until they’re inside of everything and I no longer have a choice. I will not go gently into that good night.
EllyRox 