There’s no doubt that you’ve seen/heard news of OpenAI running out of money despite the deal they made with the Department of War. A lot of people are hoping that the biggest AI company in the world goes under, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t one of them. While I don’t think OpenAI is Satan incarnate, I feel like the way they’ve done things up until now have done more harm than good. 

Generative AI shouldn’t have taken off the way it did. It’s fucking up the environment at an alarming rate. The PC part market has inflated so much that no one is able to buy fucking RAM anymore (and that hurts my hobbyist heart). Lonely people are so addicted to chatbots that they’ll do irreversible things because their AI waifu told them to. Generative AI is stealing work from talented artists who work on commissions. Not only that, it’s stealing people’s faces. It’s turned a lot of social media sites into “content” factories with no love, passion, or substance. And of course, when AI gets information wrong, it gets it REALLY wrong. Just ask the lawyer that used ChatGPT in a legal case.

But, I also feel that AI has its time, place, and application, and should be used only for those times, places, and applications. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMRWF) came together, pooled their historical data, and built a few AI models that would better track and predict hurricanes. By the NOAA’s admission, while none of them are perfect, it’s helped in their research. The AI models haven’t replaced traditional weather predicting; it’s only helped improve methods they’ve been using for years. 

For the Average Joe/Jane, I feel as though AI is best used for simpler tasks that are lower on your priority list. Taking meeting notes, ensuring appointments are scheduled, keeping lists, and so on. Basically what Siri and Alexa do, if they were run by more ethical companies and weren’t recording everything you said so they can sell things to you later. Not everyone can afford to hire a personal assistant, but everyone who has a lot of shit to manage could benefit from the services of one. 

The most vocal AI haters, though, would probably rip my head off for my views on AI, at least, based on what I’ve seen them say to others who share my viewpoint.

Trolling or not, I don’t think the people who are anti-AI should be so aggressively anti-AI, banning people from forums when they use AI to translate their native language into English and shitting on digital art that looks a little bit too polished. I’ve seen the latter a lot more often with people posting pictures, then posting a video of the process of them making the picture. While videos of art timelapses have always been a thing, the intent was “Here’s my process and what brushes I used,” and not “I’m just doing this, so people know I did this by hand.”

A more extreme example is when Sandfall Interactive, who made Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, faced heavy backlash for using an AI-generated texture during the development of the game, then lying about it. As such, they were stripped of their Indie Game of the Year Award, since the Indie Game Awards has a strict “No genAI” rule. The people who already hated E33 just started hating them more after that, and all praise for the game seemingly went out the window.

Should Sandfall have gotten their award stripped? Yes. You would do the same thing for an athlete taking steroids.
Should people be calling E33 “slop?” No. I haven’t played it, but it looks GORGEOUS, from concept art to final product. A lot of passion was involved there and it shows.
Should people be harassing the developers because of a pillar covered in newspapers? No. Don’t do that. Boycott the game if you feel you must, but don’t bug the devs. Go touch grass. Start a business. Step your pussy up. Just…stop.

People would probably be more accepting of AI if there were stricter regulations on its environmental footprint, where training data is sourced, and consequences of illicit actions using AI.

For the first point, better optimization AI could lead to less CO2 and heat output by hardware. Unfortunately, we just aren’t there yet in terms of technology. Progress marches on, but it’s not marching nearly quickly enough for our planet. The environment can’t handle what’s being done to it, and if stricter regulations aren’t enforced, we’re looking at CO2 emissions equal to 10 million additional cars on roadways. This leads to a worse greenhouse effect and “heat islands” near the data centers.

For the ethically sourced training data, do you really expect big companies to do everything ethically at this point? While they SHOULD, it doesn’t mean they WILL. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic claim to pull their training data from open sources online. They are most likely misrepresenting the real numbers of those sources (like how Nestlé does with their cocoa beans). Homebrewed LLMs would be the way to go, but again, that would require a more powerful PC that NO ONE CAN AFFORD TO BUILD OR UPGRADE BECAUSE PARTS ARE TOO EXPENSIVE.

At least with Anthropic, it doesn’t steal other people’s artwork for its image generation. Seriously, have Claude generate an image of something. It will look like a little kid figuring out MS Paint in the 90s. 

Much like Apple Airtags, Rophynol, and organized religion, while generative AI was created with good intentions, people use it for nefarious purposes. People use AI tools to cheat on tests, replace their own workforce with LLMs and manufacture porn of people who would never consent to it. Despite people being expelled, fined, or arrested for doing things like that, people continue to find ways to sidestep restrictions. If harsher punishments were in place for these violations, maybe more law-abiding people would want to use AI.

For creative work, like drawing a picture, composing a song, or writing a blog post, AI shouldn’t have a place in it. I agree with that wholeheartedly. It’s bad enough people want to use AI to replace office jobs; don’t let it replace artists and musicians. 

But for smaller, lower priority tasks? Sure. Have your LLM get some templates going for your emails. Have it make you some flashcards for the thing you’re studying. Have it give you some ideas of what to meal prep for the week. But, for the love of God, don’t be completely dependent on it. The purpose of any tool is to COMPLEMENT your work, not do the work for you.

And, if you’re vehemently against AI, then you don’t have to use it. Even for tools that have AI integrated into it already (like Office365 and Firefox), there are also tools that do not use it. It’s just a matter of researching. Boycott the things that don’t align with your values. But, don’t dump on people who use them from time to time. They’re just trying to be a bit more productive.

You can dump on the people who are trying to replace their workforce with AI all day. But, not Tim from Accounting who just uses an AI-made template for his spreadsheets. He’s still working hard entering the data and crunching the numbers himself. He’s just saving a bit of time whenever he makes a new document.