I was responding to your comment about consumers not being able to tell if Generative AI has been used. I can’t tell the difference between battery farmed eggs and free range ones, but I still avoid eggs that aren’t free range. That doesn’t seem like I’ve lost track of the point, to me.
I then expanded what I was saying, by explaining that I don’t agree with battery farming, which is why I avoid eggs produced that way, despite not being able to actually tell if an egg is free range or battery farmed. This relates to the point about Generative AI use because I also don’t agree with using Generative AI in art and media, and might or might not be able to tell if it’s used.
To respond to your latest comment about my actions and beliefs being irrelevant because my not supporting something I disagree with won’t stop it happening; you’re right. Hens are still battery farmed. As much as I wish it wouldn’t happen, it does. Does that make me sticking by my own morals and feelings futile or irrelevant? I don’t think so.
As for the objections I have with Generative AI, there are a few: I think it’s inauthentic. I want to experience art that was made with intention. I want to see what people are capable of making, and how people tell stories. We’re a storytelling species, I think it’s really important for us. I feel like I’ve been lied to when art is generated by an unthinking machine and then presented as though it was made by a human.
For me, art is a connection between me and the artist. If somebody writes a sad song, and plays it, then I get to experience and understand their feelings in that moment. It’s a communication. I feel something, and they’ve given that to me. If a chatbot did it… Well nobody communicated anything. It’s a lie. It basically catfished my emotions.
There are other objections, too; the plagiarism of actual human work without recompense. The fact that these chatbots are making people mentally unstable, the fact that these chatbots only exist to enrich the already wealthy. The fact that all of this is being sold to us as some way to remove effort from our lives, even the fun parts of our lives. I think effort and hard work are their own reward a lot of the time, and I hate to see laziness championed because it leads to uninteresting and lame shit.
Sorry, that was a long one, and I’ll cut it off here before it gets any longer 😂
Re your last point, I’m a full time web developer and while I’m not building entire games or whatever, I am currently working on a fairly complex and involved data migration project. My boss has demanded I do the whole thing with AI and don’t write code.
Thus far, it’s been incredibly frustrating to get it to do what I need it to do without having the chatbot change tonnes of tiny things or assume and hallucinate stuff that simply shouldn’t be there. Beyond those time-wasting frustrations, the fact that I’m not getting hands-on means my mental model of how the data is translating from one system to another is muddy. It’s not as clear as it would be were I building this thing myself. Specifically, because I’m not building it myself, I’m not running into edge cases personally and unpicking the knots of the current system.
There’s no intentionality in what chatbots generate, by definition. They have no intention, they’re not alive, they can’t think. They don’t understand things.
I’m sorry but I’m sort of done with this topic. I don’t like Generative AI, I think it’s disingenuous, lazy, furthering the commodification of art and creativity, and damaging our abilities to think critically. However, I do understand that some people have found it helpful in some contexts, and other people like to play with it. Thanks for the chat. 👍