See also: privacy policy and copyright policy.
Writing, painting, music, and other creative endeavors, are meant to be a communication from the artist to their audience. We’re in this business to entertain, enlighten, and to share our own unique perspective. We put our heart and soul into our work, as a gift to those who receive it.
When generative AI is used to produce “content,” half of this relationship is missing; communication isn’t real if there’s nobody on the sending end. Large Language Models and image generation software produce nothing new. They have no heart, no soul, not even a mind. They work from giant databases of stolen material, running it through a blender to produce a jumbled-up slurry that may resemble art in form, but lacks depth, cohesiveness, novelty, and applicability to current events. It’s easy for people to imagine there’s something there, but that all comes from the reader. There’s a reason this stuff is called “slop.”
There’s more fine work out there, created by humans, than any of us will have time to experience. Generative AI software benefits nobody, except the people who stole all that material and are using it without the creators’ permission or compensation. Its sole purpose is to pay artists and writers even less than the pittance they have been making, in hopes that people will become so accustomed to substandard product that they just accept it.
Generative AI may become a more accurate mockery of human-created content, harder to distinguish from human-created works by automated testing. But it will never achieve depth or relevance to the human experience, because it will never have a human mind and heart. In fact, it’s on track to get worse in that respect, as the software gobbles up its own slop as training materials, further diluting the influence of actual humans.
In solidarity with all writers and other creative professionals, I reject generative AI tools. Anything that purports to replace human creatives, and anything that relies on a trove of stolen information, should be anathema to real artists who respect the value of each others’ work. This includes all my colleagues in other creative fields.
I draw a distinction between generative AI and real AI tools, such as grammar checkers and photo effect filters, which exist to assist creatives rather than supplant them. I have no objection to these. However, if your AI tools are part of the same software that includes generative AI, the I discourage the use of generative AI tools for any purpose. You may feel that whatever you’re doing doesn’t rely on the stolen data, but if that’s true, please try to find an alternative that doesn’t have stolen data and whose use doesn’t enrich the people who stole it.
Apart from the question of theft and the loss of the benefits of real art to our society and culture, I’m concerned with the environmental impact of the AI data centers, including their huge power demands, massive consumption of fresh water at a time when the world is in “global water bankruptcy,” and the injustice of the disproportionate effect of their emissions on poorer communities who lack the influence to resist facilities being sited there.
Just say no to generative AI.