Moral High Ground

I'm baaaaaacccckkk with another Monster induced rant.

Today, I feel the need to ramble about AI... again. Some of you may remember awhile back when I posted this:

For the record, I still feel strongly about everything I said here as far as environmental impact. Water is depleting at a rate that is concerning for sure.

That said, I have learned a lot since I formed these opinions, and I want to talk about it. Before I get into it, I want to make my stance clear, so let's get one thing straight right out of the gate: I don't like AI. I don't want it in my creative workflow and I don't want it writing my thoughts. Given the choice, I will actively choose to steer clear of it whenever possible. I value human creativity and even human error. But, I also live in reality... and right now, reality is crawling with a very specific and deeply annoying breed of internet citizen... the AI moral crusaders.

We've all seen them. They're in comment sections with their pitchforks raised, ready to crucify anyone who so much as touches a generative tool. They've branded themselves the holy guardians of human creativity. However, if you scratch the surface of their righteous indignation, you don't find ethics. Instead, you find a towering mountain of breathtaking hypocrisy. The modern AI panic isn't a principled stand... it's an exercise in drawing completely arbitrary lines in the sand to make people feel superior while swimming in the exact tech ecosystem they claim to despise.

The funniest part of the AI policing movement is that the people shouting the loudest are already dependent on it. They speak about AI like it's a vampire hovering outside of their window, waiting to be invited inside. Wake up. It's already in the kitchen making coffee... and it has been for atleast a decade.

If you use the modern internet, you're using AI. Period. You don't get to claim the moral high ground because you don't use Grok while you simultaneously navigate your day using an interconnected web of machine learning.

When you type a search query into Google, you aren't just looking at a digital library index... a massive neural network is actively guessing your human intent and curating your reality. When you type any email or text, predictive text and advanced autocorrect aren't just checking a static dictionary, they are machine learning models trained on human behavioral habits to anticipate your next thought.

Do you use Snapchat or filters on your pictures? Well... Snapchat and other filters integrated within social media have been using computer vision AI for years to map your facial geometry and glue digital animal ears to your head in real time.

Your social media feed, the very platforms used to stage these high and mighty anti AI protests, are driven by AI recommendation engines engineered to map your brain's dopamine responses and keep your eyeballs glued to the screen.

To completely opt out of AI today means going entirely off the grid, smashing your smart phone, and sending letters via carrier pigeon. If you're still using the web, you've already swallowed the pill. You're just mad about the packaging.

Now, that all aside, I will still say this:
STOP GENERATING STUPID USELESS SHIT.

My opinion on AI isn't born out of fear of the future, it's born out of respect for resources. Every single time someone fires up a generative AI model to create some useless piece of garbage, whether it's used for writing an email because they're too lazy to think, or an image of you or someone you know looking ridiculous for views or a fleeting five second laugh like Cara Cunningham (who I love btw) does constantly... a server rack in a massive data center goes into overdrive.

These data centers don't run on magic. They require immense electrical grids and millions of gallons of water just to keep the infrastructure from overheating.

So, if you're going to use a tool, use it with intentionality. Use it because it's an absolute necessity for the task at hand. Please stop treating an ecologically heavy, massive industrial infrastructure like a toy to generate useless garbage that you will forget exists in two minutes.

Prime examples of that would be this:

None of these photos are real... and all of them were made for stupid reasons. Atleast 20 liters of water were wasted for these 'laughs' for no other reason than to show how unhinged Cara claims to be.

That said, I can see the people screaming, "OMG you are sharing AI photos!" Yeah, these were already generated. I did not create them. When you go to Google and search up things, you will see a ton of results that have been generated by someone else using AI. People even like to comment on these on social media. Share a quote you like? The AI police are coming to tell you it's AI and you should be ashamed of yourself. Bitch, what? I didn't fucking generate this shit. It was already shared. I liked the quote. Fuck off.

The loudest policing happens in the creative sphere, where critics love to play a game of historical amnesia. Whenever a new tool emerges, traditionalists freak out and declare it the death of soul. Eventually they accept it and then use that tool to gatekeep the next generation.

For example, when the digital camera first emerged, the traditional photography establishment reacted with intense existential panic. They viewed the technology as a direct threat to the soul and integrity of the medium. People fiercely guarded their craft and dismissed early digital images as 'soulless' and 'clinical' due to the flat and sterile look of early sensors compared to the organic warmth of chemical film.

Beyond the aesthetic critique, there was anxiety over the 'death of truth'. Because digital files could be seamlessly manipulated in software like Adobe Photoshop without leaving a physical trace, so people worried that photography would lose its cultural authority as a reliable record of reality.

So began a bitter cultural war over artistic discipline and gatekeeping. Traditionalists looked down on instant gratification of the LCD screen and mocked digital creators for trading the darkroom for computer mice and software.

Even I got pissed off when I found out people were "writing" books using complete AI prompts and no human editing or ideas at all. I was livid. Initially, I lashed out and started ranting just like these people. How DARE them step into a craft I love and pollute it with AI slop?! I felt I worked so hard to write, edit, and publish my own work... and for someone to come along and enter a sentence long prompt and shit out a short story and sell it on Amazon like they had talent in writing made me SO mad.

I eventually got over it. Because it's none of my fucking business. I don't have to like it, and I don't have to consume it. I will avoid it like the plague to be honest. I think it's unnecessary and people should learn the craft instead of relying on a machine to do ALL of the work for them. But at the end of the day, I know what I write is human and genuine and nothing that the AI people do can take that away from me. If I place in a Vocal challenge, or someone buys one of my books, I can take pride in knowing they're enjoying MY work and not AI. That's what mattered to me. Shouting into the void about someone doing something I didn't agree with was making me bitter, and not stopping them.

Which was why I wrote my first piece. To educate people on the obscene amount of water usage it takes to create generative AI images and content. Most people didn't seem to know about that. All we can do is put forth information we believe in and agree with. We can't stop others from doing what they want to do or seeking validation from something.

Another example is digital art. Today, it's widely accepted. No one with a brain looks at a piece of digital concept art or an illustration made in Photoshop or Procreate and says, "That's not real art, a machine did it." We acknowledge the human eye, the hours of digital brushwork, and the vision behind the screen.

Yet, look at what happens in music. A musician sits down with a MIDI controller, like an Arturia MiniLab, to compose a track. They program a synthesizer, use a digital sequencer, or utilize smart quantization to snap their timing to a perfectly clean grid. Suddenly, the puritans come crawling out of the void to accuse them of using 'AI' or making 'soulless, fake music.'

Why does a digital stylus on glass count as pure human expression, but a keyboard controller triggering a digital sample is policed as a mechanical fraud? It's the exact same technological assistance, judged by two entirely different metrics. And the irony isn't lost on me that the same people critiquing this music are the digital artists... MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.

My own music has been attacked because some of it is digital. I have a friend who creates a lot of my music tracks using an Arturia MiniLab... and the Procreate people deem this AI. WHAT?!

Apparently, it's not 'art' because I don't have a full band backing me up. I'm not creative because my music is digital. DIGITAL, not GENERATED. I'm not a musician. Or an artist. Or creative. Even though I write my own lyrics, sing them myself with my own human voice into real live recording equipment, add all of my own adlibs and sound FX, edit in CapCut and Bandlabs, make the videos myself with outfits and backdrops and editing tools via CapCut. That isn't art according to the AI police. Because of DIGITAL music tracks. Fucking shutup. You're boring.

And it just gets worse when you look at the physical world. The exact same crowd that condemns generative AI as 'lazy' because you just input data and let a machine spit out a result will happily enjoy 'art' made using a 3D printer.

Let's think about the mechanics of that for a second. To create a 3D printed structure, you feed a digital CAD file into a machine, and a mechanical nozzle layers plastic with zero human touch involved in the physical creation. These same people call that 'high art' and put it on a pedestal. Meanwhile, we entirely ignore the fact that 3D printing directly displaces traditional sculptors. Artists who have spent decades mastering the grueling, physical labor of manipulating clay and marble with their bare hands are cast aside for your 3D prints...

Why is automation celebrated when it prints a physical object, but demonized when it renders pixels or text?

Let's just call it what it is. Fear and ego.

None of these people actually care about the sanctity of 'the human soul' in creation. If they did, they'd be protesting the algorithms that they're scrolling every single day on social media.

They love technology right up until the microsecond it threatens their specific hobby, their specific industry, or their specific sense of intellectual superiority. the moment a tool threatens to democratize a skill they spent time learning, they suddenly morph into ethical purists.

Bottom line? Shut the fuck up and worry about yourself... because if you cared so much, you wouldn't be chronically online bitching about what everyone else is doing or sharing. Quit accusing everyone of using AI. Especially people who have been creating their whole fucking lives. You sound salty and jealous. Do better. I don't know what to tell you.

As for me, I plan to keep avoiding AI where I can, because I like the work... and I'm not going to pretend I'm a saint for doing it... but I sure as fuck am not going to join a digital lynch mob of hypocrites who scream at the cloud while standing knee deep in the rain.