So, Maybe You Don't Think AI is All That Bad...

THIS WAS WRITTEN BY A HUMAN WITH A HEARTBEAT, PLEASE DON’T BE OFFENDED, BUT I USED MY HANDS AND FINGERS AND BRAIN TO TYPE THIS OUT. Is that the disclaimer that we need nowadays?

You’ve obviously heard plenty about AI already, and that includes both positive and negative opinions. I am one who holds a negative opinion about it. Some people brush this off with “What’s the big deal?” or “It’s not all that bad.” Some people even agree it’s bad, but figure, “What’s the problem if I use it a little?” I am no expert on AI, but I know enough and I see all the issues it presents. I want to do my part to make it clear why people should stop using it in ANY capacity if you care for your friends, care for your kids, care for your family, and care for yourself.

To make it clear up front, I understand that there have been many forms of AI, smaller things that have existed in many facets of life. I am talking about Generative AI, Large Language Models, the stuff we have seen explode onto the scene in recent years. Can I dive in? Are the skeptics ready to come along with me? Don’t be scared, you can read the whole thing. If you think AI is fine, then you have nothing to fear about what I will write from here on out.

The Laziness Factor

You don’t need it!

Really, that should be all anyone needs to hear. You didn’t use this thing years ago, but if you are relying on it now to write your emails, just remember, you never needed it for emails before. If you become lazy and rely on AI to do things for you that you are fully able to do, then you diminish your drive a little bit.

If your drive diminishes a little there, where else might it diminish? Does it feel like it could be a slippery slope? Does it feel like you might decide there’s other things that you “just don’t have it in you to do” anymore? Do you want to turn into one of the fat-asses in WALL-E who stopped doing things for themselves and now they can’t do the simplest of tasks?

Also, seriously, to people who use it to write emails constantly, you can do it. You were doing it all along, no one was getting fired for writing subpar emails. And if you did, wow, you don’t need AI, you need help with how to write an appropriate email. Just watch a quick video online or ask a friend, I promise you, it's not tough.

But My Job… 

A little subgrouping of The Laziness Factor is called “But My Job…” because I KNOW some people say, “I’m not lazy and avoiding writing emails, I don’t have enough time because my job gives me too much to do.” I hear you. There are a lot of companies out there giving their employees work that takes up 110% of their  time but uh oh… basic math tells us we don’t have the capacity for 110%, and we cap out at 100. So, people use AI to do certain tasks so they can still get other things done.

This may be writing emails, or taking notes on a meeting because you’re booked for two and can’t attend both. I have a question for you… does it not sound like your job shouldn’t be trying to make you exist in two places at once? Or like they shouldn’t be trying to give you more work than is humanly possible to do? Do we need to instead be asking corporations to not be giving their employees more work than they can handle? The solution is not to use something to handle your 110% workload, the solution is to get the, I don’t know, million-or-billion-dollar-corporation to disperse a fair amount of work among its employees and if there is still more work to be done… THEN HIRE MORE PEOPLE.

The Intelligence Factor

So, maybe some of you people in the back are saying, “I get it, Steve. That would be ideal. But the corporations aren’t listening to us.” Yeah, I know, change doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. You are using AI to write your emails or take notes in your meetings because you’re afraid you won’t get all your work done and your job will fire you. 

First off, just because change will take a while, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still work towards change. Collectively, we need to get corporations to treat employees more fairly. Secondly, there is some other change that is taking a while, but most certainly happening in the background while you use AI.

It Might Be Making You Dumber

You might wonder how this “excellent tool” could make you dumber just because you have it write emails for you or figure out other tasks that you “don’t have time for.” Think about everything that you know how to do. There are so many things. You can write an email (seriously, trust me, you can), you can draw a picture even if it sucks, you can tie your shoes, cook food, solve an equation, do critical thinking, decipher symbolism from a portion of a book, use a screwdriver, drive a car, parallel park, setup a TV, setup some piece of furniture with a Swedish name… there’s a lot of different things, big and small, that you can do. You have all these different areas of your brain that handle different functions and tasks.

When you keep using these areas of your brain, they stay in motion, they are getting practice. Now, I’m no expert on the areas of the brain and what they lend themselves to, I won’t pretend to be. But let’s make up some examples. Let’s say, one area of your brain handles a few things that you’ve done in your life, but many of them, you don’t really do anymore.  Maybe you don’t use screwdrivers or parallel park anymore, maybe you rarely need to solve some sort of an equation, but you write emails. And let’s say one portion of your brain handles those things, and the only thing really keeping it going, is you writing those emails.

But then, AI can write emails for you. So, you stop. All the tasks that you would do that came from this area of your brain, you’re not doing them. What happens when you stop doing a certain exercise for a specific muscle group? Does it grow stronger? No. It atrophies from you never using it. It weakens. Then, when you go to use that muscle group, sorry Popeye, no spinach for you. If you stop using this portion of your brain for writing emails, you may not realize it, but you might not have been using that portion of your brain for anything else, and now you use it for nothing.

Now, it might atrophy. Now, when something comes up, like hey, do you want to take this new job? Here is the pay rate, but it works differently from your old job, because we go based on commission for most of it, so you have to take this percentage and apply it to this number, take your hourly rate, and whoa whoa whoa… this sounds like an equation. Is your atrophied section of your mind ready to handle this? Or are you going to have trouble figuring out what to do?

Imaginary situation, I know. But I’m making a point. Using your brain less is going to be bad for you. It’s as simple as that. If you leave parts of your brain sitting there, stagnant, it might just come back to bite you.

People say if you don’t use AI, you will get left behind. Uh, no. Tell me, who do you think will wind up being left behind? The person who uses a tool to do all their stuff and forgets how to do things for themselves, or the person who continues to do things for themselves and doesn’t lose their critical thinking skills?

It ITSELF Is Stupid, And It May Be Harming You

I know people will look at that example and go, “I don’t need to figure out how to solve the equation, I will use a calculator.” First off, Mr. I-Have-An-Answer-For-Everything, let’s hope you still remember how to figure out percentages on your calculator. Or are you going to take it one step further, and say, “It’s fine, I will ALSO ask AI to tell me.” Oh God, you’re going to make matters even worse.

One, allude to the above point, you might be making yourself dumber. Two, this thing is not as smart as you think it is.

When you go get information from books in a library, when you read from the dictionary, whether the physical book or online, you are gathering information that you know to be 100% correct. It is a source of truth, and you can then study it, remember it, repeat it, use it. Searching things online, REAL TRUSTED SOURCES, same deal. But people are asking AI for information, and treating it as a source of truth. It is not.

AI is gathering information from online and spitting it back to you. The problem is, it doesn’t always get it right. When I have Googled something (and maybe it’s time to stop with that and start Binging things or DuckDuckGoing things) I have been unable to ignore the fact that the Google AI always pops up first now. I had to research a lot of stuff for different freelance writing jobs that I had. One was animal-related. One was football-related. I would often look things up online, some of it was stuff I didn’t know, and sometimes it was stuff I was pretty sure of but I needed some confirmation.

In my experience with the Google AI, it is right about 90% of the time. People will say, “That’s pretty good!” No it is not. It is not your child getting a B+ in Science. It is supposed to be a source of truth. It is supposed to be 100% correct, no exceptions. If you are right 90% of the time, and you rely on something that isn’t right 100% of the time, rather 90% itself, then guess what, we’re all getting downgraded, aren’t we?

In doing my research, I would see what Google AI would say, and then I’d go on to read real sources, and I determined it was wrong about 10% of the time. Sometimes it was wildly wrong. One time, I was writing something about former NFL star Antonio Brown. Google AI told me he won a Super Bowl with the Raiders. Antonio Brown did win a Super Bowl, but with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He did not win one with the Raiders. In fact, though he was on the roster of the Raiders briefly, he never played a single game with them. Double in fact, in the entire time Antonio Brown had been in the league, the Raiders never even WENT to a Super Bowl, let alone WON a Super Bowl. It is clear, the AI saw that Antonio Brown was on the Raiders roster, that he had won a Super Bowl, and it tried to mash all that information together, and it did so in a blaze of failure.

It has also told me that a specific animal was about four feet tall at the shoulder when I was researching for a YouTube video script. The animal in question was actually about four feet long… much smaller in height. The details it gave me would suggest this animal was way larger than it was. Again, it saw a measurement that applied to the animal, and then applied it to the wrong detail… height, not length.

So, maybe you're thinking, “Steve, how does this harm me? These are details about animals and football players. This isn’t important.” Correct. Except you WILL get laughed out of any fantasy football draft and any zoologist convention if you recite these “facts.” Maybe you don’t care about that. But maybe you would care if you were looking up how much of a specific medication was safe to take in a given time period, and AI told you a shorter period of time, or was referencing what was safe for a lower dosage of the medication without you realizing it. See, it doesn’t apply only to the inconsequential, it applies to EVERYTHING. And that can get really scary and really harmful… really fast.

Conversations With Others May Become Impossible

So, maybe you're saying, "Well, I will know not to trust AI for the important stuff." Good. Will everyone else you know do the same thing?

What if people you know read something that's untrue, but now they're regarding it as the truth, and even though you know it’s untrue, you can’t get through to them? Have you had a conversation about politics or anything else that has gone this way? Yeah? AI doesn’t help with that. It feeds people misinformation and does everything to weaken public discourse when discussing important topics.

The Artistic Side

So, maybe you’re thinking, “I’ll just be smart about what I use AI for, and avoid people who rely too heavily on it. But I’ll still use it. It’s fine. It’s not doing any other harm.” I mean, come on, what do you expect me to say? There’s more, you still shouldn’t be using it.

This is the part that might elicit a groan out of your collective mouths, but it’s the artistic side of it that is damaging to society. But it is important, and I’ll get to that.

The first thing is that when you use AI to make any kind of “art” you are stealing from real artists. (Notice the quotations on art there and the lack of it on artists, that’s no accident.) People use AI to "write stories," and whether they use it for the entirety of their story, or for just parts of it, they are stealing and plagiarizing. The only reason AI can do this stuff is because it scours the internet and finds stories, learns from them, and mimics them. It's just spitting out what it found elsewhere.

It is the same with creating images, and this is where I need to explain to you that I am not a hypocrite… not anymore. But I once was, a little bit. I used to use AI to create images for stories I would post on Vocal and Medium. I never used it to assist with writing, because “THAT’S STEALING.” But sometimes I wanted a cool image and I couldn’t find any free photographs to use that worked well enough with my story, so I made “cool” images with AI. (Notice the quotes, they weren’t cool, they usually looked like trash.) I used to think, well, with writing, it's stealing from writers and I wouldn't be doing the writing, and that’s a double no-no. But with art, it’s fine, it’s not like I am trying to be a painter or cartoonist.

But someone is.

And someone is getting stolen from.

How would I like it if someone had an image that they wanted to display and they wanted there to be a fun story to go along with it? And instead of hiring me, the freelance writer who could write that for them, they used AI? Hell, let’s say that instead of even just asking me to write it for free, they used AI. Now, no writer gets a chance of getting some money or even recognition for their talents. Instead, credit goes to the robot, and the robot stole what it learned from writers online, perhaps me included. That’s infuriating.

I realized it was the same way for artists making images, and for photographers. Shouldn’t I just use the free images afforded to me at Unsplash or through other sites? Those photographers get their names credited for their work, and if someone is so willing to pay an artist for work, or promote an artist for their work, that is far better than using a machine that stole from that artist and others. Every time you use AI to create “art,” you are stealing from the art community, and you are severely hurting artists who are trying to make a name for themselves. It’s not OK for writers to say “I’ll use AI for the images because that’s not my artform” because you’re harming other artists and claiming that only your artform deserves to be protected.

If you’re a writer who refuses to use AI for your writing, then you should refuse to use it for any art. I had a several-month-stint where I used AI for art because I hadn’t realized this. I will admit that. I didn’t see it. But something opened my eyes to it, and I said NEVER AGAIN. I refuse to knowingly use AI or be affiliated with it in any capacity, and you artists should too.

And the second point about the artistic side of it, for those of you who use AI for your “art,” I got bad news for you, it isn’t art, and you aren’t an artist. In no way, shape, or form is it art to delegate some of your work for your “project” out to an entity with no soul. Art comes from people with souls. Art does not come from computers.

It doesn’t matter if you used it to write your whole story, or just part of your story, or you just used it to outline the idea because you couldn’t figure out how it should be laid out, or if you just used it come up with ideas. If Person A comes up with an idea and outlines it and does a rough draft… and Person B finds the rough draft and makes some tweaks and then hands the story in under his name… who do you feel is the true author of this work? We all know the answer. It’s art, you’re not supposed to be outsourcing the creative process, you’re supposed to be doing it.

Any work created with AI, I am not interested. It’s a kick to the collective-artist-groin, and most times, it is BLAND AND BORING. Any movie or TV show you’ve watched, any book you’ve read, any painting or sculpture you have admired was created in a painstaking fashion by a true artist because they put their soul into it. If they outsourced it to a computer, it would be far less interesting. AI finds stuff that is already created and mimics it. It doesn’t make anything new. Without artists making new things, it has no way of “creating” anything. If artists never existed, AI making “art” would never exist, and that’s your key as to how to know it isn’t art. You’re not a writer because you prompted a great story, the same way you aren’t a comedian because you repeated a Chris Rock joke word for word with the same delivery.

“I’m so funny, I could be a stand-up comedian.”

No, you couldn’t! You know who could be? Chris Rock, because that’s HIS joke. And by the way, HE IS!

The more bland things we allow into the world, the more they will faze out the beautiful things, and soon we will all be sitting in a big, heaping, steamy pile of cream of wheat, staring at beige nothingness for miles and miles. You want your kids to grow up without any way to draw inspiration for their imaginations? Should we all grow up without a sense of wonder and become the same cardboard cutouts of each other?

No thank you. And give me extra “no” and don’t even worry about the “thank you.”

Funding The Already Powerful

“Hey, Steve, I’m the annoying person who has a rebuttal to every one of your arguments because I REALLY want to prove that it’s OK for me to use AI because I just love using it. All I do is make images and share them with friends. I’m not trying to pass myself off as an artist. Cool your buns, dude.”

First off, quit talking about my buns. And buns are supposed to be warm. Secondly, using AI just churns money into the mill of the already too-rich and too-powerful. You are funding them for every use of it. Do you think ultra wealthy people who already have too much control should have more control?

And how about this line that you’ll hear from Elon Musk and some others. They say, “There will be universal high income and you won’t have a need to even work when AI completely takes over.” First off, how do you not hear that and think it sounds like the start to a dystopian nightmare that yes, I would pay $18 to watch in a theater, assuming it was written by one of those fleshy being things, uh, a human?

These ultra rich people are trying to convince us that AI will do all our jobs, and we won’t need to work, and we will all have universal high income. OK, can I get a plan? Can I get some basic framework? Or are they just going to keep repeating the same buzz words and phrases without explaining how any of that will work? And why should we believe them? We just keep using AI and they keep getting more money. That’s all they want. All these people have done is work significant amounts of time to become rich, and have never tried to give back to communities in meaningful ways. Why, all of a sudden, are they going to use AI to help us and take away jobs so we can just chill out and do nothing? And how are they, along with the government, going to implement this universal high income and allow us to buy everything that we need? How are we going to have food and water and electricity and every single other thing we need?

What… is… the… plan?

They can’t just keep saying AI will do the jobs and then we will be fine. All they want is more money. Elon Musk and Sam Altman and all the others have never cared about you over there, electrician in Ohio, or you over there, dogwalker in Delaware, or you up there, accountant in New Hampshire. Why would they start caring about you now? It is not a mandate that they help the public. Why would they start now? They could have started billions of dollars ago, but they were only concerned with earning billions more.

Are you waiting for the tigers  to change their stripes?

Stealing Jobs

“OK, Steve…”

Oh God, this guy is back.

“I agree with everything you just said.”

Oh, wow.

“I wouldn’t expect these billionaires to help us. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. They say a lot of crazy stuff, and it isn’t going to happen, they aren’t coming for our jobs.”

Oh, funny you should mention that, they have already started with that. AI has already taken plenty of jobs. And with there being too many people in the world who don’t have jobs, and too many people having trouble affording the necessities, and with too many people having to work multiple jobs… less jobs available and more people out of work is not going to help any.

I tell this to people, and some will say their favorite phrase, “the tinfoil hat.” Oh, ha-ha, the conspiracy theory stuff. People think that it’s all rumors and it isn’t really happening and that I am just repeating what I hear in the news.

Nope, I have experienced it first-hand. And I know others have. But even if others have lied to me… I have experienced it.

As I mentioned, I do freelance writing. That is not my main occupation, but it is to give myself more income as it’s needed in these times. I used to see plenty of writing jobs available on the platform I used. I used it for years, so I had a good idea as to what types of work were available, and how much was there. Quite a lot. I had several jobs at a time. Some would end, and then I’d pick up new ones to replace them.

Well, some of those jobs started ditching human writers and using AI. AI started to take the freelance writer jobs, and even though they objectively did a worse job, I guess they were cheaper, and so I lost some jobs because the person would rather use AI.

I also started seeing a ton of job postings about “write for us and train our AI to write” and I NOPE’D harder at those than I have ever NOPE’D before. But others didn’t. And I wish they NOPE’D too, but in some cases, I get it. Maybe they needed the money too. But it’s a cannibalizing job. You are taking a job, training a thing to be able to replace you for that job and other similar jobs. And that is exactly what happened. There are FAR LESS jobs available on this platform for writers, and it’s because these people got their AI systems trained and they stopped offering work to humans. Sometimes I find jobs for beginners that offer such low pay that it isn’t even worth it, but the jobs that offer a decent pay for someone of my expertise with writing, they are hard to come by. In fact, I haven’t been able to get a freelance writing job for about a year. Like I said, I used to always have at least two at a time, sometimes three, sometimes even a fourth intermittent one.

I don’t want to say I was in high-demand… but I was in medium-to-high demand because I had excellent reviews from everyone that I worked with and I produced great quality in a variety of different styles. But they’d rather go for slop now. Or for the people who still want real writers, they post the jobs, but there is far too much competition.

So, yes, they are stealing jobs already. Wake up and smell the 1099.

The Neighbor Factor

So, maybe you’re thinking, “I don’t really care. I don’t care if it makes people dumber, I don’t care if it gets thing wrong because it’s close enough, I don’t care about artists, and I don’t care about people in another profession who lost their jobs because I have my job and I am fine.”

I know there are people who think like that. If that is you, have you thought of your neighbors across the country?

You can find so many instances of people who, without their approval, have gotten large data centers plopped down in their neighborhoods and have completely disrupted their lives. Supply and demand. They supply AI to you, you use it, you keep demanding more, and they supply you with more. And every time you use it, it gives them more reason to build another data center and put it right next to a neighborhood where people have to listen to awful noise pollution 24/7.

Or it weakens their water flow to the point that they can’t even wash their dishes.

Or it turns their water brown and undrinkable and now the water that THEY PAY FOR is not healthy or safe.

The Environmental Factor

Maybe that got some of you. And maybe some of you are thinking, "Nope, I don’t even care about these strangers." But do you care about yourself?

AI data centers are causing massive harm to the environment. It's worse than so many other things out there, and we have a lot of things contributing, we don’t need one more. They use up massive amounts of water, pulling resources away from other places that need it, and they're using up so much energy that they're contributing to global warming. It’s hot out there, huh? Hottest summer on average that we have on record? And projected to be the coldest one for the rest of our lives? AI is contributing to that in a big way.

Do you not care about THE ONLY HOME THAT WE HAVE AND CAN LIVE ON?

So, maybe you’re older, and retired, and you’re thinking, “I don’t care. I don’t have much time left, I’m going to spend it making funny AI images of politicians that I don’t like doing awful things and then use that as reason to explain to people why they suck.” Terrible, by the way, even if you dislike the same politicians that I do. Use your brain, use your words.

But I hear ya. You don’t have a lot of time left on this planet, you don’t care if it goes to shit. But do you have friends or family members? Do you have kids that will be around longer than you? Do you have grandchildren that will be around a lot longer than you? Do you want them to be able to live comfortably on the planet, or do you not care if they have to exist in a sweltering, dehydrated, storm-ravaged, price-gouged, unoriginal, bland-colored, moronic land?

It doesn’t matter what reasoning you have for using AI. If it’s just for this one thing, or if this one thing isn’t so bad, or you swear it’s helping with something… no matter what it's doing, every single time, the use of it is damaging the planet.

And if that doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know what to tell you. You’re too far gone. You’re not the human I am trying to connect with. That is, if you are even human at all.