Conversations surrounding the use of AI infuriate me. As a writer and an artist, I have had strong feelings about the presence of AI in creative and academic spaces for a while now, but they have been kicked into high gear with the rising popularity of platforms like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Sora. I can’t escape it—everywhere I look, there’s an AI-generated fashion show, animated clip, or marketing scheme, and I couldn’t be more frustrated about it.
For one thing, most forms of generative AI are horrific for the environment. The energy AI takes up to spit out a mediocre essay could power several homes in the United States for an entire year. AI is wasteful and an ecological nightmare, but that’s not its only sin. AI is putting people out of work too. Yeah, you heard that right—you know when people spout nonsense about immigrants stealing your jobs? No, it’s an algorithm instead.
See, the internet is a funny thing to regulate—it’s so new and so vast that U.S. officials (and practically every other government as well) have had difficulty coming up with new policies to manage it. Copyright, in particular, has been a difficult concept to apply and is somewhat useless when it comes to protecting original ideas online. Artists, writers, and other creatives post their work to the internet knowing there is a risk that their work could easily be stolen. That doesn’t mean, however, that it is then moral or acceptable to appropriate their work.
AI is currently the most prominent culprit in art theft and perhaps the most tolerated. Most people don’t even seem to realize that AI is stealing the work of thousands; they seem to be under the impression that AI is magic and that it can create something out of nothing. But artificial intelligence doesn’t work like that—it has to learn from something. It uses patterns and algorithms to predict likely outcomes and uses that information to sculpt something out of other things. It’s like a collage—AI takes bits and pieces from real artists, writers, and photographers, and mashes them together to make something “new,” pulling from the work of creatives and providing no credit, while simultaneously threatening their livelihoods.
Despite lacking the ability to innovate in any meaningful way, artificial intelligence works faster and for cheaper than any living person on Earth can afford to; thus, companies and celebrities looking to cut corners sometimes turn to AI for promotional art, logos, and marketing. The film industry has also used AI to replace dead actors in their iconic roles, instead of hiring lookalikes or simply creating new characters.
The worst part about all of this is that they are winning. The brands and corporations attempting to replace real people with unfeeling machinery are getting closer to their goal: AI is getting better, more realistic. The art it produces and the writing it spits out have become both more accurate and more superficially beautiful… but it comes at a steep cost. Artists, writers, and creatives of all kinds—the backbones of culture and innovation in our society—are at risk of losing their jobs in the very near future because some millionaires in a New York skyrise or Silicon Valley tech business wanted to make a couple more bucks.
Seeing people resort to using AI is an especially annoying occurrence. It grates on me to see talented writers type a prompt into ChapGPT and use the results to submit a paper or an article 10 times worse than their most sleep-deprived, spelling-error-riddled work. Why should I care to read an opinion piece no one bothered to write? How could I care for a piece crafted not by the loving hands of an artist, but by unthinking and unfeeling algorithms?
In an opinion piece I wrote while still a managing editor, I called the postmodern and contemporary styles the greatest affront to art in history. “The human aspect that makes art so special and meaningful is quite literally being painted over in front of our very eyes,” I wrote, “and in our desperate attempts to protect the feelings of people who make millions off of a single paint splatter on a canvas, we hang up essays in galleries, newspapers, and online forums to explain away the death of human expression.” This article was written only a year ago, but I am already confident that I was wrong.
Not about modern art being meaningless—no, I still stand by that opinion 100%. I was wrong in thinking that the worst thing to happen to human creativity could come from actual creatives. I was wrong in believing the ultimate poison to the art world was artists themselves, when in truth, the greatest danger to innovation and creativity is the greed of corporations and the unrelenting human need for simplicity and ease, no matter the cost.
As generative AI becomes more prevalent, more popular, and more destructive, it can be easy to think about it in terms of what it gives us: an article idea when we’re in a creative block, an essay to submit for a quick grade, a digital painting we might feel we don’t have the “talent” to create. I want to remind everyone of what AI is taking away from us: human creativity. Our ability and our desire to innovate and create is being suffocated by the expansion of AI drivel; as we advance further in generative technologies, let’s be aware of how far we’ve stepped back.
