Look at this bastard little icon. You probably see it every day right now. Hell, I see it every time I pop open the WordPress toolbar, because Automattic, makers of WordPress and Jetpack (back-end technology that helps WordPress sites do what they do) are cramming it in absolutely fucking everywhere, just like every other tech company is right now. No-one asked for this, no-one wants it, no-one is happy with the results it produces.
And yet, look at that bastard little icon. Such promise it carries in its little sparkly starbursts! The suggestion that magic is about to happen! The implication that, were you just to click that bastard little icon, creativity will be magically produced from nothing, allowing you to truly express yourself without any of that pesky “thinking”! You will truly be once and for all free!
As a creative type, naturally I object to generative AI being jammed in everywhere that it doesn’t belong. I’ll admit to having found some uses of it potentially interesting — music generation is intriguing, feeling like a step onwards from a program we used to have on the Atari ST called “Band In A Box” — but whatever use case I come across, it’s hard to shake the feeling that its only real use is to enable laziness, and to prevent having to pay a real person for doing the creative work that is their specialism. (The actual computing and environmental cost of such tech doesn’t matter to AI zealots, of course.)
That’s not to say there’s no money in AI, mind; no, by golly, the big tech companies are falling over themselves to hoover up investor cash right now, and every big generative AI site features some sort of predatory monetisation system, usually involving “credits” that obfuscate how much you’re actually paying, and/or “monthly” subscriptions that are actually charged annually, because apparently that’s just a thing you can lie about now and no-one calls you on it.
I think one of the clearest signals I’ve felt that AI bullshit has gone too far is its encroachment into pornography. It’s now easier than ever to produce “deepfake” pornography featuring people who have not consented to appear in pornographic material. Of course, AI-generated slop has plenty of telltale signs, still, but the fact this stuff exists at all was already cause for concern even before it was easy to produce it.
On top of that, sites that were once about posting collections of erotic art and animations from artists, movies, anime series and video games are now overflowing with AI-generated swill; a cursory glance at e-hentai’s front page earlier revealed a multitude of galleries tagged with “[AI Generated]”, making them virtually worthless. Of course, e-hentai and sites like it already skirt the borders of morality by often including artwork artists intend to be kept behind Patreon, skeb or Fantia paywalls — but many of these galleries seem to suggest that there are a significant number of individuals out there attempting to position themselves as “artists” when all they are, in fact, doing is plugging prompts into an AI model that doesn’t chastise them in a patronising way when requesting erotic material.
I’m sick of it. I’m sick of Jetpack emailing me to join an AI “webinar”, I’m sick of ClickUp, the productivity tool we use at work, constantly spamming me about some AI feature I don’t care about, I’m sick of the breathless zealotry from the cryptobros who have found the next big thing to latch onto before it all inevitably comes tumbling down in burning wreckage… and I’m sick of the uneasiness that I’m sure anyone in a vaguely creative field is feeling right now.
And I’m not sure it’s going to go away for a while. Big Tech seems determined to make “AI” a thing. And while I’m not averse to actual, helpful uses of it — which I’m yet to see a convincingly working example of that can’t be better fulfilled by other, existing methods — I think we all know that with the people we have in charge, those actual, helpful uses are inevitably going to take a back seat to ways of screwing poor old Joe Public and his friend Struggling Artist out of their hard-earned money more than anything else.
(Aside: I tried running this article through Jetpack’s stupid “AI Assistant” to “get suggestions on how to enhance my post to better engage my audience”, and the thing just crashed. Good show!)
So fuck that bastard little icon. Take your magic sparkles and jam them right up your robotic arse. The only things allowed to sparkle like that are fairies and ponies, and AI is neither of those things. So into the trash it goes, so far as I’m concerned.
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