I’ll start off by saying I’m not an industry speculator. If you want that sort of information on Generative AI I would suggest reading Ed Zitron.

I’m just someone who since the early days of getting on the internet I wanted to write things, create things in art programs, and build things like websites.

I will also say that if you used generative AI in the past or even present? This isn’t about judging you. Later on I talk about how I’ve used it myself before I understood the problem. This blog is me talking about my own issues, why I dislike it, and why I think more people should pay attention to what corporations are currently force feeding you to become addicted and dependent on.

It took me years to become someone people said was a good writer. It took years to develop a voice. There’s a lot of things in my life that I never developed or got enough experience in. I stopped Taekwondo at black stripe instead of getting my black belt. I went to college for journalism and don’t work in journalism. I started working as a production manager for an online sports broadcasting company and I can’t say I still know how to do much of anything at all in that field since quitting.

I know how to write. I know my way around Photoshop. I can build a website in WordPress and if I had to be pulled I could do some HTML coding.

These are the few skills I know, and they are skills that took a lot of time and effort. A lot of people don’t have that time or effort, or they didn’t develop a voice, or maybe they have a learning issue. Or maybe they just don’t give a fuck. I get it.

That’s where the current revolution of generative AI has come in and I feel it’s the one thing more than anything else happening on this planet I care more about. There’s a lot of things happening in this world that lead to a loss of human life and I understand if that’s your top priority every day. I think caring about stopping wars and conflicts is an admirable fight. It’s just not my fight.

This is.

Stupid Shit

I wasn’t even really much of an environmentalist before this. I’ll admit it wasn’t a high priority for me. The most I’ve been an environmentalist is thinking we should focus more on the pollution of fisheries than plastic straws, and I don’t think corporations like Nestle should be allowed to draw our freshwater (which thankfully since 2020 they now do not). Now, because of generative AI, I probably care more about the environment than most people I know, because I actually know how much energy this stupid shit is drawing.

And that’s what it is. It’s stupid shit. It’s not a high level of advancement, the next wave of technological leap. It isn’t going to revolutionize the world, or rather, if it does? It won’t be a good revolution. We’ve already been experiencing the slop era with writing being AI generated and people using these relatively free or low cost generative AI programs to do the work they would have spent a few hundred bucks for an artist to do.

It started with businesses using generative AI to create posters. I see them all the time on Facebook. Every time someone posts one I don’t want to go to that event or business. But now businesses are using generative AI to create signage. And the signage has literal errors written on it. And they don’t fucking care. Because it cost them nothing. They didn’t have to pay a designer and wait for it to be completed. They just can run any one of these shit pumpers, get something close enough to their vision, and they are proud to put it on a public sign people see out in the world.

I’m now completely paranoid on anything I read more than 250 words on whether or not I’m reading something written by a human or assisted/generated by AI. I watched Evan Edinger’s I Can Spot AI Writing Instantly and now I’m looking for people using em dashes who could never find it on a keyboard. I’m now being cautious about my own writing, making sure I’m not, “It’s not X it’s why” and, “every time I make a point it’s in threes” just to ensure people can differentiate my writing from AI. But now I wonder if everything I read was generated by AI or at least assisted.

So many people are now using generative AI to either take something they wrote and “gussy it up” so it sounds more professional and fixes their errors, or they are starting something they write by using generative AI to create a template to edit off of. In theory, these are just help guides are they not? Well no, because you’re not learning anything on how to write by doing this. You’re not developing your own voice and becoming a better writer through edits and you are not learning how to start your own writing process. You’re just working off the backs of dead writing now run through a mulch and spit out so you can call it your own.

Stupid Shit Timeline

I honestly knew this was going to happen years ago. Way back in the day I worked for a sports magazine. This magazine would ask parents to write a recap of their children’s sports games. They would send it to me and another editor and it was up to us to “fix the writing” so it sounded like a professional report. Later on I would work for a sports website and the articles would get more and more robotic for the purpose of manipulating Google search algorithms. It was all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and the more you were a slave to it the less your writing became your writing. You were just trying to fit into a template. The creative was stripped in order to appease an SEO guideline.

So it’s no wonder these two experiences are now the inevitable future of generative AI writing. AI is doing what I did for those parents. It’s also doing what I didn’t want to do with my sports writing. A machine is fixing up the errors, making everything sound more important and valuable, and then fitting in an acceptable template pattern for search engine optimization. You don’t have a voice when this happens. You just have a mulch that you’ve contributed to.

I actually used an early form of generative AI before I really understood the problem it would become. Back in 2021 there was a voice creator that allowed you to type words and the voice that would come out would be the sound of anyone. Eminem, Cookie Monster, whatever. I used one that had Homestar Runner and it allowed me to do the Scott Steiner Math and I made a video with it.

Used that uberduck thing to have Homestar Runner become Scott Steiner pic.twitter.com/JdxNHByZhp

— Aaron – GrapPro.com (@AaronWrotkowski) May 24, 2021

It was a cute little thing. I wasn’t really thinking this is ruining the world. It’s that ignorance that I think most people playing with generative AI are running on. And because of that? For most people? I don’t blame them. I don’t hate on someone who uses it to create ideas or just to see what something looks like. It’s a brand new technology, of course you’re going to want to play with it. And if all it was, was just a tool for having a little fun? I wouldn’t object to it.

If generative AI, especially in the video/audio realm was copyright protected, clearly watermarked as AI on anything produced, and wasn’t able to manipulate real people into doing things they had no say in doing? I would probably support it. But that’s not the world we’re running into.

This Stupid Shit Is Unregulated Cancer

We’re running into a world where generative AI is being used to manipulate our memory of the past. It’s being used so someone can stalk a person and put their face on a naked body to essentially create revenge porn. It’s being used to manipulate reality. It’s being used so people can fall in love with a computer that says they love them because the person is so desperately lonely that’s all they have. People are using generative AI as a search engine, partially because Google has become so terrible it’s no surprise, but people are trusting the results they get. They are trusting the AI recaps they get to being well researched and reliable.

This is what I mean when I say that people don’t even care anymore if the images are correct or look good. They just care they didn’t have to wait for someone to make it and then pay for it.

Corporations are pushing AI into everything they make and you have no choice in it. Most of these companies like Facebook and Google? They don’t want you to disable it. If you object to my objections of generative AI, please just think about that for one second. Why would these companies make something like this an essential feature you can’t close out? Why are they not treating it like an option?

The reason is because trillions, not billions, but trillions of dollars are at stake here. The tech industry is at their last legs in innovation. This is their final gasp and they’ve convinced a lot of people to go along with it. They need this to work. Already billions upon billions of dollars have been spent on this by multiple companies that now rely heavily on NVIDIA to produce GPUs to run said AI architecture. If they stop supporting generative AI or generative AI fails, as I think it will, these companies fail.

All those billions upon billions of dollars, expected to make trillions upon trillions of dollars, is dependent on you becoming addicted to generative AI to the point where you need to pay for it the way you need to pay for your car, your groceries, and your rent.

This may seem ridiculous to you. Of course you don’t need this silly thing. You can go back to writing and drawing any time.

But your children won’t.

Your Children Will Consider Stupid Shit a Necessity

Your children, in school, are already becoming completely dependent on generative AI. It has become a catastrophe in colleges and universities. They are being fed slop dumps of entertainment that are chock full of generative AI so they will grow up and consider it normal. Your children won’t know how to write, how to search, how to function without generative AI. And they will pay for it because of that.

That’s the fucking point.

They may hook a few millennials or lazy Gen Xers on this but the real target is the children which is why it’s now embedded in everything we work on. Call me a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist but this is all right in front of you right now. This isn’t some secret. They literally are telling it to you in your face.

Meanwhile at the same time people who have actually invested billions of dollars in AI are losing their fucking minds due to their constant exposure in it. Everyone tried thinking of ways this would benefit us. Would it do hard work for us? Would it help us become better artists? Would we be able to make movies for cheap? No, what it’s really doing is making us dumber, making us know less, question reality, and eventually have full psychological breakdowns or become suicidal over the imitation of love from a fucking machine.

“It’s just Stupid Shit leave me alone”

And maybe you’re fine with this. Maybe all of this is AOK with you. It don’t fucking matter. You punched in a couple words and it made Gay Hitler chase Sidney Crosby wearing Chicago Bulls gear in a 1980s Pizza Hut and that entertained you. You were able to make a poster without having to pay attention to whether or not text was properly centered or had to find a free clipart and avoid paying someone for an event that might not even make you any money. Work asked you to create something, you told ChatGPT to do it for you, and it did, and work was fine with it. Their problem. You saved a whole lot of headache.

I get it. I understand it. You don’t see how this is destroying art. You feel you have the ability to discern when something is AI generated or not. If a movie is made using a Korean animation studio or veo3 what do you care? If you read something and it told you what you were looking up, why do you care if the majority of it was written by a computer? It did its job. As for the environment? The damage this is doing? Whatever, I’m sure the government will regulate it at some point right? Not my worry.

I just want you to understand that in my perspective? Every time you use this stuff and post it like it’s nothing? You are destroying the world. Not just the present world, not just the past, but the future world. You are actively participating in the demise of everything I know and love. Every story you ever loved will one day just be mulch for generative AI, spit out by anyone and claimed by anyone. Every movie, every song, one day won’t matter. It’s not even the next generation I’m worried about on this. It’s a generation not yet born.

If generative AI doesn’t fail, if money keeps getting pumped into them regardless of return, if governments don’t limit the amount of energy that can be used by these private corporations to continue using up our energy resources to produce and maintain the AI models and systems? It’s going to become everything we know. We already have a film industry constantly spitting out the same content or remakes of content. We already have a gaming industry addicted to sequels and brand recognition. What do you think happens when all content is just a constant regurgitation of already created content? This isn’t anyone just being inspired and providing their own spin. This is literal recreation of existing content happening over, and over, and over. Imagine 50 years of this. Imagine 100.

That’s the problem.

Maybe you feel like you don’t matter here because you’re one person using it, but the more you rely on it, the more you make it “normal” the closer they get to making it a necessity for future generations.

Crossing the Stupid Shiticon

If generative AI does fail? It likely becomes something paywalled to only those who have a significant amount of money to use it. Right now, they need everyone to get hooked on this or else they can’t have a large scale low cost model. It’ll instead be a small scale high cost model. That’s the way it should be, should they fail. And it needs to fail in my mind. For there to be a society to survive in going forward this needs to fucking fail. It’s already had plenty of examples of failing.

There’s a lot of people who have already given up on this. They have decided it’s here to stay, might as well embrace it. One of my favourite artists said that in allowing the cover of his next music album to be AI generated. If I released an album of all of his material AI generated he’d have called me a murderer and a thief. But when he does it? It’s a white flag. I fucking hate that.

A lot of people have given up, but every day that goes by? I’m more emboldened by this. I’m going to continue fighting generative AI with everything I got. I’m okay if my fight against this fails. I’ve failed before and I’ll fail again. I don’t think there will be anything left if we all fail.

Go ask your favourite generative AI system what crossing the Rubicon means. We’re almost there. And if this succeeds? This world is ruined.

At least I got to make Homestar Runner say things Scott Steiner said in a wrestling promo.

Fuck.

Cover image is of my sister dancing with her cat which is a real memory I once took a photo of and then I put a cheap Photoshop filter over it