I hate generative AI, to put things nicely. 

I’m growing increasingly paranoid in my day to day, constantly scrutinizing images and videos I come across to make sure they aren’t deep fakes. I find it disheartening to hear peers offhandedly using ChatGPT for things such as outlines and poems as if DIY blogs and templates don’t exist.

When I try to discourage people from using it, I’m met with “Well I only use it for this or that,” as if the problem is the frequency or situation of use. The intention of use does not lessen the impact.

I don’t want to open this article by insulting anyone because that would be a poor rhetorical strategy. But to be blunt, I’m running out of sympathy and we’ve been running out of time.

The development of generative AI and the rise in its use is dystopian.

This predicament is reflective of our society’s continuous devaluing of the arts and humanities, exploitative work ethics, and flagrant disregard for the environment. We are politically divided, emotionally drained, financially taut, and overwhelmed in every sense. I’m bombarded with so much news on an hourly basis that I can’t remember what happened last week. And now I can drive myself crazy questioning if the people on my screen are real or not.

But let’s talk about something fun instead: cartoons.

If you are going to understand one thing about me I need it to be that I love cartoons. I spend most of my free time watching superhero action cartoons targeted towards 12 year old boys. I spend the rest of my time drawing those cartoons and sharing that art online with other fans and creatives. I’ve made most of my friends this way. This is my main personality trait. I wrote my college essay about this.

So now that I’ve bared my soul for the 3 people who will read this article, you, dear reader, hopefully understand that I am speaking to you as an artist, a lover of art, and a human being when I say that the advent of generative AI has thoroughly stomped on the joy of online fandom spaces, the entertainment industry as a whole, and my general faith in humanity.

It’s literally a giant plagiarism machine.

I’ve deleted years worth of art from multiple platforms to avoid it being scraped for AI training.

When Instagram announced it would start training it’s AI models with user data, many artists in my circle, including myself, made the hard choice to scrub their accounts clean in fear of their art being swallowed up into an algorithm that would mercilessly chew up the work we put time, joy, and effort into so it could spit out bastardized amalgams.

Not too long after, Tumblr announced they’d also be using their platform to train AI– but not to worry! If you didn’t want your data used, you could simply opt out of the program (notice all users were proactively signed on instead of having the choice to opt in). Opting out, however, only applied to your specific blog, so if another user who did not opt out reblogged one of your posts on the site which functions off people reblogging other peoples posts, your data would end up getting scraped anyways!

X (formerly Twitter), of course followed suit.

I and many others have cut our losses. I’ve all but deleted Instagram, only really checking it via desktop every few months to like nice photos of my classmates. I also wiped my Twitter clean and have been awkwardly trying to find my footing on Bluesky. But it sucks for a lot of people to have to rebuild their platforms, communities, and businesses.

I still use Tumblr because my home is among those strange weirdos and their incoherent text posts, but there was a significant amount of time that I didn’t feel comfortable at all posting my art anywhere online. Of course, I’m still not safe, but being in those online spaces, getting to share thoughts and art and writing with a community of equally passionate people is how I and many others find joy from day to day. 

The things you post online are available to the world to do with which they please for basically the rest of time, (save for some legalities and technicalities, but you understand the concept of a digital footprint I hope). This has always been the case but in now being done on a much larger scale to art, literature, photography, film, and music in a much more impersonal way. Many have weighed sharing their art with a trusted community of peers against protecting their creations from thieves who feel entitled to their work, and chosen to protect their works by taking it offline or never sharing it in the first place. It sucks. I’m choosing to stick around for now.

Why are we allowing deepfake technology to continue development?

I could make an easy jab at someone’s grandma for not being able to tell the difference between AI and reality, but these things are only getting more accurate. If you’re not looking for something off, you might not notice it.

It should be obvious how dangerous it is for there to be an ever increasing amount of things online that are not real. 

Stock images of random people that look a little too smooth. Uncanny and soulless, but harmless. Anatomically incorrect images or diagrams of animals, plants, buildings. Annoying for art references, among other things. A video of a certain politician saying something contentious or inflammatory. Historically inaccurate documents. Actively detrimental to collective knowledge. Falsified video or photographic evidence of used to incriminate someone. Pornographic content of children, teenage girls, celebrities, or any unwitting victim made without their consent which can have a lasting impact on their image. Reports containing information that is misconstrued, contradictory, and flat out wrong.

Misinformation and altered photos and video have always been a thing, but generative AI has made it all the more quick and easy to produce harmful content that will do exponentially more harm than good.

 I’ve never been one to put my face online much, but especially now in an era of deep fakes and phone scams, I am making a conscious effort to keep as little of my likeness from the internet as possible.

Innovation and efficiency: OK, so are we gonna use the extra money to actually help people, or what?

Many, many, many people have already lost their jobs to AI. Writers, artists, graphic designers, voice actors, animators, the list goes on. Many more people are poised to lose their jobs in the future. Many people have been on strike for the past year trying to get protections against AI, and many more will inevitably join that battle.

Workers are being replaced because AI is faster and cheaper, but where is the resulting profit going? Hint: not back into the lives of the people losing their means of living. While there are many ways to use AI that allow us to put more time and effort into problems that require a human touch – using algorithms to diagnose and treat patients better or find patterns humans can’t – generative AI specifically fails to have made an effective argument for itself in its benefits to an economic system that does not distribute readily available funds and resources to the people who need it most. Instead just being something companies use to churn out soulless meaningless cheap slop.

A word on the things I can say:

There is a lot I can’t cover and a lot I wish I could say better. Part of that is that you should really read properly researched and professionally written articles that are much more in depth than this one written at 1 am for a highschool newspaper. But I feel like I have to say something. I hate to complain without offering a solution, but this problem is larger than one’s individual choice not to use this product being pushed on an overworked population.

What I will say is this: it’s all a matter of time.

It’s the fact that you’ve got 6 classes and sports and clubs and a family and friends and a job and your hobbies and your grades and college and a world that is turning and burning and ending and here tomorrow all the same and you just don’t have the time. (So many ads promoting gen AI use similar points or the need to complete a rush job, but why are we saddled with so much work in the first place?)

It’s the fact that you have this awesome idea you want to express, but it would take years of experience and hours of your day to execute it and you just don’t have the time. And you could pay someone, but you run a business, and business ain’t cheap. (Though I will pose this question: Is a product worth your time if it wasn’t worth someone else’s time to make it?)

I’ll also say this as someone who’s been scribbling in the pages of their notebooks since the 3rd grade, borrowing art books from the library and tracing over pictures with printer paper and a number 2 pencil, and regrettably tearing pages from old sketchbooks out in embarrassment and throwing them away.

I’ll say this as a student (well) who is always a little behind and a little too late. As someone who has downed the dangerous 10pm coffee to finish a school project due in the morning and subsequently started hearing whispering voices at the 1am mark. (No I did not finish the project that night). 

I’ll say this as someone who does too much and definitely has the time but sucks at using it and who has a hard time getting started because I want to do everything I do at %100 because I want to be seen as the best me %100 of the time.

Sometimes you’re going to make something and it’s gonna be ‘bad’.

It’s gotta be ‘bad’ before it gets ‘good’.

It’s better being ‘bad’ than it is being nothing.

It’s better being yours than it is being no one’s.

The lessons you learn from your mistakes will be yours, and the improvements you make from your lessons will have all the more impact. The things you create have value and meaning simply because you make them.

This is where I tell you that there will always be time to explore new crafts, except there won’t be. Our time here is finite and unpromised and precious, full of the fixed and the unexpected. Some of that is a fact of life. A lot of that is a society that values profit and productivity over quality of life, welfare, and basic human decency.

But that’s what makes the time you spend honing a craft all the more invaluable. 

A single art piece is years of training and hours of time and a single vision made of bits and pieces of other people’s ideas, consciously or subconsciously, funneled through a unique lense and made its own through interpretation. 

A single book is pages and pages of abandoned ideas and scenes that just don’t fit and hours of reading and rereading and revising to get it just right. 

A single song is decades of music and hundreds of new innovations on old technologies and hours of humming out chords and picking strings and breathing rhythms until it all flows into place.

The voice of a beloved character is someone in a booth channeling an idea of a person and pushing it up through their throat and out of their heart and then doing it again and again and again until they get it right.

So, if you do happen to have the time, I urge you to make it ‘bad’. Make it for yourself. Cry. Make it with a friend. Make it half-assed. Make it with 5 minutes to spare. Make it on a gentle morning when the bend of the branches compel you to capture their sway, however uselessly, in words too wordy and never quite enough. Make it with several misspellings and grammatical errors. Make it with whatever you have handy; Photoshop, crayons, napkins, a crappy camera. Make it with respect. Make it off topic. Make it pretentiously. Make it with humility. Make a fool of yourself. You’ll have more fun that way.

Please, for the love of humanity, make it yourself. Or properly compensate someone else to do it for you.

We are what we make and we make what we are. I’ll be damned if I let some machine do it for me.