Ok, software and websites.
You can stop asking if I want to use AI when writing.
I don't. I never will.
I get that a lot of people have invested a great deal of money in it (mostly, it seems, to allow the rich to approximate skill without paying for it), but I'm just not interested in participating.
Sure, it's unethical, unsustainable, and harmful to the environment.
But those aren't even my main reasons.
And, yeah, it was trained on my published works without my consent, but again, not my primary objection.
It's also lazy and antithetical to my goal of continuing to develop my writing skill and creativity, but that's not the biggest issue either.
Mostly, the problem is that it is a crass, empty automated circumvention of life and human experience designed to imitate and masquerade as both.
So, not only is it essentially the opposite of art (art being personal effort expended to connect us through intentional, crafted expression of individual human experience), but worse, it is engineered to impersonate a perspective detached from a living person. It has no perspective. It has no accountability. It is a mimicry of human acts of creation and expression, a sophisticated parlor trick of pattern recognition, that cannot connect us to anyone (because it has no perspective or life experience with which to connect).
I'm not saying AI has no good applications. But writing? Art?
I guess AI makes sense if your concept of writing or art is mostly as a "product" or "content" divorced from the foundations of why humans give a shit about art and writing in the first place.
So, mostly, I think it's gross and kinda sad.
It's like seeing a toddler turn away from her mother to focus on hugging a mannequin.
It's like seeing a gardener spending his limited life-minutes whistling and watering plastic flowers.
It's like waking early to take your toaster to witness a sunrise.
Also... if I may... these companies have spent billions to build a plastic facade of what I do.
I don't need it.
I'm the real thing.
