See, I'd love more than anything to agree with all of this, genuinely. Because the scraping and collection process for AI training is highly unethical, and the mass development and hosting of AI takes an obscene amount of water to support, and the training and filtering process is mentally distressing on the workers and can be downright dangerous for mental health. But unless you're able to find me something that can do a more efficient and reliable job than AI can, I'm more than likely not going to stop using it. Just like unless you can find me an equally powerful phone for a similar price as mine, I'm going to use a phone that was likely made with the aid of a sweatshop. All the hate and vitriol towards the people who have used AI even a single time is just imbecilic and makes me want to use it more. This kind of talk won't deter people from using it- it will deter people from disclosing its use, which is worse. The last thing you want to do to get people on your side is insult their intelligence and capabilities.
You can say WordHippo or Google or Thesaurus to find rhyming words and 'tip of my tongue' words, but in the end it takes me less time to ask Claude for an x syllable word that means x than it will to sift through the internet in an uncertain venture to find one.
You can say 'just use your brain', but in the end there are times where I'd rather read something than write something. I've published dozens of fics, and hundreds of thousands of words. I know it's hard. I do writing for a living. And because it's hard, and recently very mentally taxing, sometimes I would rather like to read the niche fetish or odd AU a dozen times in a dozen different slightly shitty ways than I would like to plan, draft, write, and edit a single fic of it. Ever wanted to read something specific, but not write it? Because you can. I'm not saying it's better, because it's not. I'm saying it's easier. And unless you can find me someone who will write me tens of thousands of words of slightly shitty niche fetish fics for a flat $20 at any time of day, I'm going to continue using it.
You can say 'just publish bad art/writing' but believe it or not most people don't actually want to publish things they think are bad!! And most people, contrary to the popular "I would rather read shitty writing etc. etc." That is espoused, no one actually wants to read a fanfic that sucks and is hard to read. There are entire memes dedicated to the writing sins that cause people to back out of fics. The authors will take any form of help to make it better if they think it's beyond their capabilities, including asking an AI to edit and spellcheck. If it's 3 in the morning and my friends aren't awake, then yeah I'll ask Claude to check my work for spelling. And no one would ever know! I genuinely haven't been able to see a reason to get pressed about something as rudimentary as spellcheck. (Not referring to the garbage that Grammarly puts out; that is not just spellcheck).
You can say, 'just commission an artist or make shitty art', but unless you can point me to an artist that is willing and able to do dozens of iterations of the same character concept in semi-realism, instantly, and for free, at 2 AM, I'll probably still use AI. I try not to, though, because I think it's unethical. I don't care with writing because it's scraped my work for sure, so I have a stake in everything it generates lmao.
I absolutely agree with you about research. AIs hallucinate so much that you need to doublecheck every fact they give you with verifiable information. Never, ever use an AI for research because it is more likely to steer you wrong, and people WILL find out if your information is wrong. But no one is a bad, lazy person inherently for using it; they just need to be shown better, more reliable, more efficient methods.
Here's a long anecdote I'd like to share, regarding the popular talking point of AI writing being useless gibberish and painfully obvious: I use AI for brainstorming and getting rid of writer's block, just like the poor schmucks you complained about. I've been using it to draft some ideas for a fic I plan on writing. It generated me a chunk of text with dialogue that was incredibly well-written, so I stole it and edited it slightly. I didn't even have to edit that much, just a few phrases and weird word choices. It was probably 95% AI. I shared it in a discord, just to see what people thought of it, or if they could tell. They proceeded to tell me that my writing is incredibly realistic and that my dialogue is phenomenal. It made me feel bad, lol, but I couldn't take it back. It just confirmed that no one, not even 'AI detectors', can tell if an AI has written something; you can only tell if an AI has written something poorly. And of course, I would never admit that it was AI generated because I know I would be ousted immediately. Just like what I said before. And I never will say anything. Maybe if the general attitude was different, I would have disclosed it so that we can all be in awe of AI's capabilities when used by someone who knows how to write. Maybe I would have never shared it at all. Who knows. Technically, in this case, AI didn't steal anything, I did. Lmao.
Anyway, if you want AI to stop, which is valid and honestly a good complaint to have, you need to come up with actual alternatives. Doing something in a slower, less efficient, less reliable way just because it's the 'right thing to do' is never going to work as a movement along as no one is being tangibly harmed by it. Never. Humans are all about efficiency. If there is a way to boost efficiency, we will find it and use it. There are no two ways about it. It's just human nature.
