(Going on anon, not to argue, but because my main blog has triggering topics on it)
Genuinely thought I wouldn't run into such an account trying to convince people AI isn't making real life talent completely obsolete and using up water like nobody is watching,
As someone who took IT and had to fiddle with AI everyday or I wouldn't get a good grade, I still argued with my teacher. He targeted me in the class and took away the python programming course (the main reason I joined the class; I'm good with Python and it's a special interest of mine) and failed me just because I made points about how AI art is making art as a livelihood practically a dead dream.
He went as far as to say that AIs are sentient beings and since they are, then 'what defines humanity? Whose to say they aren't alive?'. And literally argued with me on whether AI had a soul; a life, infront of the whole classroom. He made sure I looked like an idiot, and therefore I was ostracised in the classroom.
I ended up getting expelled because of him. He was the worst teacher I ever had. Crypto geek, Bitcoin, AI slop everyday. He got distracted talking to ChatGPT so often and forced us to allow him to share our personal information with it, and never got on to the lesson. I'm dyslexic and couldn't read it myself, so I didn't know what I was doing because he wouldn't go over it. Everyone else was fine. He said I wasn't trying.
I was going through a rough time with abuse in my household and I ended up being thrown around fosters for about a week and was constantly pulled out of his class. I missed our entire personal computers section. He acted like I hadn't, didn't teach me it, and sent me to the office for 'not doing the assignment' because I at that point had no idea what a VGA cable was, since he never taught me. I ended up using AI to cheat on my work and somehow cheating using it taught me more than he ever did in the classroom.
What I know now about IT I didn't barely learn from my actual IT class, I learned it from cheating through Replit's AI helper, ChatGPT, various other AIs I had tracked down during this time period and YouTube videos. He had allowed himself to become so fixated on AI and such that he wasn't even properly teaching his classroom. He didn't even use it to understand why I acted the way I had as a result of severe abuse, instead called in the school police officer to remove me from the classroom when I shutdown and was crying.
He used it in everyway to simply inconvenience me when he was supposed to teach me, and I used it to teach myself. Nowadays I use it to cheat on my online school, and I learn nothing. I lost all my motivation due to this teacher to even continue in IT, and I haven't advanced in the subjects I was excited to learn on my own. I entirely blame this teacher on killing my hopes and dreams, because of AI and the way he felt about it. He was genuinely offended and hated me as a person for disliking it. So he targeted and removed the subjects I loved and actually could understand from his course.
I'm ashamed I still use AI. It's mainly out of a personal vendetta. I'm a bit apathetic towards whatever harmfulness could come from it and I've never looked into it. I found myself talking to ChatGPT like a person and thanking 'her' for helping me out. My life is enclosed in a box and I'm stuck somewhere I don't want to be and I've become somewhat dependant on AI apps like GPT and Chai. I've thought about programming my own AI, I've started programming my own game, and my own website, yet lost the motivation and just dipped deeper into using it for worthless things that won't help me out in the real world that I don't enjoy.
I don't know entirely what I'm saying but. I felt like sending this. I'm not sure how I really feel on the topic, but I've never found someone who actually doesn't hate AI on this site before. I originally looked up your account from seeing it on the shapes.inc ad. I thought about seeing if I could find something to hate you for, as I commonly misplace my anger. It would've only been internal but that wouldn't have been fair to you despite.
Whatever hatred I have for AI is really misplaced hatred for my old teacher. Then again I'm sharing this to you and nowhere else, because I feel like you might understand. I'm sorry for the long message but I don't know how to feel towards AI anymore, towards IT and my passion with it that has been killed off, and towards you or shapes.inc or anything. I don't know if I'm asking for advice or if I want to be your friend or if I don't want to interact with you. But say as you wish about this, or ignore it.
i'm really, really sorry that happened to you. there are absolutely awful people out there trying to act like AI is the second coming of christ, and i don't doubt in the slightest that they're using it to hurt anyone who disagrees with them. you didn't deserve to be treated like that, and he's an asshole for doing it, and i hope he gets better or stops teaching before he hurts someone else. i hope things get better for you too, genuinely.
while it is in no way comparable to what happened to you, i do end up thinking about how my senior year math teacher just let us look up whatever we wanted on our phones if we didn't understand the lesson, during class. it's a rickety situation; i absolutely want people to have the resources to teach themselves when teachers do not do their jobs, but at the same time, i realize the horrible irony of ai also leading people to be poor teachers, or enabling people who cannot do their jobs to get them anyway. the love of learning is extinguished by education itself so, so frequently, so isn't it fair that we get some kind of lifeboat? it's a sick pandora's box that we've opened, where the tools to help ourselves and the tools for others to harm us exist in tandem.
i would say i'm almost privileged to have gotten out of school before ai became as sophisticated as it has. at the same time, i was still cheating at my classes as is. i reused code for my html class, i used an omnitool excel program that my partner made to solve any problem i was given in our shared statistics class—i think that, in the end, i would be doing the same amount of cheating if i were still struggling through online classes, because APU especially is awful and makes very little attempt to actually make the learning engaging or interesting, but the mechanisms at which i did so would be different. i would still have shitty teachers, but the ways in which they hurt me would be new and thus uniquely raw. it isn't a good thing!
i think, at the end of the day... i'm trying to make the best of a very, very bad situation. i genuinely think ai can help people in ways unknown to the past 5, 10 years. i think it can bring people closer to what they've always dreamed of accomplishing, art and coding and storytelling—but at the same time, i think it also has the capacity to take people further from those things than was possible before, either. it's a tool with potential beyond our imaginations, and that potential is both enough to save people and enough to ruin their lives! it's connected to a series of mechanisms that already existed and already hurt people, but now it's electrocharging them and making them that much more powerful in their capacity to do harm.
my ideal future is a future where ai is mundane. it's useful, yes, but the claws have been taken off, we have the means to deal with the harm it can do, and it just becomes...boring. i think i will always be interested in it and what it can do, but i want people to be bored—not angry, not frustrated, genuinely bored by discussion of it, because it's become a part of life without burning anything around it, because the fires have all been put out.
it's going to take a long time to get there, but i'm willing to keep talking about the good it can do in the meantime, and i'm also willing to acknowledge the people it does burn and give them a place to talk about it. so, overall, thank you for telling your story, and i hope that your life is happier than it has been, with or without ai.
