You know how Greta Thunberg said "You have stolen our dreams"?
This is how I feel about Sam Altman and AI.
I was *robbed* of a future where AI is a cool tool, instead of yet another shiny, meaningless tech buzzword, and a shit feature that nobody wants to increase sales. Instead of something to help us better diagnose cancer, we are setting the planet on fire and completely disregarding anything Hayao Miyazaki has said about how he feels about AI, all just to see how we'd look as Studio Ghibli characters.
You see, I study AI. But I applied before the whole ChatGPT thing. At the time, OpenAI let a few select people prompt GPT-3. To generate YouTube titles and that sort of thing.
Back then, AI was mostly used for analytical purposes. To detect fires early, to help analyze protein folding, to develop new medication. And this was what drew me in.
When ChatGPT hit the scenes, I was genuinely excited for the potential of it. For the potential to make the internet more accessible, to be used for good.
Oh, how naïve I was back then.
Instead of that, AI is - in the best case scenario - used as yet another meaningless tech buzzword. It infests any product of any company that has nothing else to offer.
And that is the best case scenario. In the average case, instead of just being enshittification itself, it helps to accelerate enshittification by generating meaningless slop to poison search results, both in text and in picture form.
In the worst case scenario, AI is actively being used for harm. Used to generate nonconsensual imagery of people. Used as a tool for misinformation, for manipulating the public opinion, not only enshittifying the internet, but actively making it a worse, more hostile, more adverse place.
And that does not even touch on the issue of how training data is gathered, and the legal and ethical problems this raises, which, I hope, being on Tumblr, you're all well aware of by now. To any artist, I fully support you using nightshade to actively poison your work.
So yes. Despite being a student of AI, I am disgusted with what this field has become.
The following paragraphs are directed at anyone who has worked or currently works on any generative AI system:
You have stolen my dreams.
Not only have you stolen my dreams, you have plundered them for every dollar, every cent, against any moral or ethical code, in search of profits over everything.
You are going against every moral code that people should be committed to. But you don't care, as long as you can make a quick buck.
You don't care if Hayao Miyazaki has called generative AI "an insult to life itself". You just want to see yourself in the Studio Ghibli style, because to you, everything, even art, is something to be commoditized, to be mass-produced just so it can be instantly forgotten.
FUCK YOU AND THE MECHANICAL HORSE YOU RODE IN ON.
