A response to Erin Underwood's open letter to SFWA and the SFF community
"AI is harmful in every possible way. It’s a highly inaccurate plagiarism tool built on creative theft, accelerated environmental destruction, human rights abuses, heightened risks of psychosis, sexual blackmail, educational collapse and the erosion of our collective sense of truth, and the only reason it’s ubiquitous despite all this is because a handful of sociopathic billionaires working in a highly unregulated field have doubled and tripled down on putting it in everything, because the minute the AI bubble bursts, they’ll loose a staggering amount of money. (That, of course, and it’s the kind of tech that aids in committing war crimes, which is always of powerful interest to the military-industrial complex.)
So when (to return to the open letter at hand) I see someone argue, as Underwood has done, that “there is no putting the genie back in the bottle” - that we must account for and accept certain types of AI use going forward, because that’s simply the world we inhabit now - it makes me want to scream until my throat ruptures, because no, we fucking don’t. We don’t have to accept AI as a technological innovation any more than we have to accept meth as a chemical innovation, and for similar reasons: AI is bad for us as a species. It harms us - and our planet - far in excess of any benefit it provides; and those benefits are overwhelmingly achievable through other, less toxic ends."