Honestly the revelation that everything was already AI put me off this train of thought. Digital AI is just a machine that does what capitalism was already doing, but faster and with even less human intervention to curb its worst excesses, which sucks but it’s not a new problem by any means. Any movement that seeks to improve the world will need to address artificial generation as surely as it seeks to address all of the rest of society’s systems.

Ai Makes me feel true dread for the cultures of future generations. Culture gives an identity to every era. It says something about who they were, about their wants about their struggles. You can feel empathy for older generations through their writing, through their music, through their stories. It is a reminder that they were young, that we were young. A snapshot of humanity at it’s most human. And i feel a lot of second hand rage that this is being taken from future generations. They won’t have philosophers. They will be robbed of the duty to make up their own subjectivity, to even dream. Imagine a future that will be undecipherable through all the noise; Imagine eras that killed it’s thinkers, that lost all will to say something meaningful to others. Imagine eras marked by centralized monopolized aesthetics; Eras where it’s impossible to run from ideologies focus tested by algorithms and fascist governments and technocrats. Imagine the most inhuman of futures.

And what scares me the most is that there is people out there that look forward to all that.

If it makes you feel better, the climate collapse is going to get exponentially worse within our lifetimes as several climate tipping points boil over, and all biospheres are in complete ecological collapse already

There won’t be a society to shove AI on, or even data centers, by the time we are seniors (if we make it that long)

Just in time to be weak and vulnerable while widespread famine and feudalism take over

Thankfully most of the world can’t run this stuff and climate change will make that impossible, so plenty of culture will survive. I’m not as sure about the richer countries. I think AI will be what the majority of slop will be while those with money to afford voice actors, artists, musicians, and the like will take advantage of that. The larger companies will rely on AI but content creators who want an edge over the competition will go with the more authentic stuff.

It’s one of those things that just feels like it’s not only literally stealing from everyone, but also stealing something from everyone. There’s this whole “good enough” mentality that surrounds it that takes away from the hard work required by real people to both create the training data and label it.

It’s something that calcifies learning and limits our ability to interact with both technical and artistic creativity on so many levels.

My cousin today was showing me a pitch deck that was sent out by his company where the graphs all had hallucinated numbers and their company logo was re-designed on every slide because whoever made it just clicked “generate slide” 40 times.

Ironically, AI writing is actually worse than just sharing the prompt. Since all it does is fill out words that say what you prompted but in 1000 words instead of 50. Meaning now I have to parse out 950 words of fluff to see what you actually meant.