Just gonna say it, back in like 2019-2023, I was EXTREMELY pro AI. I messed around with OpenAI’s playground thing, messed around with that Dall-E Mini/craiyon thing, and was one of the first to hop on ChatGPT when it came out.
I had this really dumb opinion that it’s just fun stuff to mess around with! This isn’t gonna do any real harm! Thinking, stupidly, that most people wouldn’t use it to like replace writers or just do their work for them.
It was around 2024 I became a lot more skeptical of it. I kept seeing slop art in like local restaurants and even this one club I used to hit up that I absolutely don’t anymore. And the amount of time people say “I asked ChatGPT” drives me up the wall.
Like are you third partying your thinking!? And seeing it just dominate Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok also made me begin to lose it. It was literally the Dead Internet Theory becoming a fact. I felt like such an idiot for being pro-AI and thinking people would use it wisely.
That said, I’m not exactly anti-AI, to be fair. I have local LLM models on my computer running through LMStudio if I ever have want or need of these chatbots. It makes it way harder to use it and my poor gaming laptop screams for mercy every time I want to use Qwen, so I dunno.
I guess I’d say I’m AI-Skeptical and leaning more toward negative. But this isn’t about me, it’s about you. What do you feel about generative AI?
As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.
I hate the way they were built. I hate that my past writing has been used for LLM training. I hate that specific people I know have used LLMs to try to replicate something I personally had been doing, and they didn’t give a damn if the result was shitty. I hate that I can’t use some of my favorite punctuation and phrasing patterns anymore without people thinking my writing is AI-generated, because surprise, that’s what happens when AI is trained on text written by people like me. I hate that I can’t fully prevent anything I share publicly from being used for AI training, although I’m damn well going to try. (Hey nonconsensual AI crawlers, enjoy trapping yourselves in Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth honeypot after I publish my next blogging project.) I don’t want my writing to contribute to this BS.
I hate that the writing communities where I first shared my writing as a teenager are (a) now populated with a fair amount of obvious AI slop and (b) scraped for AI training. I hate that self-publishing spaces are inundated with AI slop. I hate that websites that previously paid writers are now paying less, or not at all, or using the writers’ work to train/build AI. I hate the way my search results are filled with articles “written” with AI instead of humans. I hate that I can’t trust that information is accurate from sources I might have trusted in the past, just because I don’t know who was using AI for “research” with less caution than I would want.
I hate the way people reply to me with AI slop text and don’t even check it over it first in work-related situations. I hate many, many other things about how it’s impacted my career that I won’t get into here.
I hate the way so many people no longer respect the art form I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I hate knowing how little people care about good information, creativity, or any consideration other than speed of “production.”
I hate that I can’t even avoid AI by disconnecting from the internet. I hate that I can no longer trust that books were written by a human, depending on where I get them. I hate the way certain apps constantly remind me of all this BS, because they just had to make a really prominent AI button instead of a normal or (better yet) removable button. I hate that my friend’s goddamn washing machine has an AI setting, even though it has nothing to do with LLMs, because the world can never stop reminding you about AI.
Believe it or not, I too was once somewhat excited about AI. I thought AI would free me from the boring tasks so I could spend more time lovingly creating and appreciating art. Silly me.