Perfect Moments Are Not Made By Machines
Image by Nick Sirotich. Click for more.
If you wonder why I hate generative A.I. so much, you probably think it’s because the process is little more than theft from human artists whose work has been scraped without their permission and without remuneration in order to create words and images for those who have no talent or drive to do so for themselves.
Of course this is troublesome on a very basic level for me.
You may also think I hate it because the process devours natural resources such as clean, potable water for cooling the servers of the machines processing all the prompts made. This is an enormous problem in a world where millions of people do not have a reliable source for drinking water.
Most certainly a reason to eschew such frivolity as creating memes for social media that could just as easily be made by real humans with a modicum of training in image manipulation software.
But these aren’t the reasons that I abhor generative A.I. with every atom in my body.
The reason is that it was developed to create perfect moments for anyone with a keyboard or microphone to prompt a machine that has no limitations imposed on it by conscience.
Have you ever experienced a perfect moment? A moment that defines your very dreams and hopes, a moment that can never leave your memory, that lives in your heart forever?
I have. I’ve had a few. And what I know about perfect moments is twofold:
You can’t hold onto and extend them, and they absolutely, under no circumstances, can be manufactured. Not by a machine, not by you, not by god, not by anyone or any process - their nature is fleeting, and justly so.
If we could live forever in a perfect moment, it would not be perfect. Perfect moments are exclamation marks, not commas, not dashes, or colons, question marks, or periods. What if every sentence ended in an exclamation mark? You’d just be shouting for no reason.
So here comes generative A.I.—just tell it what you want and it makes it with no apparent cost to you. But what does it cost us as humans?
It diminishes our souls by making people believe that this is the way of the universe—that perfection can be manufactured at a whim. But when that’s the case, it’s no longer perfection, it's empty victory over an adversary that’s just the loneliness that we feel naturally because we long for something achievable that we have not achieved yet.
It’s natural to feel that loneliness. It drive us to work towards the goals that lay before us. It’s the very nature of humanity, and generative A.I. subverts it by supplying empty calories as nutrients, but the result can only be starvation of the soul.
Anyone can draw. Anyone can write. All it takes is sitting with a pencil and applying oneself long enough. Ideas are worthless. We have known this since the beginning of time; ideas can’t be copyrighted, trademarked, or patented under U.S. laws—only the work that results from the idea.
Only the application of ideas has any true value, and the only application of ideas that you will ever have domain over is by creating the work yourself. Otherwise, it’s just a hollow echo of someone whose work you’ve stolen. If you take pride in stealing the work of others, you fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be human.
If you can’t be part of the cure, at least stop being part of the disease.
—Anthony Taylor