ai & my life

[illuvium]

i think it's pretty clear that i'm passionate about the impact of ai in society and in my life at the present, but i've more to say (shocker). i obviously care when others use chatgpt for the aforementioned impacts on the environment with each search, but even thinking more selfishly, i hate ai as a concept. i've never and will never use chatgpt or any of that other generative ai trash to do any of my work, but since i'm well aware that others are, it's making me more paranoid as a result. everything i write is my own and is created from all the influences of the writers i've read and whatever other interesting quotes i've picked up along the way like a raven with its treasures. with ai around, it's gotten more convoluted. i've had to be concerned about coming across as ai, especially when writing applications to things. it's just genuinely disappointing that i even have to consider this and that i have to worry that i don't come across as authentically human enough, which is honestly crazy when you think about it. kind of dystopian too; i, a real person, have to convince someone else that it's really me and not an ai generating my paragraphs. god.

what this reveals to me is perhaps more worrying, though. apparent trademarks of ai usage are more "advanced" synonyms of common words, but i really do think that these synonyms aren't advanced in the slightest. come on, delve as a red flag for ai usage? you learn that word in elementary school when you're being taught about penguins. all of this is just proving to me that there's such a decrease in literacy today, especially in the united states, that's just incredulously concerning. relying on ai is only going to augment that issue, too. elementary schoolers i know have used chatgpt. elementary schoolers! in the fourth grade! every year you're in school from elementary up until high school is crucial, but i feel like elementary is especially so. aside from the soft skills (which also are seeing, at least in my experience, a dramatic fall off), elementary school is fundamentally a time to be building your basic skills in things like reading and writing. if you have to rely on ai already to be writing basic essays, lord knows how much you'll struggle reaching high school and writing essays there. that aforementioned decrease in literacy ties into my opinions regarding booktok and the general condition of readers today, but that's also a post for another time.

all of this is to say that i'm positive ai will have excruciatingly averse effects on the current generation and the future ones, too. generative ai like this isn't something you can roll back so easily, which is a real shame since it's truly one of those things that i don't believe provide any benefit to the world. earlier today, i was watching people i used to respect or at the very least like go on chatgpt for the simplest matters. when i say that witnessing people go on chatgpt and rely on it in any manner like this drops my respect for them greatly, i mean it. in all honesty, i feel like i'm going crazy sometimes. i see online that people share similar thoughts to me, but in real life, i've not yet found someone agreeing with me. i see instead people spending their lunch breaks typing away at chatgpt and wasting all that energy.

i've mentioned in my pinned post and other places that i'm in fandoms as well. going back to ai and fandoms, it's doubly bad with things like character ai. regardless of the situation with c.ai and the suicide of a young boy, i have a hatred for the website. there's no point to it, which is what i say with every generative ai program ever, but it's doubly apparent here, with character ai. if you're truly so desperate to be able to talk to your favorite character, roleplay is right there. roleplay has existed for as long as fandom has existed. it's literally been part of fanculture forever. hell, i roleplayed in elementary school when the rage was warrior cats. ignoring all of that in favor of a lifeless chat robot is just ludicrous to me. you can make the case that the internet isn't safe. i'd be inclined to agree with that, but i just can't see how the alternative is to go to that soulless thing.

relating to fandom and also to my first post regarding generative ai, ai-generated fanfiction is ridiculous to me. reiterating: when i write fanfiction, it's with my own interpretations of the characters. it's a study of how i view them, what i think they would say, what situations i'd like them to be in and so on so forth. ai is not capable of the kind of analysis i am and that i do when i sit down to write. ai steals writers' works and plays pretend, acts like it can truly understand the characters and the manner in which you write. it can't do that. it doesn't have memory, it can't develop. you tell an ai to say that something objectively true is wrong and it'll say that. you ask it to confirm what it says right after, and it'll say that what it said was wrong not even two minutes ago is true. it's not based on logic. it's based on what it scrapes from the internet. it can never be capable of the sort of analysis real writers do when they think about what they're writing. even subconsciously, with tags like "out of character", you understand that your version of them isn't consistent. ai could never do that, because ai can't form its own analysis of anything. what makes me the angriest about ai-generated fic is that the person prompting the ai has the idea on their own. they have the ideas, they have that creative drive, and they can think, but they just refuse to, and that's the most grating part. i could never be satisfied with an ai-generated fanfiction. taking my ideas and absolutely butchering them? i'm a picky reader and a total grammar police, but i would prefer a poorly formatted and poorly written out of character fanfic made by a real person to ai-generated slop any day of the year