"testing" ai

[illuvium]

yadda yadda there's a whole lot of things i dislike & that's been made abundantly clear. to kick a dead horse, i'm going to talk about ai again for the nth time. hoorah. i've gone over my dislike of people who use it on the regular to actually do work, but another subsection that i've not mentioned my distaste for are the group of people who shy away from ai but only for the reason that it's a lazy tool. i know i've said things along these lines before, but being clear, my main issue with ai is the egregious energy cost. that, apparently, isn't enough for other people. and of course i understand arguments that even just using the internet and other things contributes massively to the energy cost, and i don't disagree totally with that, but it feels so petulant and frankly speaking quite boldly oblivious to imply that there's no difference between using chatgpt and, i don't know, searching with a search engine or doing your assignments online. like it or not, the world runs on technology. what it doesn't have to run on is ai, or not at least ai being used for what it is, which is to threaten creative jobs. like basically all human inventions, ai should be aiding us. instead, it's taking jobs from creatives rather than assuming the more menial and what people would dub "unskilled" labor (which i've qualms with as always, but that's for another time). back to the original point though. my personal issue with ai is the energy cost. i don't know if it's not public knowledge since i've known about the costs for maybe a couple of years at this point, but i wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't public knowledge (read: 80% of the bees in america dying off? whole keystone species there. frankly sickening). i've seen no shortage of teachers and just other people in general generating ai as part of assignments or to incorporate within presentations. it's scary just how quickly ai can get worked into these things when it really shouldn't be. the things ai should be doing are things that are dangerous. all the time i see people question how renaissance artists were so prolific at such young ages and the reality is that they had sponsors. they had the time to invest in their craft. this is the sort of stuff we should be promoting rather than having ai make art in desperate wanting of a soul. instead, we just have these big corporations sucking the life out of every single on of their workers save for (naturally!) the absolutely lovely ceos benefiting from the exploitation of their workers as well as a cold callousness towards other people in general. you could make a michelangelo out of basically everyone on the planet, but not when 99% of those aforementioned people are stuck in dead end jobs trying to make end's meet. but i've gotten side tracked, and so i just would like to say that when people advocate for things, they need to make sure they have some consistent reason to do so. i turn my nose up at each and every one of these people who use ai for these trivial reasons, to "test" things out and see what the ai's interpretation of it is. just stop it. if you wouldn't use ai to write the slides you present, don't use ai to "draw" the images you slap onto it. it's in such poor taste.