AI makes me want to die

[moon2bright]

AI has killed the only things left that made life bearable. Art, expression, being able to use your own mind -- that's what I value most in the world. But the tech parasites want to strip us of our humanity, so they came for that too. Make no mistake: AI is the death of the mind, the death of culture. With this shit on top of everything else -- climate change, fascism -- I just don't see a future worth sticking around for. The world AI boosters think they want isn't one worth living in.

 

[Dingusguy]

If it is any solace, the AI bubble seem to be about to burst, open AI has announced they are bleeding funds, many projects such as data centers are being cancelled or delayed due to backlash, lack of electrical infrastructure or access to water for cooling.

So with any luck at least AI might get diminished down to a more managable state soon.

 

[stopMotionSickness]

I think the death of these things were carried out moreso by corporatization and cynicism than automation. Like idk if there's much more humanity in the "corporate art" style that was being made basically by the only paid artists around. The same corpos that were interested in the soulless art from then will continue to be the only ones engaging with the soulless art from AI, even if that means a bunch of people who never thought about art too hard are joining them (because of lower barriers to entry). In just the same way, the people who care and make soulful art will continue making it and making little money off it, like it has been for a while. Like look no further than music; every radio station is playing generic stuff that's meant specifically to be tolerated by the widest audience possible; yet at the same time small-time bands and producers still make plenty of live shows and albums.

There remains a pretty big distinction with movies, since those seemed to be the exception where creativity seemed to actually thrive under corporations, until only pretty recently. There might be a battleground over whether the corporations prefer streamlined production for worse but more financially "safe" movies, versus audiences who get pretty bitter about realizing AI creation is cheap/soulless. But even then, the soulless remakes and sequels that corpos keep pushing are the ones that actually make the biggest killing, far more than any original stuff that's come out recently. I suspect audiences in the first world are collectively uneasy at the future and are looking to nostalgia to calm them down, rather than giving new things a chance (for the base expectation of things turning out bad).

mb I'm rambling, but I do agree it's a pretty big subject in contemplating the future. Whether we retain authenticity in our lives or if material success necessitates becoming fake/corporatized/forced keeps being pushed by the new abilities we acquire. There is a nightmarish world forming where we automate everything life was supposed to be about, down to creativity and socializing; and plenty of meaningful jobs are disappearing with no replacements, marginalizing millions more to menial work. But then again a population that demoralized has been known to lash out even against the mightiest empires. Maybe it would be interesting to see what a world like that looks like, treating it more like looking around the stop before catching the bus.

 

[idksympxthy]

If it is any solace, the AI bubble seem to be about to burst, open AI has announced they are bleeding funds, many projects such as data centers are being cancelled or delayed due to backlash, lack of electrical infrastructure or access to water for cooling.

So with any luck at least AI might get diminished down to a more managable state soon.

With the damage it's done to forms of expression like art and social media... its too little too late. creativity is kinda dead and I see it everywhere in generated thumbnails on youtube or 'speedpaints' of pieces of art that just amalgations of other stolen artists' work. AI has done irreperable damage to the way people engage with media, fewer people can do it critically.

 

[moon2bright]

With the damage it's done to forms of expression like art and social media... its too little too late. creativity is kinda dead and I see it everywhere in generated thumbnails on youtube or 'speedpaints' of pieces of art that just amalgations of other stolen artists' work. AI has done irreperable damage to the way people engage with media, fewer people can do it critically.

Add to that the people who can't read more than a paragraph because their comprehension has eroded. It's from relying on a slopbox to summarize everything for them. And kids who've become dependent on it to write anything beyond a text. People have willingly outsourced the necessity to think about anything. The world that's emerging after just a few years of this shit isn't worth living in.

 

[soonnotkoei]

generative ai right now is being used in all the wrong ways, mostly. corpos obviously wanna shove it everywhere, but yes they will soon realize that most of the shit they're throwing isn't sticking. i am of the opinion that there be regulations in place restricting the use of genAI to where it matters and is actually useful. and we're seeing a few glimmers of hope in the industry with regards to the big players.

i agree with everyone here, the damage it's done to the creative field is pretty severe. i genuinely believe it's making young people objectively weaker critical thinkers.

 

[InsomniacPhantom]

Someone might say that the death of culture and the mind began many years before the AI boom. You can't expect something rotten (capitalist society) to give rise to something different.
I don't think people's apathy/indifference and ignorance on political and environmental issues is anything new. It's not AI's fault, it's education's fault.
I don't have much to say about art, AI is certainly an insult to thousands of years of culture, but regardless it has never been appreciated as much as it should be. Let us remember all the works destroyed during the wars.
I honestly don't know if is worse AI or the concept of paying the entrance to the museums

 

[moon2bright]

Someone might say that the death of culture and the mind began many years before the AI boom. You can't expect something rotten (capitalist society) to give rise to something different.
I don't think people's apathy/indifference and ignorance on political and environmental issues is anything new. It's not AI's fault, it's education's fault.
I don't have much to say about art, AI is certainly an insult to thousands of years of culture, but regardless it has never been appreciated as much as it should be. Let us remember all the works destroyed during the wars.
I honestly don't know if is worse AI or the concept of paying the entrance to the museums

AI is worse, don't be glib. And yeah, capitalism is -- as always -- the real villain.

 

[Pluto]

 

[moon2bright]

View attachment 199110

Very helpful. Lel kek and all that.

 

[violetforever]

yeah and this is just how i feel about most technology in general.

 

[witchcraft]

Same. Since I was very young, I'd always had hopes and dreams that I could make a living, or at least a significant supplemental income, by doing something creative. Maybe I could write scripts, or write books that might later be adapted.

I've tried YouTube, making videos and streaming. I used to write a lot in my free time, mainly for self-expression and catharsis. But AI has basically been the final nail in the coffin for my creative aspirations. When I was in public school (graduated ~10 years ago...), English was always my best subject. I was actually pretty lazy and often didn't do the assigned reading, instead opting to use sites like Sparknotes; that said, I did sooo much reading in other ways, like video games such as Elder Scrolls and Fallout and RuneScape, online forums and comment sections, etc.

Nowadays, I've been accused of using AI for writing the way that I've always written. People can't even tell the difference anymore, or they don't actually care and just use it to ragebait in the same way that they might respond with "too long, didn't read, bro wrote a whole essay lmfao" when I was trying to make a thoughtful contribution.

The irony: when AI was trained from a database with millions of texts, academic or otherwise edited and proofread, going back who knows how far in history, how do we know for sure that we can detect when a person has used AI to write something? I've always written this way—I've used em dashes for over a decade, well before the AI craze—but now suddenly I'm occasionally being accused of using AI. This was the way that I learned to write, which is reading the writings of professionals and esteemed authors of fiction... so if AI is "learning" from the same writers plus a million more that I could not read in a lifetime, it seems like our ability to "detect" AI writing is flawed. It seems inevitable that it will lead to a lot of false positives while also failing to detect actual AI writing, particularly if a human at least checked the AI writing for logical errors and fact-checking.

I'm not saying there aren't still ways. I wasn't a teacher for very long, but it's very obvious when you have a student write on paper silently for 5 minutes at the start of every class, and then suddenly their homework essay is nothing whatsoever like their actual writing. But that is very different from online witch hunts where well-read, intelligent people are being accused of using AI when AI copied them, copied us, not the other way around. The em dash has been used for hundreds of fucking years, and brainlets think that it is a surefire sign of AI.

I don't care what anybody says. They can call me unc or whatever. I am convinced that life was better, and hopes for the future were better, in the late 90s. My parents tell me stories about their childhood growing up, the sense of community that was everywhere, and so on.

People who compare AI to the printing press or typewriter are either being willingly dishonest, coping, or don't realize they're drawing a mostly false-equivalence. The printing press may have replaced the jobs of scribes and shifted power dynamics in society, in the same way that AI has. But the printing press was not a fundamental attack on human expression, nor did it leave everyone unable to trust what they see and hear. I do not see how the printing press was at all existentially problematic, whereas AI is very much so.

The saddest part is how few people care. No, I'm not talking about people who are just burned out and overstimulated. I'm talking about people who are totally okay with what's happening here. They celebrate it, even. You vent about being stripped of our humanity, and they respond with postmodernist cynical nihilistic garbage about how there is no such thing, there is no soul, there is no meaning to art, etc. If that's how the overwhelming majority of people think, why should I bother living anymore.

 

[stopMotionSickness]

Someone might say that the death of culture and the mind began many years before the AI boom.

meee! ig I need to figure out how to word things better. But tl;dr of it is human attitudes of cynicism and greed destroy art and/or demand AI art, while those who care about art will continue unaffected by the introduction of AI. Artists are hella underpaid, and yet millions if not billions of dollars still pass through sites like Bandcamp.

Someone might say that the death of culture and the mind began many years before the AI boom. You can't expect something rotten (capitalist society) to give rise to something different.
[...] ...it's education's fault.

And tbh idk if that's the case. People keep seeing that capitalism is built around people's self-interest, and assumes that self-interest exists because of capitalism. But like what alternative would have people universally value art and purge greed from the human condition?

I don't care what anybody says. They can call me unc or whatever. I am convinced that life was better, and hopes for the future were better, in the late 90s. My parents tell me stories about their childhood growing up, the sense of community that was everywhere, and so on.

The more I get into philosophy and try to figure out how "meaning" works, I keep agreeing with this more. The human reward system was built for doing something tangible with a knowable group of people, and getting a tangible result that everyone can feel and celebrate. Some say this was severed upon industrialization, but I'm more convinced it had to do with computers, most especially with the internet. Industrialization, for all its pains, did ultimately create excess/wealth that opened up a lot more upward mobility and career diversity than agriculture, if at the sacrifice of some satisfaction of doing so (landing a job doesn't feel as satisfying as a fresh steak after the brink of starvation). But now every relationship, friendship, job application, class, manufacturing process, engineering design, etc. etc. are just screens. I fully believe that it was most meaningful to live in a time either before agriculture, when collaborating with a tribe of ~100 people to take down an animal instantly secured respect, survival, and good food; or after industrialization/before computerization, when people could hone a career skill without worrying about being outcompeted or kicked to the curb, like a lot of degree holders are nowadays.

i agree with everyone here, the damage it's done to the creative field is pretty severe. i genuinely believe it's making young people objectively weaker critical thinkers.

On average, yeah the mean is being brought down. Mostly by the "average" person who might've previously been swayed by compulsory education to put an effort into thinking, but when left alone wouldn't care too much. At the same time, research suggests there's actually two modes students default to when using AI: they either "passive"ly just make the AI spit an answer they can copy+paste, or they "active"ly ask for explanations so they can actually learn it for themselves. idk what the implications of that might end up being tho.