After months of hard work, it paid off. You completed the amalgamation of many sleepless nights, tears, maybe even a little procrastination. But it was all worth it for this. You finished your essay, painting, song, poetry. Whatever it may be, you’re done. It’s out for the world’s eyes to consume and critic (hopefully not as harshly as you did). A few weeks pass, compliments, praise, and a general feeling of pride fills your body. Then you open your phone and someone plagiarized it word for word, brush stroke by brush stroke, note by note, bar for bar. What now? Now imagine this exact same scenario except it wasn’t someone else. It was something you can’t fight, you can’t talk to, something not real.
Well that was all a very dramatic way to put you into the shoes of any creator who has had their work stolen by Open AI, Chat GPT, or any other generative AI. These generators bring with them a number of ethical and societal concerns.
All generative AI is trained on already existing art. Meaning that when you type anything into these platforms, you are just receiving back a watered down combination of various artists’ hard work. These artists not only go uncredited but they also get the message of their art morphed into a shallow shell of what it once represented, if not completely changed into something that goes against what the original piece represented, all without the original artist’s consent.
AI is ruining social media. If you’ve spent a second paroozing around TikTok, Twitter, or god forbid Facebook. You will be flooded with a plethora of AI generated images. Anything from Lana Del Rey holding a Hello Kitty plush to Jesus Christ rising back from the dead. Usually all being posted without saying it’s AI. So Instagram created their own AI to detect other AI. Friendly fire if you will. Except now this “feature” meant to help artists by distinguishing the real from the fake is having the opposite effect. By flagging posts from actual artists as AI even when they spent hours if not days creating every aspect of that image, video, etc, themselves. AI has created a strange double edged sword. When it is not stealing from Artists, it’s making their work seem less impressive. Doesn’t this go against everything social media is supposed to be? A medium of connection, helping not only bring together people and communities. But creating a bridge for easy, quick connection. Has social media always been this? No. In many ways it has created larger divisions in our society. This can be seen in the way each year people are dragged further and further to the opposite extremes of each side of their own respective political spectrums. But at the very least social media created a way for people to talk to other people. Now people’s self expression is being stolen from them right beneath them for other’s profit.
AI is making perceptions of reality warped. My sister is a licensed cosmetologist. Every day I hear her horror stories about a middle aged woman who doesn’t know any better showing her a photo for inspiration. It’s perfect, not a single strand of hair sticking out, with a strange gloss that almost seems too good to be true. Spoiler! It is. These images not only prove to make previously pretty streamlined services, like haircuts, more difficult. But they also make those providing those services look less talented than they are when they can’t provide the perfect hair depicted in the image. It’s especially tricky because the person requesting this service probably didn’t think to look a tad bit closer and see this wasn’t a real image, and the hairstylist is just left attempting to find a way to make this fake a reality in any way possible. Which makes an already challenging job way harder than it needs to be.
Artificial Intelligence isn’t all bad with AI being used to detect diseases way faster than we’ve ever been able too. Technological advancements like Blendr help make creating easier instead of needing to create every single pixel. Now you can focus on creating. But that’s the important part. These generative AI aren’t helping people create or even express themselves. But rather they are taking away the only thing that we really have as humans. Our creativity and imagination to create, tell stories, express our difficult emotions and allow others to see themselves in it, and maybe even get inspired and make their own art. Instead these generative softwares bite the hand of those who tried to make the very confusing human experience, make just a little more sense. After all, why would anybody feel the need to create when now it seems all it does is feed the monster killing the very thing they hold so close to their heart.
