Artificial Intelligence

There's a lot of AI hate going around social media, but I am not jumping on that bandwagon. I find that AI, as with most things, has positive and negative aspects.

1. It's fun to give AI a few keywords and have it create cute fantasy pictures, such as otters having a birthday party or unicorns playing poker. Is this taking money away from "real artists?" Not as far as I'm concerned, as I would never pay for this stuff ~ it's just fun to look at for a few seconds. Back when I had my WP blog, I used these AI creations sometimes. Otherwise, I uploaded my own photos or images from free sites, such as Pixabay, but I never spent money on images for a hobby blog.

2. It is not fun to see people using AI to create nasty images of other folks, deceptive political ad/memes, and revenge pr0n videos. This is becoming a real issue now that AI is so "good" you can't tell if someone is really in a photo/video or not without forensically analyzing the metadata or whatever, and obviously bad people are using these fakes for political propaganda and other nefarious purposes. Most of us don't have FBI labs on premises to figure out what is real.

3. When I do a Google search, AI pops up first now with a summary of the results, which is convenient. I don't see how this is costing anyone money. Sometimes the AI blurb is enough; other times I scroll down to see what else is there and visit a site. It depends upon what I seek ~ a definition vs info about a movie or whatever. I guess it's possible I see fewer ads this way? Boo hoo. 

4. AI is used by advertisers to market to us more specifically, so instead of seeing a bunch of garbage ads I'm not interested in, AI combs through my texts, emails, etc., to serve me ads I sometimes click on. This doesn't bother me as much as it seems to bother other people. It's still my choice whether to buy a thing or not, same as it always was, even when I was tempted by actual products in a meatspace mall. And as far as the intrusiveness aspect, for most of us that bird has flown once we enter cyberspace, unless we take extreme, time-consuming measures to defeat all the spying.

5. Obviously fraud/identity theft is a huge problem and getting worse. It angers me that AI can be used to facilitate crime, but so can a lot of modern technology and conveniences. I am angrier at the actual criminals and the lack of consequences for them though than I am at the technology itself. I mean, I am not mad at gas stations for letting us pay at the pump; I am mad at the thieves who use credit card skimmers and the lack of the death penalty for same. Sorry not sorry, but if we lined up a bunch of thieves/scammers and shot them, I bet that would discourage others.

6. AI's editing/reminder functions are useful. From spell/grammar check to asking me if I want to reply to an older email I may have forgotten about, I appreciate these tools, both for work and for home. I mean, we've had spellcheck forever, so I don't think anyone objects to that, and I’m grateful that AI helps me to send clearer emails too. Sometimes the suggestions are silly, of course, but that's why we have "natural" intelligence to allow us to accept or ignore the suggestion. Apparently, educators are now utilizing AI to grade student papers and check for plagiarism, which causes problems when the automated features are too general. Again, there is an easy fix: use human intelligence to review the results. 

7. Some "enterprising" folks are using AI to write their entire 50K NaNoWriMo output, which I guess is annoying, but only because NaNo has changed from a fun way to help us get a bunch of words on paper to a slick, corporate organization. I've had nothing to do with NaNo for years, mostly because I can no longer summon up the motivation to stare at the screen from 4am to midnight and be an exhausted zombie for a whole month, but back in the day you could still fake your output by simply copy/pasting any glob of words into your document. Why though? To get a sticker? Now maybe it’s more than that with real prizes and contracts up for grabs. Idk. However you cheat, you're only robbing yourself of the opportunity to learn to write faster via stream of consciousness. 

8. Finally, let’s talk about creative writing. I have no problem with AI-generated prompts/ideas to stimulate a story or poem, and I already said I have no issue with spell/grammar check. But what about a piece of work entirely written by AI? Welp, I don’t like it, mostly because it offends my sense of creativity, and not so much because it takes money from “real” writers, since there are many other things I resent in that department before I get to AI, such as the ridiculous monopoly the big publishers have on Amazon. If I search for “paula light books,” it’s like I don’t exist at all because of all the popular/sponsored titles/authors that contain light. I am more pissed off at that than by some clown who decides to use AI to generate a children’s story about elephants or whatever. I understand why this makes other writers upset, but I just can’t get all wrought up about it when I was selling nothing to begin with. PFFFT!