when the whole world is enfatuated with a topic, at some point, you'll need to grow an opinion on it if you do not wish to be outpaced with the current state of society. the trendiest topic of the 2020's is artificial intelligence, and its growth over the last 10 years has demonstrated that, yes, this is something we need to talk about and have defined opinions on. so i wanted to give my stance on artificial intelligence as a whole, just so it's documented out there. i feel like this is important enough to warrant its own post, and it could very well be something worth discussing.
AI started to me like it did with the majority of the people: the release of OpenAI's GPT 3.5 model on july 2022. i'd already heard of alphago and machine learning but never took any particular interest towards it. only took me a couple of years to develop any actual opinion on AI with the rise of generative models being used in mainstream content production. at first, it was dell, then midjourney, then chatgpt's image models, then nano banana, and then today. the most of what i saw was in the dellai phase, where everyone was obsessed with this crappy image generation program and didn't know where it was going. but then chatgpt's image generator got its 3.0 update, and suddenly everything went out of control. it could now generate mostly passable text, and users abused the hell out of it. now everywhere you went there was a new AI meme. youtube had it, twitch, twitter, you name it (i didn't use any of the short form content platforms but i remember friends talking about there being that stuff there too). and now, there was an actual problem.
i've always been one to maintain a rather nuanced take on art as a whole. my definition of art has changed over the years, but it now remains mostly consistent towards a single goal: to transcribe the contents of the mind into a medium and share it. share it with whom? doesn't matter. now here's the problem. art makes money. good art makes a lot of money. so now, you're generating "good art" from models that were trained on said good art, and gaining money from it. that's not really art. you typed instructions in, took the product of a script you didn't write, and now you claim and parade it as your original creation. that's not how this works. the words, yes, were your doing. they're art. the generated image? no. and i feel like it's important to also branch off from this idea that art is visual only. code is art, books are art, music is art, mathematics is art, reading is art. so when you put all of those things for a model to chew down for you and then you claim "oh, i read this, i coded this, i wrote this", it's not really accurate. that's not art. that's just trash. it's not even human garbage, it's a mangled mess of other human garbage that was automated and then claimed by a human.
i like trash. not in the physical sense, the digital sense. over time, the meaning of trash around the internet has completely changed, but i would like to define it here as
i don't support the use of generative AI, i think i already made myself clear. it provides a massive damage to not only the culture of humankind but the environment that we live in. during the big boom of 2023, AI used 17.5 BILLION gallons of water alone (spectrum.ieee.org), and it keeps growing. though multiple sources seem to say different things, it's currently estimated that AI has used 264 BILLION gallons during the first semester of this year. that's almost a TRILLION liters of water, and most of the time, the countries that host data centers are poor and have limited sources or sourcs directly tied to the living condition of the citizens. it directly contributes to global warming by reducing the amount of natural cooling sources in the world via deforestation and land exploration and by emitting incredibly large amounts of carbon in the atmosphere. humanity has actively regressed in its attempts to mitigate the damage of industry, and the use of AI has been at the center stage of all of this.
but that doesn't mean all AI is bad. and that doesn't mean we should abolish the use of machine learning in fields like computer science. AI has been used extensively in the medical field over the last 5 years, opening ways to identify cancers in bud stages and saving thousands, maybe millions of lives. the use of AI in competitive sports like chess and go also opens barriers to mathematics inside of the fields, expanding human knowledge and creating strong artificial players that push real humans into becoming better every day. machine learning is a relatively new field of study in computer science and its research has brought many wonders to the lives of enthusiasts of machines and to the average person. i myself love studying about ML and i think that it is genuinely amazing how we managed to recreate neural models inside of tiny metal boxes. if you ignore the drastic mismanagement of big companies, things like GPT 5.5 and Claude's latest models are saving graces of the field and they show a bright and positive future for the development of intelligence in micro scales. overall, there are many positive things that have been brought into play by AI and that we need to address.
i feel like we need to be educated. and when we educate ourselves, we start to see through the cracks and failures that build today's world, and how important it's increasingly becoming that we need to be aware of what we, as humans, do. knowledge as we know it is being challenged, and the death of learning means a grim and dark age is coming to the future of culture as a whole. AI is an enabler of this culture — it's actively being pushed by governments around the world and endorsed monetarily with huge funds, inserting itself into our lives making its home our infested brains. i hate AI. i do not hate machine learning, i do not hate computer science. i hate what the world has done to knowledge, and i hate that there are so many people that will look at you in the eye, knowing all of this, and tell you that you should fully support the actions of these big companies and countries. educate yourself, educate others, and remember to always love yourself and those around you. stay safe, and thank you for reading