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> My Views on Generative AI
As a Computer Science student, I should be excited by all this new technology. Machine learning is cool, and AI has been making technology better for many years now (e.g. image recognition). Being able to ask a computer something in natural language, and have it produce some meaningful output is genuinely pretty cool.
However, I can't help but feel disappointed with the state of things. Image and video generation means faking things is easier than ever, not to mention removes the creative aspect of producing this content. Vibe coding means that the internet is flooded with low quality, unmaintainable software. And a rise in LLM use means AI 'slop' is everywhere.
Increasing AI use means that people are at risk of using their own brains less, which is a detrement to everyone. When googling something, you have to read and understand the results and learn to pick out what is relevant. It's not hard, but in some cases it does take some effort to get a useful result from a google search. If instead you rely on asking a chatbot to do the work for you, then you are offloading that mental effort. Sure, it's more convenient, but if you never have to use your brain at all then you genuinely risk losing some capability. In a world where people are hyper-consuming information 24/7, do we really need to make our technology use even more mindless? I understand this isn't necesarilly the best example, but all these little things that can be replaced by AI will add up and mean all these little moments of mental effort may disappear.
Increased AI use has negative effects beyond the people using it. In recent times demand for RAM and flash storage for AI use has increased so massively that these components are becoming unattainable for many people. Prices of comsumer electronics are increasing, and it doesnt seem like it's going to get better any time soon, if at all. Power usage for these AI datacentres is only increasing, and of course there is some water usage due to the evaporative cooling used in these datacentres.
In my opinion, increased AI use is a threat to creativity, intelligence, and the planet. We are likely approaching a future where the internet is full of AI generated slop and it becomes increasingly difficult to find genuine human work. I hope this doesn't happen, but the technology is out there now. There's no going back from giving people the ability to generate realistic-looking videos of anything they want, or to write entire articles and essays with little to no thought or effort.
There's proabably a lot more I could say, but i'm not a particularly good writer and I don't want to say too much stuff without actual sources to back it up. At that point i'd basically be writing an essay, and that's beyond the scope of my little website.
Embrace human-made work, appreciate the thought and effort that goes into it, and maybe learn a thing or two yourself instead of asking an LLM. And if you're gonna use an LLM, use it to learn!
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Written by a human, for other humans. It probably isn't very good writing, but that doesn't matter.
Everything I produce is made without the use of generative AI for any step of the process.