My thoughts about AI (and why my blog is staying AI-free)
Despite artificial intelligence (AI) dominating the tech industry news (and to an extent, media news) for the past year, I haven’t written much on the blog about AI. Part of it’s because my thoughts haven’t changed since I wrote about ChatGPT a year ago. Again, I’d like to think there’s arguments in favor of AI software, but so far, I don’t see AI being applied to anything useful. The fact AI generators are using the work of writers and artists without permission or compensation makes it an automatic “no” from me. And, of course, AI created content is notoriously mediocre-to-godawful. (Even a six-year-old knows how many fingers a human has.)
The main uses for or concerns about AI I’ve seen so far:
A way for already-stingy companies to cut corners further and generate content, without having to pay (even at paltry rates) actual writers/artists. Or editors, judging by stuff slipping through that even a junior high school student newspaper would catch.
Generating offensive “deepfake” images.
A glut of garbage content to drive traffic to websites via search engine optimization (SEO), reducing the usefulness of Google search results.
A mindless “gold rush” by tech companies to stick AI in everything, regardless of usefulness or consequences.
Making it easy to crank out and spread misinformation; a concern given the upcoming US presidential election.
My analysis of AI’s problems
Expanding further upon each of the above points...
Point 1 has definitely shown how much some businesses will disregard quality in the name of pinching pennies. A year ago, it was CNET as the poster child for this. Since then, we’ve had plenty of other examples come along:
The writer and actor strikes of 2023 had AI as creators’ major concern. And for good reason…
Disney produced the opening credits to “Secret Invasion” with AI, with lackluster and heavily criticized results.
Newspaper chain Gannet received criticism for publishing numerous high school sports articles with AI, producing nonsensical results.
Sports Illustrated magazine (which looks like it’s all but shutting down) was revealed to have used not only AI-generated articles, but also AI-generated fake writers, complete with also-fake bios.
As for point 2, recently, Twitter temporarily shut off the ability to search (what’s left of) the social network for offensive AI-generated images of singer Taylor Swift. (Microsoft’s since closed a loophole allowing the creation of such in its AI image generator.)
Point 3 is a concern for a lot of smaller sites, blogs, etc., including mine. It’s already hard to get attention or show up in Google, but a bunch of AI-generated garbage clogging Google search results doesn’t help.
Point 4 is definitely showing up en masse in all sorts of tech. “AI” is the new buzzword, no matter how useful it may or may not be for a device. Google and Samsung are pushing AI hard in their new phones/Android; Microsoft is heavily integrating AI into Windows; and even Apple is making noises about getting into AI. At this point, Linux looks like it’s going to be the only operating system left that’s AI-free by default.
Finally, point 5 will likely be a concern with this year’s elections. Misinformation on top of everything else (the disastrous state of Twitter, etc.) won’t help.
My blog and AI
Again, you won’t see any AI-generated text on my blog. I’m fully capable of doing my own writing, without relying on a glorified site scraper/”Clippy 2.0” ripping off other writers’ work. There’s also my own writing experience, skills, and (via college) training, which certainly beats some Google Search or Microsoft Office add-on.
The same goes for AI-generated images on my blog, though avoiding those might be harder. The free image and photo sites I use (Pixabay, Pexels, Flickr, etc.) are probably getting a bunch of AI-created images.
As for the future, I’m assuming (or hoping) the AI craze will go the way of the NFT/cryptocurrency craze and “pivot to video.” Those are two other recent tech fads that didn’t help anyone but their promoters.