I feel like theres a need to distinguish between
“it’s impossible to avoid using generative AI these days (because you need it to write emails and resumes and class assignments and work reports)”
and
“it’s impossible to avoid using generative AI these days (because it comes up automatically on search engine results, and shopping websites use it to summarize customer reviews, and phone cameras automatically use it to enhance your photos without asking, and spellcheckers in browsers and writing software now use it instead of actual dictionaries, and turn themselves back on with every update even when you turned them off– so unless you have a VERY strict list of what websites and programs you use, and you NEVER have to stray from that list for any reason, it’s gonna get forced on you without your consent)”
I don’t know that the latter is really relevant to the discussion.
Searches have been algorithmically generated for like two decades at this point. Phone cameras have worked this way for ages, too. They have no right producing the quality they do. If the worsening spell checks is a problem, get on libreoffice like everyone else.
No one cared about any of this until the moral panic started. Hell, most people prefer it actually (though, if you’re on tumblr you have self-selected for less algorithmic feeding), whether we like it or not. I’m unsure that generative AI like chatGPT has a future–most people seem to use it as a friend or therapist more than accomplishing…anything–but the things we’ve taken for granted for at least a decade are probably here to stay.
I’ve really dug deep on my own feelings on this, and I think it comes from a sense of attachment to a world that no longer exists. Yeah, it sure was nice when we understood and had control over how our tools work. When the web was fun, when shit just worked and you could account for its faults because the faults were predictable. But that isn’t the world anymore. I’m not forced to use algorithmically enhanced cameras or searches or spell checks. Maybe in this new world, I’m happier with a pencil, paper, guitar, sitting in the sun and listening to the birds instead of looking at a screen wishing things back to how they were.
Some valid points here, yeah
I do agree that the things now getting so hotly debated under the name “AI” are mostly just slightly more aggressive versions of technology that’s been around for decades.
And just how close they are to that old technology varies enormously with the specific application. On Livejournal in like 2002 or 2003 there were little Markov text generators that could make up nonsense haikus from the text on your blog posts. I suspect that whatever is summarizing Google search results is just picking a few websites in the results and doing basically that with them. At least, it seems like every time it says something egregiously wrong, someone is able to trace the component parts of that text to either a shitpost somewhere, or a valid reference taken horribly out of context. It doesn’t really generate, it just copies and chops up.
The whole debate of “I never ever use AI” versus “avoiding AI is impossible” seems to me like more of a moral purity thing than actually caring about the results of what you use.
People seem to be taking the various valid concerns about AI, and distilling them into a moral rule that divides the good people who follow it from the bad people who don’t. But they can’t agree on the exact criteria for being a Good Person who Never Uses AI.
I’ve been in private Discord servers that threaten to ban anyone who posts AI images. The enforcement of that rule follows no rhyme or reason in terms of what level of AI-enhanced filter someone can put on a photo before they’ll get a warning. And nobody dares address the fact that some of those filters are applied automatically to any photo you take on your smartphone, without even letting you choose.
All drawing I currently do is on paper, so I don’t concern myself with how much “AI” is inherent in any particular digital art software. But even if I want to share my paper-and-pencil drawings with anyone beyond the people I can meet in person, I have to make some sort of digital image of them. And I’m lucky I don’t take this no-AI purity thing as far as others claim they want to take it– because otherwise I’d have to know a lot more than I know about the workings of my camera and my scanner, and whether it’s even possible to digitize my art without violating whatever the Morally Pure rule on this is.
(Guess I’m also lucky that nobody else actually takes that no-AI purity thing as far as they claim to take it.)
Spellcheck is a minor annoyance for me. Just a red line that appears under words (like “spellcheck”) sometimes when I’m typing into fields on websites like Tumblr. I turn it off when i can, and it turns itself back on when it feels like it, and I ignore it as much as possible. (Again, lucky that no one actually cares about how this technically, by their rules, makes me a Bad Person Using AI.)
For long works where I seriously care about the editing, I don’t use LibreOffice, I’ve gone more nerdy and formatting-obsessive than that. As I’ve talked about before, I write all my fanfiction in BBEdit, a code editor for programming, which I got in the habit of using because I make HTML pages and it’s quite good for writing and editing HTML. This crossed over into fanfic because AO3 fics have to be formatted like HTML pages, and so the most effective way of making sure they retain my chosen formatting when I paste them into AO3 is just to write them in HTML from the start.
Which became even more funny when I started writing Tron fic. Guess it was meant to be.
BBEdit is pretty obedient about respecting my spellcheck decisions. And while it has some features for writing programming code in AI– which is alarming for some of the same reasons as writing school assignments or work reports in chatGPT– it doesn’t force me to use that if I don’t want to.
Which should not feel like a luxury, but here we are.