Thoughts on AI

I'm a bit late to the party, but AI has definitely taken off lately. Every product we use now seems to have some sort of AI integration or feature baked in to capture some of the hype. How do I feel about it? Well… thats complicated...

Memes

If you dig around my GitHub you'll surely stuble upon Himbot, my Discord bot project. This is where I used to enjoy AI. For memes. I had two commands: "ask" and "pic" which generated text and images respectively. Now, I didn't write some complex algorithm for this. It used Replicate to access open source models. As it turns out, this made the bot quite fun. Have an unhinged discord conversation that needs image replies? All you had to do was throw some no-context nonsense into "/pic" and see what happens! It was amazing! This honeymoon period didn't last long...

Capitalism

Capitalism ruins all things. Including AI. Now what could be a useful and fun technology is rammed into every product ever at the expense of its users just to check a box for shareholders. Notion? It has AI now. Snapchat? Yup… an AI assistant there too. Want to use windows? I hope you aren't planning to ignore Microsoft's new OS level AI Copilot! There is no escape it seems. Even DuckDuckGo and Brave Browser are using it now (although given Brave still clings to the trash that is Web3 I am less surprised there). My point is, there is definitely going to be AI fatigue, if there is not already. Capitalism won't let us forget about this though, since it seems to line the pockets of the ultra-rich anyways. Want to make a game but don't want to pay an artist? Just pay for some compute and generate images with prompt engineering! How did that model get the data to learn to do this? No need to worry your little heads over that detail if its making you money! All of this and more is enabled by this technology and encouraged by our economic systems.

What can we do?

What can we do about this? Is there a hope for us trying to escape AI? Honestly, I am not sure. But I am definitely trying. I have removed copilot from my Windows install, and I refuse to use anything that forces me to use AI. Being concious about how you use AI is key. With so many of these models trained on the work of skilled creatives, it is our responsibility as consumers of this technology to ensure that we are always paying professionals for their work, and not using their skills for free via a heartless algorithm. Lastly, be causious of products that add AI for seemingly no reason. There is a good chance your data is being used to train it.

Thanks!

Do you have any thoughts on AI? Do you use it? If so, how? Feel free to reach out by email at me@atri.dad. Until next time! 🫡