The Black Mark of AI

Now that I’ve returned to this site to seek out riches and attention for my own nefarious purposes, and as I comment on other people’s work in hopes that my selfishly-intentioned kindness will feed back into me in due time, I keep seeing the AI-generated content label everywhere. I appreciate the warning, and I skip any story that may have it. I suppose that’s why it’s there, so that people whose tastes oppose AI integration into art and media can gently invest their time and attention elsewhere. But I think this is indicative of a greater blight, something which breeds animosity between myself and the robots which lazy content spewers outsource the emotional and physical labor of writing to.

That’s it, darlings. It’s just lazy. I like to imagine I worked hard (well, I worked, at least) to get where I am as a writer. It’s not very far, and lord knows I haven’t been very successful, but the words I write and the ill-edited and ill-revised words I slop onto this website are hand-typed and human-weighed. People are losing their curiosity and independence, and they’re losing their desire to make something with their own hands, but it goes further than that. I consider AI chum on this site an affront to all writers because it cheapens what they do. It is insulting to look at the human mind and human creativity and think, “Okay, but this machine can do it faster and wronger.” “I know I should actually invest time and effort into the written word if I want to make money off of this, but I can’t be bothered with that, so I’m just going to let the Plagiarism Machine do it for me.” My dude, if you’re hurting for a halfpenny per read, it’s more profitable to just get a part-time job for $7.25/hour. Geez.

I hold this opinion on all platforms. As a playwright, I feel as though I have put myself on a number of shit lists because whenever I see a theatre company use AI slop in its public-facing social media posts, I always call it out. I have been blocked by two theatre companies while doing this and have nothing to show for those efforts, but genuinely, I find it dystopian that a theatre of all places would stoop to posting an L like that. If we are to trust a theater to be a steward of art that only a human can create, then any use of AI should be considered an immediate betrayal of that stewardship. It’s a kick in the scrotum for people like me who have spent years honing a craft; it’s a theater saying, “No, you don’t get it, of course you did all that work, but we want to go with the thing that will do your job wrong.” I feel for the artist who spent all that time learning to draw hands just right only to be phased out by a slurry of six-fingered hallucinations.

In whatever case, the AI trend is proving to be catastrophic, and I am hoping that eventually it dies out. Right now, the three biggest AI tech companies are investing in each other to inflate their share price, to make it look like they’re even more profitable than before. This is an economic disaster waiting to happen, and it simply cannot happen soon enough. Is it spiteful for me to manifest a market bubble bursting just to prove the lazier “content creators” frauds? Absolutely. But I think, given the way the world has developed, I have earned the right to be spiteful. The alternative is to be jaded, and there’s too much of that these days. Until then, miss me with that tumorous AI-generated content. I will never feel any need to read it; the label itself is a black mark, smeared shit on the side of a bucket of shit.