Why I'm Not Worried About AI

Entering our third year of a post-AI world seems to have done little to dampen the hype around it. Buzzword or not, it’s hard to ignore the vigour in which tech is determined to crown itself the new feudal lord, constantly banging the marching drum of progress to the beat of enforced adoption. As a creative, I’m just as aware of the encroachment of AI, threatening the livelihood of artists, musicians, and writers.

While I am keeping weary tabs on the further intrusion into the arts and creative industries, often at the invitation of those dreaming of cutting costs and maximising profits, I am not fearing the worst for humanity unlike many doom-sayers and AI evangelists. For once my anxiety-riddled pessimism can see just how futile and doomed these concerns are when viewed with a healthy dose of objectivism.

Consider what I like to call The McDonald’s Paradox.

McDonald’s, the fast-food brand, is objectively the biggest, most profitable, fastest, most convenient, most successful, and most widely available food service in the world. More than half of the world has McDonald’s, including China, a country as economically and culturally opposite to America as you can get. McDonald’s is so large that it props up the service, agriculture, real estate, and toy industries. McDonald’s is so big it serves more burgers in a single year than there are people in the world. If you are a chef, cook, or restauranteur you will never in a million years come close to being as successful as McDonald’s.

McDonald's, objectively, is the best food service in the world.

Yet no matter how great McDonald’s is, I, as well as many, will never recommend them to anyone as a good place to eat. There’s an Italian restaurant down the road from me called Da Vinci’s, and the pizzas are perfectly baked and filling, the pasta is handmade every day, and the bruschetta is sweetly tart. Go to my hometown of Dundalk, go to the Windsor, and order the rabbit on a bed of mash; oh, it is plate-licking good! I’m a vegetarian now and I am still raving about it! Go to Temple Bar in Dublin, just off Dame Street, and you’ll find Mongolian Barbeque, an Asian buffet that cooks your food on a giant fire-lit grill. Free bowl of rice for the table and extra servings if you go meatless.

I’m sure you can do this too. Do. Tell me about your favourite restaurants. You’ll prove my point. AI, like McDonald’s, is convenient, fast, and cheap, but we don’t value ease solely, much less above everything else. We value quality, atmosphere, taste, culture, specificity, novelty, and sentimentality. No matter how good McDonald’s is, I’m not going there for Thai food or for my anniversary. Put simple, people like the human element.

That’s something AI can’t do; be human. Yes, it can do things humans can’t, and even do things we can but better, but there’s a reason we’re more impressed with human chess players than bots, or when a human wins a spelling-bee, a skill made obsolete by computers. It’s the same reason why “hand-crafted”, “artisan”, or “designer”, though at times elitist, are seen as markers of quality and artistry. While the term “art” will always be debated, intentionality and execution are two core components that define it yet will always allude AI.

Many online publishers are utilising features that flag AI and promote human works instead. Many artists are showing their work as proof, or else swearing to never produce AI images. Even I’ve gotten into the habit of labelling my work with #HI as a marker of “human intelligence”. I am not claiming what I make can’t be done by AI or that it’s easily distinguishable, but at least I can meet a niche in the market; those interested in humans. In fact, the more AI continues, the more cracks show, the more it’s labelled as “slop”, becoming synonymous with low-effort, low-quality, mass-produced tripe, and dubious copyright issues.

Speaking from my experience as a writer, a constant between publishers, producers, companies, and even competitions has been the insistence that you are declaring to be the sole copyright holder to your works. Companies are infamously anal (legally speaking) and for good reason. While AI companies argue that scraping your data qualifies as “fair use”, we’re already seeing examples of AI perfectly recreating copyrighted images from artists and movies. Disney and DreamWorks, though just as eager to downsize with the help of AI as anyone else, are taking Midjourney to court over their own copyrighted material being generated in masse.

There is a certain level of randomness of AI. This is why the same prompt can yield different results. There is also an average aggregation effect, since AI learns the most common traits of works. This is why so many AI images look so similar. AI can be thought of as a slot machine; if you try enough times, you will accidentally recreate a copyrighted image. This is exactly why human works can be copyrighted but not AI; the odds of unintentionally recreating another’s work are low for humans but moderate, if not high, for AI.

As it stands, the legal dubiousness of AI isn’t so much a nightmare as it is a game of Russian Roulette. Why take the risk?

These are only a few observations that ease my mind, but, admittedly, do little to comfort my more pressing concern. People.

It’s been three years. Three years of people believing AI is sentient, or that it’s a god. You can laugh, but one of the latest news stories is about a man falling in love and “cheating” on his wife with an AI girlfriend he created. There’s an infallibility perception that is already leading lawyers to cite cases fabricated by AI in court, for students to reference AI as a source for essays, and for people to become hospitalise because of erroneous medical guidance from AI.

In three years, people have fallen for hoax after hoax, with AI destroying basic media literacy that was already being dismantled by social media and echo chambers. The technology doesn’t need to get better to convince people that giants are real, or that angel skeletons have been found in Africa (yes, those are real examples).

And worse, in only three years AI, promising ease, comfort, and productivity, has made everyone disinterested. The type of people generating AI images and text, calling themselves “artists” and “writers”, are the most cynical, disinterested, and surface level purveyors of muck, with little interest other than trying their luck at making a pittance. It is the height of hubris to think, despite the centuries of art, literature, and creativity, despite the millions of undiscovered musicians, poets, and animators around the world, despite the inspiring variety and endearing uniqueness of cultures yet to be appreciated and in desperate need of preservation, that what we need now is more half-assed brain rot flooding our senses faster than ever before.

It only took three years.

I’m not worried about AI. I’m worried about us.

#HI