This morning I had the pleasure of appearing on CBC Radio Manitoba and talking to the always-delightful Marcy Markusa about something that has been bothering me and the entire artist community for a long time now: Generative AI. But because you can only fit so much into a 7 minute interview (which you can watch here, by the way! ), I thought I should write a follow up post to get into it a little more for anyone whose interest may have been piqued.
First off: the most recent catalyst for this entire discussion in the first place was the trend of people generating images of themselves as little doll/action figure starter packs. That, plus the Studio Ghibli trend a couple weeks prior had me speaking up a little bit (maybe a lot, I don’t know) about it in my Instagram stories, so when some folks at CBC Manitoba were looking to talk about genAI, they reached out to me to see if I’d like to come on and talk about it.
When Marcy asked me if I’d had conversations about this with people I know, my brain hadn’t totally kicked in and I kind of biffed the lead-in about that specific thought, so I didn’t manage to say what I wanted to say, which is this:
Yes. I have talked about it at length with some friends, and I know other friends have seen me talking about it publicly even if we didn’t have direct conversations about it. In regards to the fun trends, dude, I GET IT. We’ve all been conditioned to jump onto trends by years of fun quizzes and random generators and silly little things made for the sole purpose of passing around and sharing results with your friends. It’s really easy to think it’s not a big deal, that you’re not taking an artist’s job because you wouldn’t have paid for it anyway, so you’re not hurting anyone with this. And it’s also not helpful that people on the other side of it are very judgmental and accusatory about it, though I ALSO understand that aspect too.
It boils down to simply this.
At this point, we know that the technology exists only because a bunch of techbros, who want to cut humans out of the creative process so they don’t have to pay them, scraped millions and millions of copyrighted images off the internet without our permission. They’ve gone on record saying that this tech cannot exist without unfettered, unpaid access to our intellectual property. “You can’t gatekeep ideas!” they cry, but god forbid you look at their coding and software, because that would be theft, of course.
And then there’s the environmental factor, which is even more concerning. The stats are out there, it’s not a secret. The servers, many of which are notably located in areas where drought is a problem, get quite hot and require fresh, clean, drinkable water to cool down. Currently, ChatGPT consumes approximately 500ml for every 100-word response. Image generation requires even more. Also, ChatGPT, which relies on fossil fuels, uses 10 times more electricity for a single prompt than a Google search. Some estimations put its daily electricity usage at the same amount it would take to power the Empire State Building for a year and a half. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has literally asked us to stop saying “please” and “thank you” because it costs so much.
But even with all of that, we’re still not getting to what I consider the most concerning aspect of all, which isn’t that it’s being used, but how. If you’re someone who uses ChatGPT to find information, I dare you to go ask it a question about something you’re an expert in and still think it knows what it’s talking about. Now, realize that kids in school are using it as a search engine. That even the search engines all have AI-generated summaries at the top that many, many people don’t read past. That OpenAI has signed deals with numerous major news outlets, allowing them to summarize articles. There have been outlets busted for publishing AI-generated articles under fictional journalists with made-up names and generated photos. Generated revenge porn, false images of politicians during election periods, false photojournalism on Facebook (where, by the way, Canadians still cannot share links to real news)… this is all deeply concerning. People are not only freely giving personal data away, but they’re trading their ability to think for convenience, and it’s not even accurate convenience.
But the most alarming of all is having all this happen while watching the situation south of the Canadian border develop. In regards to search engines and news organizations going all in behind something as easily manipulated and frequently incorrect as AI-summarized information, it’s going to be even more frighteningly easy to mislead, spread disinformation, and sow distrust in science and the media. Do you remember in Animal Farm, Napoleon wrote out commandments in order to keep the animals humble and equal, and over time, changed them bit by bit to suit the desires of the pigs? Then the animals, without historical records, shrugged and said “we probably just forgot” and accepted it? We need trustworthy sources of information.
Meanwhile, on the creative side of things, creative jobs are drying up and even industry-standard companies like Adobe (who would not exist without the income of creative people paying for their software) are jumping on the AI train as well, placing further strain on an already stressed and exploitative industry. What’s even more frustrating is seeing people in other creative fields like writers and musicians using generated images for their covers. That is SCAB BEHAVIOUR, my friends! You are crossing the picket line and everyone is noticing. We respect you less. We assume your work is shoddy. We think you are gross.
“But Alex,” you may say, “I cannot afford to pay an artist to draw me a cover.”
To which I reply, “that’s okay, there are stock photos! And there is so much stuff in the public domain! And you know what? Text-only covers? They can be gorgeous.”
Look man, you’re not the only creative person in the entire world whose project has budget restraints. If it wasn’t an option, what would you do? Did low-budget books simply not have covers pre-2023? Just loose pages, flapping in the wind? Get real.
And the problem isn’t that we’re going to stop making art. That’s in our bones. But there is a rise of anti-intellectualism and puritanical tendencies, and paired with sharply declining media literacy (which is a whole ‘nother can of worms), I worry that all of this combined will lead to a return of censorship in favour of more “inoffensive” art to appease the masses. More “pure” art. Art that doesn’t make you feel bad, or uncomfortable.
Because what is the purpose of art, if not to make you look at something differently? I can’t count how many times people have come up to me and said “your landscapes have made me see Manitoba in a more positive light”. How many times have you read a book or watched a movie that made you think about a situation, a relationship, or yourself differently? How many girls broke up with their lame-ass boyfriends last summer after watching the Barbie movie? And like… let’s be real, books don’t make anybody gay, but they might help someone make sense of themselves and realize oh… wait…
But if there are fewer jobs for artists and writers, then they’ll have to leave the field, and there will be fewer artists and writers, which will lead to less art and fewer books and movies, and profits will go down, and so on and so forth. It’ll rebound, it always does, but we would lose so much in the meantime. Wouldn’t it be better to prevent it entirely?
So back to the original question, yes, I have had conversations with people about this. I’ve been having them, at length, for years. I’m having it with you, now. And when I know that you know this, when I’ve spoken to you about how much it sucks that my work, the work of my peers, the work of my dearest friends, has been stolen to create this… I’ll be blunt. Point-blank, it hurts my feelings to see you posting those pictures of you as a toy with weirdly smooth skin and the wrong number of fingers. It hurts my feelings to see you turning your cat into a generic-looking blonde woman.
It hurts my feelings that I specifically have asked you, my friend, to not use this thing that you do not need by any measure, because it is actively harming me, the planet, and society in very real ways, and seeing you using it anyway.
I need you to understand that when you do that, you are telling me, “I hear you, I understand, but also, I don’t care.“
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