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David Ralph Lewis

AI and me

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#posts #creativity

I've added a slug to the bottom of my website, saying 'Handmade without AI.' It's to show my site is made by me without the use of generative AI models.

I wasn't initially against generative AI or LLMs. Way back in the halcyon days of 2022, I made Reality Adjustments, a little poetry game with branching paths and multiple endings. The idea was to show the rules of reality breaking down, so a free AI image generator seemed useful to suggest these odd realities. At the time, the free model I used produced all sorts of visual glitches and oddities, which were fun to experiment with. The resulting images were not great, but they had an interest which supported the text. What was the harm?

Now though, I wouldn't touch generative AI models at all. Not only are they hugely damaging for the environment and built on stolen images, they have become overused and ubiquitous. It has unleashed a tidal wave of slop that threatens to overtake the whole internet. And for all this cost, the results are ugly and oddly flattened, with all the interesting glitches removed. They are also used frequently by the far right and fascists as Gareth Watkins explores:

That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The selling point is that their users don’t have to pay (and, more importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they’d be forced to depend.

AI can therefore be seen as a full replacement for artists, undermining the real work it takes to create a poem, an essay or an image. It's become a hollowing out of culture, cheapening what it takes to create art.

In large language models, such as Chat GPT, the results are dispassionate and dull at best and insulting and flat out wrong at worst. The models are not any form of intelligence, they are a word prediction engine. They do not know the meaning of anything, cannot think for themselves. They simply predict what the most likely word is going to be based on writing they have illegally scraped from the internet. My hobby has been words in some form or another for the past twenty years, and it feels cheap and grimy to outsource this to a LLM.

For all the hype, I've yet to see a useful implementation of these tools that humans or another tool doesn't do better. And it makes me wonder if it was worth the massive investment of both money and environmental resources in order to get a picture of Jesus as a shrimp or a cartoon of a soldier with incomprehensible glyphs. The whole thing feels like a tulip bubble that is going to crash some point soon.

So yes, I will not be adopting AI on this website or in my writing practise. Instead, I'll continue in much the same way - putting the work in by writing things by hand, responding to humans and thinking about ideas for a while before they come to fruition. The time this takes is the point. AI may produce images quickly but they are low value and poor quality, as well as being increasingly unethical. If I do want to create something with illustrations I'll seek to collaborate with an artist.


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