The topic of generative Artificial Intelligence has been a highly divisive and touchy subject as the technology rapidly advances. AI is impressive, no doubt, but there’s a lot more to it than most care to educate themselves about. I’ll be outlining my grievances and problems with AI, showing how it impacts our world in more ways than one.
AI has been integrated into numerous websites and applications over the years, with companies scrambling to cram as many AI features in their programs as possible. At first glance, these features seem useful, giving anyone the ability to ask questions and receive answers almost instantaneously. However, these answers and images don’t just appear out of thin air; all that data needs to be processed and kept somewhere. As a result, specialized data centers are built to store and compute this information.
The rise in popularity of AI tools entails the need for more data centers to be built. This is an issue for various reasons, but among those is the environmental impact that they have because of its demanding electric and water consumption, used to keep the center running and to cool down the centers. One data center consumes as much water as a small town, and that’s only for a medium-sized data center. Water consumption wouldn’t be a big issue if the water were reintroduced to the sources they were taken from, but often the water is too mineralized to be reused or is completely lost as vapor.
Even if the water were to be reused, AI data centers take water from public sources. What this means is that nearby communities would need to pay higher utility bills for both water and electricity against their will. No matter how you spin it, there is zero justification for residents having to pay for soaring bills involuntarily, while also dealing with a rapidly rising cost of living. What’s more, this parasitic business is fully supported and funded by our government, as it shells out more than $3 billion toward AI technology.
At a personal level, I simply cannot agree with generative AI. I find the joys of human creation and art to be profoundly beautiful. I believe that art is one of the best mediums to express human emotion. Not all art is inherently made with deep emotional connection, but I find that the beauty of art lies within the touch of human imagination. When we begin to make AI create our art and stories for us, it takes the humanity away from something that is deeply integrated into our brains. The first traces of art date back to 40,000 years ago, showing how deeply embedded creating art is into our history.
People may claim that they don’t have the skill set required to make art, saying that typing prompts in and generating images at the click of a button are much more accessible. Artists, musicians, and writers dedicate their lives to mastering their craft and creating works of art that encapsulate their experiences. Generating images created by AI and passing them off as art spits in the face of everyone who has striven to master their art. As is the case with any career, creating art takes time to master. Replacing all instances of art made by humans takes away so much from the human experience, as AI can’t begin to comprehend what it’s like to live as a human. It merely mimics and spits out what it already knows without knowing what it means. If we replace every single job with AI, what’s even the point of doing anything when it’s done for us? Why pursue and invest ourselves in a career if a robot will always be seen as more efficient?
The problem with AI lies not only within the creative bankruptcy of it. Its faults lie within every facet of our lives. It affects our environment, affects our cost of living, affects the way that we interact and consume art, and affects the people who dedicate their lives to the art of creation. The technology has so many issues that I haven’t even touched upon, such as the legitimacy of the information spewed out by AI, the unlawful use of training AI models off of other people’s works, or the creation of AI-generated videos and images that paint a person or group of people in an incorrect, discriminatory light. I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the issues with which AI has plagued and will continue to plague our world.
It’s for these reasons that I believe that this technology will always do more harm than good. Is it worth the resources that are consumed to have your homework done for you? Do you feel good about typing something into ChatGPT and having it summarize or do everything for you? If you’ve answered yes to these questions, I implore you to take a deeper look into who you are as a person. If you allow your mind to become numb and overridden with what an unreliable robot is telling you, you will learn nothing. We’ve made groundbreaking advancements as a society without the help of generative AI before, which means that we’re able to continue making groundbreaking advancements now.
