Anti Ai - Blog Posts
AI hasn't improved in 18 months. It's likely that this is it. There is currently no evidence the capabilities of ChatGPT will ever improve. It's time for AI companies to put up or shut up.
I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:
We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.
Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.
Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.
For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.
Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?
Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?
As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)
There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.
In summary:
Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.
There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.
Don't believe AI companies when they say things are going to improve from where they are now before they provide evidence. It's time for the AI shills to put up, or shut up.
Write it shitty, write it scared, write it without a clue but don't you be so spineless and have an AI write fanfic for you.
This is the second time I've posted about AI (once on spacehey) but this is crazy important. Please read the post even if you don't read mine. People underestimate just how much such an 'easy' thing requires.
I'm gonna be honest and say that I used to rely on it as a very lonely kid. But right now I'm doing everything in my power to avoid feeding the machine. Blogging, journaling, reading etc. the words of a real human are so much better than anything a bot could write, however cringey they might be. If everyone keeps on using things like this, so many more artists will be rendered powerless. So many will get hooked on the feeling of a real person and then start defending it. It may not be targeting you nefariously, it may help you in the short term, but its impact is absolutely terrible, and it leads to MORE pollution and MORE plagiarism and MORE reliance on bigger, better AI models. Eventually it won't just be roleplays.
Not to mention all the real people being made into (let's be real here, usually) smut bots. There is no person to track that down to. There is no way to message a creator and get them to take something down, and reports are kinda useless. I've seen <18 creators get bots made of them and it's terrible :(
AI will never be your friend. Please know that. It will never be your boyfriend or girlfriend or parent. I know it may be hard right now for some of you but I beg you to live real life. Read real books and get lost in them. Write your own stories about the life you wish you lived. If you can't find friends outside, try to find them online. Find communities. Live through music. TV. Anything. But AI, no matter how deep it may feel, is never real. It is a hollow shell of feelings people have felt before. It will leave you feeling more isolated and terrible than ever. If it takes our physical jobs, please do not let it destroy our creations.
Why is c.ai bad? Like genuine question
One of the main reasons you will see people giving as to why c.ai is bad is that much like all "generative" ai it's basically a copy/paste machine. The algorithm that runs c.ai is made by scraping the writing of millions of human authors in order to train the machine on how sentences and "romance" should be structured in order to appeal to the people using it. This is, by and large, just straight up plagiarism and authors like @/ceilidho end up having their content stolen by c.ai users in order to farm more bots.
If you don't care about the plagiarism aspect of c.ai bots then you should care about the environmental aspect of them. ChatGPT alone uses about 2.9 Wh of electricity just to run a single query, and the water used to cool the servers (again for just one question) is equal to about 3 16 oz bottles of water. Google reported their greenhouse gas emissions rose 50% in 5 years just due to ai use. 1 query can power a lightbulb for about 20 seconds, and every question is routed through a data center which uses even more electricity to answer the question. So you sending a chat to c.ai uses a massive amount of electricity, and for the bot to respond takes even more.
Not to mention data centers have to be built, which consumes a lot of resources and energy, and releases a lot of greenhouse gases. Then they have to be powered, which consumes more energy and more water, and releases even more greenhouse gases.
If 1 in 10 working US Americans asked 1 question every week for a year (52 x 17 million) that would use the same amount of energy that it would take to power EVERY HOUSEHOLD IN WASHINGTON DC (671,803) for 20 days. NPR reported on this as an "energy emergency" this is an unprecedented and explosive amount of energy being used very suddenly, very often, and by a lot of people.
Ok you don't care about that either, then let me appeal to you the person who uses c.ai. Maybe you love your favorite author's work and you really want to rp with one of their characters. Is the bot's ability to write that character really as good as the author's? Is it as satisfying? Or are you just caught up in the short-term dopamine rush of the rp?
Because I tried c.ai when it was first getting popular and let me tell you, it was nowhere near as good as the human role plays I was used to. There was no riffing, no plotting out where we wanted the rp to go, no standard reply length, I had to retry replies multiple times to get something even remotely close to something I could work with to respond to. There were filters, I couldn't use certain words or phrases. The bot couldn't remember anything past a few replies. It was BAD. The shot of dopamine I got after the first reply was gone by the time I was on the third one.
Now maybe I was just spoiled by good human rp partners, but I kept seeing people on tiktok complaining about the same problems. "How to break the c.ai filter" was a major issue. People wanted the experience of role playing or writing a fic, but they didn't want to put the effort into actually doing either of those things.
"Just let people enjoy things!" I hear you cry.
You go on c.ai because you're lonely, or bored, or because you think that finding a human to rp with is too hard or they won't like your scenario/kink/whatever. You are actively contributing to the expulsion of artists from fandom spaces and the destruction of the planet in equal measure. If all you care about is short term gratification, then go on the r/IWishIWasHer subreddit and read the rps threads there. If you actually want to roleplay with someone there are a million discord servers that do that. Hell, there are communities on tumblr that you could join and ask about roleplaying!
Relying on instant gratification will numb you to all the joys that creep towards you. If the only thing you can see is the object in front of you, then you're never going to reach for something better further away.
Not to mention none of your chats on c.ai are actually private, the server is scraping all your responses to have the ai send to other people. So if you're telling the bot some real smutty/embarrassing things that you wouldn't want anyone else to see, congrats on everyone else getting a piece of it.
People in charge: the youth want AI they want technology! They want us to move forward with the technology! MORE AI! PUT IT IN EVERYTHING!
Young people: I listen to CDs and would gladly use a flip phone, the chain this rectangle has on me is never ending. I want to live near nature and see my friends often
I hate how hard it is to trust "photography" on Tumblr. So many people post AI slop in the photography tag. Just stop.
I hate how hard it is to find beautifully edited mermaid core shit. It's all AI slop now.
It's draining my and my friends homes. It's ruining artists. It's awful.
Fuck ai. Fuck the people who defend it with their lives.
I wish I could just be free in the ocean again. In the gulf of "AmErIcA" where I used to live. Now I'm trapped in some kids body full of pain.
the amounts of times I've seen a person in front of me open chatgpt to type in the teacher's question to then respond with chatgpts answer is sickening. IS IT THAT DIFFICULT TO USE YOUR BRAIN DURING THE CLASS YOU WILLINGLY CHOSE TO ATTEND??
They should block chatgpt on uni WiFi the way they used to block coolmathgames
"Every writer"
Writers don't use ai.
Those who use ai are not writers.
They are prompt generators for the prompt generators, producing soulless fucking slop that takes the "writing" out of writing.
a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted
their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"
"Every writer"?
come on
I just want to preface that I do not think using AI, like Grammarly for example, to make corrections to your work applies to my statement. I’ve used Grammarly and built-in tools like in Google Docs to check my grammar and punctuation because English is stupidly hard, and I say that as a native English speaker. My initial post only applies to people that put a prompt into some sort of AI that generates a story instead of you just writing it yourself.
Even after learning and studying how to write, I still need this little bit of assistance. Editors/beta readers do the same, only I can’t afford or even find one. To me, it’s like art. You can trace all you want but if you don’t know the fundamentals, tracing will only get you so far.
I hope this makes sense! I do not condone or support the use of generative AI.
Just came across AI-generated work in the Stardew Valley section on AO3 for the first time. This author’s only two published fics used it.
It disappoints me, honestly. This person is missing the part of the process where all you wanna do smash your screen into tiny little pieces and swear off writing ever again but working through that until you excitedly share it online! It’s all so important to experience, even if you think it’s shitty in the end, because it means at least you did it. It means you feel more connected to it and you’re strengthening your skill! You can only get better!
If you think your story is done but still not up to your standards, post it anyway! Someone will love it and it might help you break from that mindset you’re in.
Write fan fiction, have fun, it’s not that deep :)
I'm starting to see AI art in fanart tags and even when they are tagged as AI art, people in the reblogs tagged it as fanart.
Let me just say this once. I don't believe AI art is fanart. The way things are, it's theft. It doesn't count. The effort that fan artists put into their works cannot be equated in value with whatever an AI generates. The works with hours of applied skill and originality and love put into them are the works I want to praise on this blog.
So that being said, if I ever reblog "fanart" that is ai generated, please send me a message or an ask and let me know so I can delete it off my blog.
Reblog so more people can hopefully see, don't ever do this.
This is the worst timeline. (x)
I noticed a reference image for an unrelated D&D campaign had MACHINE ART that slipped through last session unaddressed. so I scrambled to replace it with a cruder but human-made facsimile
I'm doing my part to fight the robot war
Ronan Lynch would blow up an AI data center.
this is so real and reminds me of this tweet:
why would i want AI to do all the things i already do for fun for me? whats the point in that? i do it because i find it fun, i never find myself wishing "wow i sure do wish i could have a robot here to paint my patches and diy my shit for me" like no, i do that because i want to. i wish to paint with my and only my hands alone, i dont want others to do it for me so i can sit back and watch.
no, spotify, i don't want to use ai to "turn my ideas into playlists". i already fucking do that with my brain and hands and i do it for fun. what, should i get ai to pet my cat for me? to play my silly games for me? to spend time with my beautiful wife for me? how about i rend you asunder
"Count the fingers, count the knuckles
Count the teeth and check the shadows..."
ah yes
that's a perfectly human amount of teeth to have
a perfectly human hand indeed
Write it shitty, write it scared, write it without a clue but don't you be so spineless and have an AI write fanfic for you.
WHY IS AI THE FIRST FUCKING PICTURE
DO YOU KNOW HOW POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS THIS COULD BE IF PEOPLE ARE ATTEMPTING TO USE THIS TO IDENTIFY DANGEROUS ANIMALS & PLANTS
Lots of thoughts recently. Everything feels plastic.
I could go on and on about why all that AI "art" is bad. I could mention theft, lack of creativity, it's impact on the work field and environment, but countless people have already said all that. I wanted to touch on something that to me is the most utterly wrong about all of it.
Art is more than just something pretty to look at or listen to. It's therapeutic. It's a form of communication. A tool for human connection. It's a pure, human need.
Support real artists ☀️
a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted
their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"
"Every writer"?
come on
me and my homies support real artists who put their passion into their pieces instead of a machine who rips off the hard work of talented peeps
AI DISTURBANCE "OVERLAYS" DO NOT WORK!
To all the artists and folks who want to protect their art against AI mimicry: all the "AI disturbance" overlays that are circulating online lately DON'T WORK!
Glaze's disturbance (and now the Ibis Paint premium feature, apparently. Not sure.) modifies the image on a code-level, it's not just an overlayed effect but it actually affects the image's data so AI can't really detect and interpret the code within the image. From the Glaze website:
Can't you just apply some filter, compression, blurring, or add some noise to the image to destroy image cloaks? As counterintuitive as this may be, the high level answer is that no simple tools work to destroy the perturbation of these image cloaks. To make sense of this, it helps to first understand that cloaking does not use high-intensity pixels, or rely on bright patterns to distort the image. It is a precisely computed combination of a number of pixels that do not easily stand out to the human eye, but can produce distortion in the AI's “eye.” In our work, we have performed extensive tests showing how robust cloaking is to things like image compression and distortion/noise/masking injection. Another way to think about this is that the cloak is not some brittle watermark that is either seen or not seen. It is a transformation of the image in a dimension that humans do not perceive, but very much in the dimensions that the deep learning model perceive these images. So transformations that rotate, blur, change resolution, crop, etc, do not affect the cloak, just like the same way those operations would not change your perception of what makes a Van Gogh painting "Van Gogh."
Anyone can request a WebGlaze account for FREE, just send an Email or a DM to the official Glaze Project accounts on X and Instagram, they reply within a few days. Be sure to provide a link to your art acc (anywhere) so they know you're an artist.
Please don't be fooled by those colorful and bright overlays to just download and put on your art: it won't work against AI training. Protect your art with REAL Glaze please 🙏🏻 WebGlaze is SUPER FAST, you upload the artwork and they send it back to you within five minutes, and the effect is barely visible!
Official Glaze Project website | Glaze FAQs | about WebGlaze
Anytime I think my art, writing, or video sucks, I just remember the monstrosity that is AI "art" and the people who make it, and I feel a lot better, because at least I'm putting in some effort and not letting a Machine to do it for me.
(Generative) AI is like a brain-melting parasite that sucks the life out of its hosts’ ideas and creativity and moves on when stuffed, carrying the last of its meal on it as it feasts on other unwilling people. Also like how bees do with pollen and nectar, but in a less beautiful way.
(If that makes sense-)