On A.I.

Content warning: Lots of swearing.

So. Something about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has bothered me for a while. Also something about the arguments against it has bothered me for a while, and I feel like talking about them.

The Copyright Issue

I do not now, nor have I ever, particularly cared for copyright, especially in its current form. This honestly deserves a post on its own, but the summary is: Copyright is very broken, as a whole. I have my reasons for releasing all of my works as CC-BY-NC-SA, but those mostly boil down to “I hate copyright, and this is a political stance.”

The Art Issue

I don’t give a shit if it’s art.

Do I personally believe it’s art? Who gives a shit.

This particular argument is full of bigotry of all forms, and I refuse to toss my hat into that ring, because fundamentally I don’t care what is or isn’t art, I care if something makes me feel something. A.I. generated images, and music don’t make me feel things the way that brainmade art makes me feel things.

Pay your artists!

This one I can get behind. Pay your fucking artists, be they authors, illustrators, musicians, what have you. Pay them.

But this isn’t a problem specific to A.I. generated content. This is a problem that’s much wider, and just gives people another out to not pay their artists.

They’re trying to automate the humanity out of life

Here’s what I’ve been building up to. All of A.I. generation has lead up to this particular brand of fuckery; they are trying to automate the humanity out of us.

Drawing is so fundamental to us as humans that we’ve found cave paintings that pre-date us even being human. Music has been so important to culture that it also pre-dates humanity. Oral traditions in storytelling predate written language, but provide fundamentally the same artistic outlet as authorship does.

People make so many things, because we want to, not because of profit. Sure profit is sometimes a happy side effect, but I’m keeping this blog up at the nice profit of -$80/yr. I am paying to do this.

Sure I want to sell games eventually. I’d like to be able to make my livelihood doing creative stuff. It’s not because I want to get rich though, it’s out of a desire to do something I love doing, and wanting to do it as much as possible.

They’re even, at this point, providing A.I. summaries of text messages you get, which you can then auto-respond to with an A.I. generated message.

I have a weird relationship with my family, but my dude have you just tried to optimize your interpersonal relationships?! Get help. Seriously.

When I’ve been at the lowest points in my life, the things that have kept me going have been art, and interpersonal contact. I’m sure most of us have similar stories, because let’s face it, that sentence was vague as hell.

But seriously. The thing that makes us human is art. It is talking to people, and they’re trying to take that away from us. They’re trying to optimize the humanity out of being human so we can make thier numbers go up.