Monday Musings for March 18. 2024

 Oh, my. What a shitshow the last few weeks have been. I lost an entire week, it seems, to some crappy symptoms that landed me in the ER on a Friday night, and the entire ER was full up, so they had to stick me on a guerny in the hallway surrounded by portable drapes. That was terrifying enough, and I'm grateful that I have a wonderful herbalist who has been working with me for the last few months, so hopefully no more of that shit. 

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It's been a while since I've gone on a good rant, and this morning's rant is going to be about AI and social media and marketing in general. I think I may have written a bit about AI before on this blog, but today, it really needs to be said that AI is more harmful than helpful to humanity. At least, I think it's more harmful than helpful. 

My social media feed has been flooded with these dreamy images of things like colorful baby peacocks and unattainable lifestyle/home scenes, and the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all made with AI. And that ain't good. I was seeing ads for AI blog writing tools, and even a service that would allow you to create and use AI generated vocal tracks. 

There are a few reasons why you should be wary at least and vocally opposed at best to AI generated images and writing and music. 

1. AI doesn't create anything "new" or "artistic" by itself. AI needs people (humans) to "feed" it words, images (that were actually created by other humans), and then it just sort of masticates it all up and spits out stuff based on prompts given to it (usually by humans). It never picked up a paintbrush or a camera, it never learned how to draw using digital media, it doesn't know how to play the guitar or the violin, and it doesn't possess vocal chords to sing. 

Any of the AI generated "stuff" that I've seen or heard just feels...soulless...to me. There was no heart behind the creation of that stuff. It just feels shallow and hollow and completely devoid of Life. 

2. Since AI needs all of this stuff fed to it before it can "create" something with it, it's actually ripping off legitimate artists who have done all this stuff, who are inspired to create. 

A few years ago, a dear friend of mine who is also a spectacularly talented artist sent me a great journal called, Steal Like An Artist. The idea is that you use your daily mundane experiences to develop your creativity, and it encourages you to look at/read/hear/consume the work of other artists and use that to inspire your own creative pursuits. 

Now, this is vastly different from any AI generated content. When a human being is inspired to create something, that inspiration comes from a divine spiritual place that is unique to living things. (I say this broadly, because it has been shown that other non-human species can also create, but that's a blog for another time.) Humans create from a place in their soul, their creative divine spark. But AI? That's a soulless machine that is incapable of creating something from that place of passion and spirit. Not the same thing at all. 

AI lacks the ability to FEEL the way humans do. AI has never suffered a heartbreaking loss, a breakup of a relationship, the exhiliration of landing a new job, the joy of loving life. And because it lacks all of that, what it feeds us is just as bad for the body and soul as the junk food that lines the shelves of the grocery stores. 

3. One of the most disturbing things that I saw in mye social media feed about AI was this AI "tool" for writing marketing blogs. Now, in addition to all of the previous reasons I've laid out about why is not a good thing for humanity, here's a couple more: 

First off, speaking as someone who made a very good living for many years writing SEO blog content, companies who turn to AI for this purpose are eliminating some decent jobs for HUMANS. I'm as anti-capitalist as they come, and this is right here 110% what I'm talking about when I say that companies and corporations are only ever going to do what's best for their bottom lines, and not what's best for humanity. Why bother to use a human to do a creative job like writing when you can just pay a fraction of that cost for an AI service that doesn't need sick days or vacation time or healthcare benefits or a retirement program or any of that stuff? I did not dream of a future where the computers make "art" and the humans do the grueling physical labor. 

Second, I'm already not a huge fan of the whole field of marketing these days because the primary goal of marketing is really to just reduce humans to numbers and to see how much cash can be squeezed out of them, and when you use AI generated content (images, writing, sounds/music) to do this, I feel like this further dehumanizes us.

Third, we're actually being encouraged to PAY for content, books, etc., that were created by NotAHuman. And if I can point to the disastrous example of how AI generated books about foraging can have deadly consequences for humans, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I saw AI can be downright dangerous to your health. 

4. The last thing I'm gonna say about AI (for now) has to do with discernment. In the last 16 years, here in the U.S., we've seen politics go down some kind of Dark Mirror rabbit hole. Where it used to be just like "ha ha politicians are twisting their words around", now we're being fed outright outrageous lies and being told that those are just "alternative facts". 

How are we supposed to discern what is reality and what is not? Being a shamanic practitioner, I will be the first to say that there are alternate realities, but that is not what's happening here. 

So when you see someone sharing an image of a brightly colored "baby peacock" or an intricately impossible dinosaur-shaped croissant, you need to just stop what you're doing and think about this for a minute. (And I know, thinking is fatal to capitalism, so we all need to be doing more of it.) You might see this cute picture of an adorable smiling granny and her intricately crocheted cat handbags, but come on - do you really think these images are real, or do you just want them to be real? 

It might not even be a single still image - I've seen full-on AI generated "lifestyle" videos of impossibly decorated rooms complete with weather and sound effects. 

Sharing these things might seem harmless, but in reality, they further blur the lines between reality and non-reality. They discourage actual humans from tapping into their own innate form of creativity. And they can be literally dangerous to our health and well-being if we put too much trust into these forms of AI generated content that seem to be everywhere. 

So there. That's enough ranting/musing for today. Off to go play some ukulele and write some music and maybe do a little meditation while I'm at it.