‘It feels to me like we are stepping away from what makes us human, stripping ourselves of the capacity to think and feel that took us eons to evolve.’ Photograph: demaerre/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘It feels to me like we are stepping away from what makes us human, stripping ourselves of the capacity to think and feel that took us eons to evolve.’ Photograph: demaerre/Getty Images Opinion AI (artificial intelligence) We don’t need AI videos of fake animals. There are real ones out there and they’re really cute Rebecca Shaw I can’t be delighted by something produced with generative AI. Give me books written by complicated people, drawings by sweet idiots, songs by those who feel
Generative AI has gone too far. Many have said it, but I need to add my human voice to the cacophony.
There are many reasons I dislike the growing use of generative AI. It is environmentally disastrous, necessitating massive, water-guzzling datacentres . In a world where many people do not have access to clean water and where countries like Australia suffer worsening droughts, people are unthinkingly wasting it to carry out basic tasks like sending an email or writing a grocery list.
Your cousin’s son is right now using litres of water to see what all the ninja turtles look like with his face. Of course, we all want to see what we look like as Raphael, but is it really worth the waste? The waste of the water, and the wasting of your brain, your inventiveness? People are already asking a machine to have their thoughts for them, and it’s just going to get worse. The technology arrived five minutes ago; you are not dependent on it, no matter what the marketing machine is telling you.
Read more And it’s not like it’s creating incredible things, either. None of the GenAI content I have seen – out in the world or specifically for “fun” online – makes a convincing case for its necessity. I also find it disturbing, using it to create for us, accepting what it spits out as authentic, incorporating it deeply into our lives. It feels to me like we are stepping away from what makes us human, stripping ourselves of the capacity to think and feel that took us aeons to evolve.
But none of these things is the worst outcome. Generative AI’s biggest crime is that it has ruined watching a cute video on the internet, which was one of the greatest and only joys left on the internet. Those brief moments of happiness are now destroyed. The thrill of seeing a video of a cute animal as you scroll (perhaps in an unlikely animal friendship) is gone. The little brain-and-heart zap that I used to receive from seeing a video of an adorable baby whale breaching beside her ginormous mother is gone. The joy I’d feel sending a video of a fat bird and a dishevelled bird to my girlfriend and saying “us” is gone.
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Being shown something glorious from nature helps remind us there is more to life on Earth than a keyboard and a screen. That the world is big, and that beautiful moments happen alongside the brutal. That life is worth living. It was a small thing, but it was something, and it has now been drowned out by waves upon waves of AI-generated videos.
There is no coming back from here. Sure – real, sweet videos still exist. But AI has made it so that I can no longer enjoy those either. Clicking on a video and letting it send my little endorphins swirling around, a smile on my face till the end, is now a thing of the past. When…