Thanks, I hate it!

Artificial Intelligence is the embrace of human mediocrity.

I will not feed the Artificial beast with my words and pictures

I won’t prompt, nor will I generate. Not on purpose anyway. I don’t give permission for the internet to fish my art. Just to be clear, I’m typing this with my own well-worn fingers, although the now widely used sparkly stars icon of AI is shoved to every toolbar of every word processor known to men!

This post will have errors, grammatical mistakes, but I’ll own them. They are human. Spell check is fine. Shortcuts I’m okay with, I love Digital art form, but if another person tells me to embrace this wonderful new technology because the train has left the station…I’ll scream!

But it’ll cure cancer! They say

Fine. Keep it away from my art and my books. I’m an illustrator. I draw with pen and pencil, also, ironically, with Adobe Illustrator (aka Ai), which I use to design content for kids’ E-learning. I can smell AI-generated trash from miles.

Still, it’s getting scary good these days.

Sometimes it seems my feed is full of it. This reminds me of the slow rise of ad fatigue and what it did to TV broadcasting. I worked in the ad world for a while and felt it simmering. Ads overwhelmed every space until people lost interest, the ads grew louder and cruder, and cheaper.

People around me lost their jobs, and I fear the same will happen not only in the internet space but everywhere else. Info, data, pictures, and videos can be so easily created now that human creators (like me) are replaced by Ai apps with attractive subscription models. These apps feed off what artists (like me) create and spit it back for a fraction of the cost. I had clients try to explain this to me by saying, “Oh, nice, but it took you so long to draw this! How about using Midjourney. It’ll do the dirty work while you embellish the outcome with your little swirly lines.” Thanks, I hate it. Meanwhile, the internet is flooded with fake Studio Ghibli art. Years and precious experience are crushed into an image generator of ones and zeros.

This breaks my heart.

I don’t believe videos anymore. Digital influencers have arrived, advertising skin products they have never tried themselves because they do not exist and have no skin. AI bands and singers pop like mushrooms, climbing to the top of Spotify charts! Gaining fans! Ai art is sold at auctions, and don’t even get me started on books. Lazy authors use ChatGPT and hack their way through the process, stealing the authentic voices of competing best-selling authors. It’s pathetic.

Humans are masterful creators but should they go all the way?

There’s a whole book called Frankenstein by Mary Shelly that illustrates how some inventions should never see the light of day. “If you build it, they will come.” Said the ominous voice in Kevin Costner film ‘Fields of Dreams’. But who are these… they? Do we want them? Maybe we shouldn’t build it in the first place?

“But, Oh” they’ll say. “It’s just technology. Anything can be used for evil. A hammer can build but also destroy.” Yes, but this hammer does so much more than that. It’ll encourage mediocrity and laziness when a child uses it to cheat on a book report, but also assist criminals to scam and cheat and voice-fake their way to grandma’s bank accounts.

I’ll finish on a personal note. Books and art are dear to my heart. I connect not only to creations but to the people behind them. I don’t want regurgitated, duplicated stuff that the machine spits out, but rather the interpretation that gets filtered through the human mind and experience. So if the train left the station, I’ll stay right here on the bench with my novel and sketchbook, and a cup of coffee. I’ll be fine. Thanx.

Peace out.

The illustrations in this post were done using Adobe Illustrator for the wonderful world of Wizdi – an advanced hybrid E-learning platform for kids.

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