I want AI to do my dishes so I can create. I don't want it to create so I can do dishes.

Aritficial intelligence is a hot button topic lately, especially among creatives. Most of us are pissed because our work has already been stolen to train AI so that other people can take short cuts and produce subpar product. Ghost Tamer was one of the books stolen by Meta and no, I’m not getting compensated. Something to do with when my book was published. But their original defense was that it would be “cost prohibitive” to purchase all the literature they needed to train their machines.

Interesting.

It’s cost prohibitive for me to buy a bigger house. But I really need another room. Maybe I should just take one.

Now there are guides like this one instructing authors on how to protect themselves. Write a letter to Zuckerberg telling him he’s not allowed to steal from you. Put a sentence in your copyright page saying that your book is not to be used to train AI, etc. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad these guides exist, but this kind of smacks of telling women to learn self defense and carry pepper spray because, you know, men just be rapin’. Yes, learn self defense, carry pepper spray, but could we just also not rape, murder, and steal?

There are layers to artificial intelligence obviously. Generative AI being the worst of the worst. Use your mind and your creativity and do the thing. Don’t steal from everyone else who’s put the work in. The worst part is, now so much of our work has been used to train AI that AI checkers are flagging original work as created using AI because it’s starting to look similar. And then the onus is put on the creative to prove that their work is original. This does nothing but hurt artists. No one else is getting the short end of the stick here.

Except perhaps the general population that might unwittingly ingest AI slop.

We can dig deeper into this and say that spell checker is AI. Canva’s swirly transitions between your photos is AI. Using a background remover to stick your photo on a transparent background so it looks nice on a poster is AI. And that’s true. But these are not examples of stolen intellectual property. Everyone uses the spell check and most people use Canva to create reels, posters, etc. at least every now and then.

The problem comes with you’re asking Claude, or whatever it’s called, instead of just Googling things. Frequently, you’ll get misinformation that you would then need to fact check yourself anyway if you want to present your data accurately. Another thing about AI is that it wants to please you and give you the answer you’re looking for. Often this isn’t the correct one. While we’re here, let’s talk about how much water you’re using. Data centers use water in cooling towers to absorb the incredible amounts of heat produced by servers. This water pulls from the local area, especially putting a strain on warm weather communities as 70% - 80% of the water evaporates and the rest is full of minerals and chemicals requiring treatment before disposal. It’s also a strain on the local power grid.

Not to mention the vibrations and low level noise coming from massive data centers. And they wanted to put one next to the Nashville Zoo. Why?

Until data centers are self-sustaining and won’t negatively impact the communities they’re surrounded by, they should be highly regulated and limited. And if a community doesn’t want one there, it shouldn’t be built. We don’t need AI. We do need water and electricity. And it would be nice if it remained affordable.

AI as a whole needs to be more stringently regulated. And in some way that it doesn’t continually steal from creatives, invalidate their original work, and simultaneously put them in an arduous, anxiety-inducing state of having to authenticate their own craft. I write with a living document. Sometimes I’ll save a new draft, but once it gets pretty close to where I want it, I just made edits in the same doc. I do work largely in Google Docs, so my version history could be accessed if necessary, but the fact that I’m even concerned about this is annoying.

Instagram is apparently even flagging Canva posts as AI now. Most people I know avoid AI, but everyone uses Canva. And it’s become another finger to point for anyone who is anti-AI but eager for a witch-hunt. I had a reviewer on Goodreads claim that she loved my book but “learned” that I had “used AI to market the sequel” and thus wouldn’t be reading anything else by me. Not sure what the hell she thought was AI. A Canva post I did? Did someone else do a fancy visual post and tag me in it? No idea. I generally stick to my own photos and videos, occasionally using publicly available line art, gifs, and video graphics from Canva, but not often.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but it would be nice if we could stop pointing fingers at authors who are doing their own work, and stop defending the use of AI “just to make my outline” or “just to workshop ideas.” Most of the people who do use Generative AI are out there on social media defending it with their entire chest and claiming the rest of us are going to be “left behind.” Stop it. Make your own outline. Workshop your ideas with a friend or in a journal.

Write a big messy blog post with no AI use and almost no structure just to rail against the machine.

Incidentally, as messy as this is, I bet you could run this post through an AI checker and it would tell you there was a chance it had been written with AI. And the fact that this is a possibility with even my sloppiest writing pisses me off to no end.

There is a place for AI. Improve robotic vacuums. Make a robotic duster that will just flit around and clean my house. Let AI learn how to do my dishes and clean my counters. Make an affordable AI lawnmower. Hey, get an AI out there to trim the hedges so I don’t get poison ivy again. I’m very allergic. I don’t want AI to take over the things I love. If it’s going to be in my life, it should give me more time to organically create. (And not destroy the world also, please.)