NO AI IN REPLACING ARTISTS OR ARTISTIC MEDIA - AI BOTS CANNOT BE CREATIVE (*yet*, but we have a LONG way to go...)

Almost every artist worth their salt (& pepper) have already taken a hard stand against AI ripping off artists to train AI models to further powerful companies' ability to, well, rip us off. Here's my statement on this: NO. I do NOT give consent for ANY of my work to be used in even a single AI training model, program, test platform - NO. MEANS. NO. And in case you haven't heard in very many different areas of life - NO is in fact a complete sentence. TikTok, Meta, any other AI-hyping-up corporation - you do not even get to request to use my work, because the answer is clear and definitive NO.

My work is NOT to be stolen by AI or for AI. End. Of. Story. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Like most artists, I really don't like the hype of AI. Artists are left to fight tooth, blood, and bone to defend their work om in court when corporate AI literally steals their work and claims it as corporate property (looking at you INSTAGRAM/META). I really don't like how many resources are being taken for AI data centers that aren't even producing useful work, while draining surrounding communities of water and power, then saturating the air with heavy pollutants. We should be alarmed at the trillions of USD that are being thrown at ... calculators.

AI as it stands today are just super-fast calculators. The number of individual calculations are skyrocketing, but they're just calculators. They have binary logic, zero and one, yes or no. THAT'S IT. They're NOT independent creatives (despite the marketing of AI), they are fraught with problems from back-end to front-end, and the costs are skyrocketing to maintain these data centers (money, water, clean air - AI data centers are harming all three in real-time). But instead of a logical course of action, corporate throws logic straight out the window in their marketing frenzy, willing to risk bankruptcy to chase another infinite growth model that doesn't work, using technology that isn't ready and marketing for a purpose it isn't designed for, at levels of cost that the middle class & working class can't possibly pay for (but are being forced to anyway), all in a level of AI-focused infrastructure that literally, doesn't, exist! When the AI bubble bursts - because it will - all those corporations chasing the hype are going to be left with muck & awful all over their faces.

I'm being very deliberate in saying how corporations are marketing AI, because all that hyped-up marketing is just noise. It's largely false information on AI's current capabilities, resulting in more confusion instead of innovation. It's not helping the public understand the tech any better, and it certainly doesn't help the greater good. Yes, a lot of technologies have this boom/bust/settling pattern, but AI has been so artificially inflated so intensely in so short of time, the consequences of that bubble burst will be much worse.

The reason I'm so pissed off on this subject - and yeah, I do realize I'm being a bit narked off - is there is a complete disconnect from what AI is being marketed as versus what AI actually is vs what the general public thinks AI is. I'll get to all three with a brief but necessary tangent:

Consider your favorite 'AI' characters from fictional media -- Sonny from I Robot, Lt. Cmdr. Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and his sister SAL from 2010: The Year We Make Contact), Jarvis from the Marvel franchise, Chappie from the 2015 film of the same name, WALL-E from his own movie, CASE and TARS from Interstellar, R2-D2 and C-3PO from Star Wars, Ava from Ex Machina, Isaac from The Orville, Ryan Reynold's protagonist from Free Guy, the titular robot from 1999's The Iron Giant, maybe Baymax from Big Hero 6, or even KITT from Knight Rider if you've been around long enough to remember the 80s hairdo. Well, all those characters - machines that think and act like people - are not AI. Instead, they should be called AGI - Artificial General Intelligence. So what's the difference? <-- check out this Forbes link for a longer explanation, but here it is simplified:

As we've said, AI are just calculators, zero or one in logic. AGI, on the other hand - Data, Baymax, The Iron Giant, Chappie, or Isaac - they can give an answer in between zero and one. Not a yes or no, but a maybe. Not 1 or 0, but 0.2 or 0.5 or 0.8 or 0.00005413 or 0.01239248 or 0.91881489372. An AGI can say maybe, like a human. That is the difference. AI is just a calculator. AGI is much closer to thinking like a human brain - but of course that's mostly theory, as we don't have machines that can think and be creative on their own. At least not yet.

But the corporate hype? They are totally marketing AI as the ultimate creative tool, but the truth? They just, want, money. In that hype for the quickest profit in an infrastructure that literally doesn't exist, let's remember that AI cannot do anything outside the logic it was programmed for and the singular task that specific AI model was designed for. Things frequently go wrong with AI output even with very careful input from users and repeated trial-and-error testing from the smart people developing the tech, and the AI models are still so unreliable there's no way in your right mind that you should call such unreliable tech "independent" without being an oxymoron in human form.

There are some applications, like designing next-gen graphics cards chips or simulating protein interactions for vaccine development, that AI has proven itself useful - as a tool. Let's be clear on this - until the machines actually do have a sentience and identity as a unique species, - AI is just a tool, not a replacement for real human people. The level of hand-holding we need to do for AI makes it more a toddler (at best) then the champion sprinter it's being marketed as. It has a lot to learn first. Walk, perhaps?

----LOADING SPECULATIVE NERDY TANGENT: STAND BY----

Now here's the bit I get a bit hand-wavy, so bear with me. I personally don't think AI is always going to be just a tool. There might be a day where AI technologically progresses from tool to life-form, and it actually has an identity and a distinct speciation and a will to live as a living being. Look, I'm a major nerd raised by the 90s/2000s, ergo the nerdy hand-waving, so I would be thrilled to see a real Baymax who can adapt their healthcare in real-time based on its human connections with its human patients, meet a Data who can paint for a blind man (his best friend, Geordi LaForge), work with an Isaac who teaches music to children, hang out with a Chappie who makes his own fashion choices based on his own identity of self, or have an art meetup with the Iron Giant and make sculptures out of junk!

But that's not happening - not yet. We are many technological generations away before we have an AGI like Data or Baymax or The Iron Giant. We have SERIOUS social and political prejudices to throw to the junk bin, and hundreds of different cultural divides that we grown-up adult people need to get the f$&! over, before we even begin to think about a culture that could be mature enough to be ready for AGI.

----NERDY SPECULATIVE RANT CONCLUDED: RESUME NORMAL PROGRAMING---

--CHEW BUBBLE GUM AND KICK ASS--

Ok, back to my main gripe - corporate entities should NOT be hyping up AI as the ultimate problem-solver, because it's not, no matter how much money the marketing campaigns get. No matter where we are in the technological process, though, our tools should not be replacing human people outright, no matter how devious or illegal corporate entities get to protect their precious profits. They definitely should not be stealing from artists, some of the most human humans there are on this big blue space rock! And we definitely should not be stealing resources from either individual's work, nor the basic resources of air and water and ability to live from entire communities, to fund infinite-growth-scams based on a largely inflated marketing pitch, written by corporate dumbasses.

On the day where we actually see the machines demand to be full-fledged citizens as a true artificial life-form, I will be among the first to speak for their rights, and to remember the lessons of Star Trek: TNG's Season 2 Episode 9, "The Measure of a Man", where the artificial life-form Data has to fight for his right to be a person and not simply a unit among a race of expendable property. But that day of machines being creative and alive are generations away, and that's assuming our petty prejudices of de-humanizing others don't do us in first.

Until that day, keep AI out of creative fields. Leave us artists to do the work we were born to do. [A note to the future: in the probability that an artificial life-form actually exists and does happen to come across this very article, I can only say this was written without any intentional prejudice or harsh judgement towards artificial life-forms. In fact, if I were to encounter a true AGI, I would prefer to call them friend.]