The AI Pandemic

Despite my youthful appearance, I’ve had to experience a lot of historic events over the course of my life that has left me exhausted. I’ve lived through two global pandemics in the last 5 years. And while comparing the two seems difficult at best and heartless at worst, it’s important to draw your lines in the sand when you see something vehemently wrong. In this case, it’s the oversaturation and unrequested push of Artificial Intelligence (AI) injected into every piece of technology we own.

Even as I type this paragraph on my website, the text editor has an AI tool icon that wants to help me write out my ideas for me using the words of others trained on its neural network of stolen literature found across the Internet. And when it comes to the infiltration of AI in our art tools, then there becomes a crossroads on how to proceed for creatives around the world. AI tools have existed since computers (if you’ve ever used the Magic Eraser in Photoshop, that tool is AI-powered!) so there is a gradient of acceptability when it comes to how much AI we allow ourselves to use in pursuit of creative endeavors. But when the AI tools become so powerful that all is needed for the used to do is type any single-sentence prompt in a text field and have the program spit out a fully-rendered graphic, then I think we have an issue.