Leahs Gedanken

Have you ever tasted a really delicious pizza? I would guess it wasn’t a frozen pizza from the supermarket next door. Was it? The later one fills your stomach, but does it make you happy? Like a pizza from an Italian chef who uses only the best ingredients, a wood-fired stone stove, and has years of experience. Or maybe even working on your very own dough, seeing it mature over 24 hours, picking the best tomatoes and herbs from your garden, and finishing it with your favorite cheese. Delicious!

You may ask yourself, “Why the hell is she telling me something about pizza if this article is about AI and joy?” Because I need this image to describe what AI is taking from us, from you!

Generative AI, or, to be more precise, the stuff we get sold as AI¹, is bad. It’s bad for the environment. It steals from everyone without asking. It’s wrong in very strange ways half of the time, we have no idea how it actually works and it’s controlled by billionaires. Some of this might change, even though I don’t think it will. But one thing will stay the same: AI is like frozen pizza.

The results of AI are kinda acceptable… sometimes, and it’s fast and cheap, because we ignore the invisible costs or the poor quality. AI is the fast food of creative processes. It works, but if we consider it fairly, it also sucks.

It makes a process that humans experienced for thousands of years, I would even go so far and say a part of what makes us human, a product. Being creative, meaning going through all the ups and downs on your way learning and improving a skill or learning how to work with a tool. And it strips you from the incredible joy after suffering through the ups and downs of creating something on your own. And what will you do instead to get your dose of dopamine? Right, you will go to the dopamine machine, also called social media, of these same billionaires to see ads and buy stuff you don’t need.

You can argue it makes the creative process more accessible, but is this true? Is fast food really making cooking more accessible?

But it’s even worse, AI is stopping our continuous development towards something new. We start to focus entirely on the past. Because what wasn’t experienced and created before, what wasn’t thought before, is beyond reach for every AI. It may look as if it is creating something new for some time, but instead it just creates new recombinations from what existed before. This will stop eventually after flooding the internet with AI slop. But the question is: How much experience will we lose until this point is reached?

For example, with all the parts from above—the dough, the tomatoes, the herbs, and the cheese—we have everything to make a great pizza, but would we try a new recipe at all? Learning from failure and maybe creating a truly new technique? And without this process, nearly nothing we take as normal today would exist. No, no pizza!

Therefore, seeing AI being used more and more in higher education is terrifying because learning the techniques to create new knowledge through science is so important. How should we discover something new if we don’t know how?

That’s the part of you using AI, but there is more, the majority on the other side of the abominations created with AI. And it’s funny, we can reuse our frozen pizza metaphor again. If you buy a frozen pizza, usually you don’t really know what you are eating there. It’s a highly processed and price-optimized product that reminds you about something that is called pizza. The ingredients are produced under questionable circumstances, and there are a lot more ingredients you don’t want and don’t even know what they are doing. That’s AI.

The problem is that sometimes you know whether something is AI-generated, sometimes you have a suspicion, and sometimes you don’t. And because most of the companies and also many people think they have to, they jump on the AI train. As a result, you get AI everywhere. You don’t know if the nice illustration you see, the podcast you hear, the movie you watch, the support you contact, the book you read, the mail you read, the ticket you work on, the music you hear, if all this is AI-generated. For food, we have at least some ingredients listed.

And as someone who honors these crafts, this isn’t a great feeling. You start to question everything you see if it contains the ingredient you would rather not eat. May it be for ethical, environmental, or countless other reasons.

If I assume something is AI-generated, usually this is because there is something uncanny to it. That’s not a pleasant introduction to what you created, and for me, even if your creation is actually good, I can’t overcome this feeling. It’s killing the joy I could have felt by what you created, where you put your heart in. And then there is the AI stuff that isn’t actually bad (looking). But think about it: I and many other people will invest our time in something you created. For me, it’s a matter of respect to honor their time. While they honor my time, I put into creating something.

I want things real people put real work into. Where they invest all their ideas, feelings, passion, experience, and everything they are. I want to feel a connection—the message they wish to send.

AI is creating a small devil on your shoulder that nags you every time you see something you like if maybe it was created by a human or instead by a dead thing that has no actual idea about all this.

And then there is another worse part of it, killing every joy I had left until now. Imagine you spending your time fighting AI bots while they collect the data to create this mess for multiple hours every other day. That’s currently my job, and I hate it! That’s all time I could spend making our intentional AI-free hosting better for you. But it’s also the time you need to read an elaborated mail that could have been half as long or a nonsensical autogenerated security incident ticket for the open-source project you maintain.

Combine all this with the knowledge that everything you ever created public and everything you will create in the future will be consumed by these insatiable demons. To crush it to numbers and recombine it to an abomination you can happily buy and pretend to be your own work.

And as an artist, it is incredible challenging to see people drawn to this fast food, this abomination, while they compare it and even prefer it over your work. Because this is what fast food often does, you want more and more and MORE!

And please remember the people building AI, fueling it, and also those using it, ignore the social contract, a contract they so happily use themselves to prevent you from doing whatever you want with what they created. But they are the ones who terminated the contract first, and this means they can’t rely on this contract anymore. And this is raising interesting new questions: Is stealing stuff that is created using AI still stealing? Is stealing other stuff from the thieves still theft?

Abolish AI! Feel joy!

¹ I will use the word AI synonymously for generative AI because it’s shorter and what most people think about if they hear AI these days.