Nowadays, people use AI like a man who needs water to survive. The difference between these two things is the fact that AI is an unnecessary component compared to water. The public gained immediate access to AI around the year 2023, and it has only grown in popularity. All the downsides to this inhuman machineware is becoming clear, evident, and known to those who care. AI does not help the planet, it harms it.
AI data centers are held all around the US in states like Virginia, particularly Ashburn, Northern California, Dallas, and Phoenix. These centres don’t just spout out answers to the prompt put into its task bar, it heats up. When these databases heat up, they’re scouring the internet for any viable information that could pertain to these prompts it is given. Now, these centres can’t stay warm forever, they’ll burn up and die out. Instead, they gather water to cool down the data bases to keep them from overheating. The water they collect isn’t just any water, it’s natural drinking water that creatures like you and I need to survive. Animals, people, bugs, plants; we all need fresh water to survive. Right now, that water is being used to cool down useless data bases for AI.
People like to defend AI sites because they “give access to people not privileged enough to make art” or because they “can’t do it without AI”. This is a nihilistic mindset. Many artists from the past created forms of art like music, sculptures, paintings, and more without AI or any computers. They used a different kind of AI; their Actual Imagination. Beethoven was deaf, and he still made music. Paul Castle is a mostly blind man that creates his own children’s books. You can do it without AI if you just prevail.
Using AI on a daily basis can harm your brain of long term memory, cognitive function, and basic problem solving skills. Sites like ChatGPT don’t help you, they make you dumber. Inputting a prompt into AI does not aid you in learning a new skill, tactic, or hobby. It gives an artificially created response—most likely wrong—and you forget it after mere hours of having just input the prompt. Opening Google and simply putting into the taskbar what you are looking for is objectively quicker than opening ChatGPT and asking a robot to give you an answer you could have Googled yourself.
Not only does AI harm you, but artists and authors. AI chatbots go through books, visual art, films, fanfiction, and human created literature to create its unnatural answer to a question. Many artists and authors do not consent to have their work used for an AI to learn how to pump out slop and nonsensical answers. This infringes on the Copyright law, where anyone owns what they create and no one else can use it without permission or consent. None of the work created by AI is original, it guesses based on statistics where a pixel should be placed in an image. A human person makes a piece of art with emotion, feeling, blood, sweat, and tears put into their masterpieces. A robot simply cannot do that. AI devalues the humanity and empathy that is put into art.
In the end, AI is not your friend. It should be our enemy. We are meeting our match maker, and we need to protect those that are being targeted by this Artificial Intelligence age.
AI is not your friend, and it never will be.