For once I'm not writing about school... yeah, surprisingly I'm not talking about needing a break from school, in fact, school is going great, and i have plenty of break time every weekend. What I need a break from is AI. I didn't realize it has started affecting me so much, but I'm fucking exhausted. Now, AI has already affected me personally and directly, because for 2 years give or take, i was addicted to chatbots and it was horrible, I wasted every bit of free time I had, and honestly I could write all day about how important it is that kids and especially teens stay away from chatbots at any cost. But that's not even the main thing about AI that bothers me anymore.
I am honest and dedicated when I say I am no longer addicted to chatbots. It took a long time, but my beliefs about who I am, who I want to be, and what I stand for have won out over the constant craving for the instant dopamine I could get from interacting with chatbots and having them say whatever I wanted to make me feel better. I don't care what anyone else says, addictions to AI are completely real and a valid reason to reach out for help. I've never been addicted to anything else before, so I don't personally have the experience to compare it to smoking or drugs or anything, but from the things I've learned from others who have struggled with those addictions, there are similar patterns. Quitting was hard. I was ashamed to tell a single soul, even those closest to me. It got to the point where I couldn't stay focused on school, I left class for breaks to go on character.ai. It fucked up my sleep schedule, because night was the time when I could use it for hours without being interrupted by people or responsibilities. Even now, those sleeping patterns and habits have lasted, even though I don't use AI anymore.
If I hadn't had my friends reaching out to me, it would have been detrimental to my social life, and I am sure that it is even more harmful to those who don't have supportive friends, because they go to the AI for companionship, and then it keeps them away from making real friends because it can be whatever they want it to be. It can roleplay as the best friend they could possibly have, they feel they can trust it more than any human, because humans have flaws and differences, but if the chatbot says something you don't like, you can delete the message and make it give a different reply.
I also should mention that going to a psychiatrist and getting prescribed antidepressants helped a lot too, but it also required me to stop relying on the AI to listen to my problems, and tell someone who can actually help you. A mental illness like depression mixed with a reliance on AI for emotional support is a recipe for disaster, as I'm sure you've heard in news stories about more than one death emcouraged by AI chatbots. I count myself lucky that I wasn't suicidal while being addicted to chatbots.
Anyway, I got off track, I didn't realize I had so much I needed to get out about chatbots. But now that I am personally over that hump, AI still has effects on my life. Because of my both political and non-political views on AI, I have been disappointed by many people that I look up to due to them being accepting or indifferent to AI. My highschool art teacher, my art history professor, my parents, my peers as well as my girlfriend's peers which she tells me about. I am lucky in one way that a lot of the other students at art school have a strongly negative view of AI, so I don't have to worry about feeling distanced from EVERYONE around me.
Use of generative AI is one of the few things which I will actively get myself into an argument or debate over. Usually, I can just live and let live with most popular topics of discussion, but I can't hear someone say they use gen AI and then let them think that it doesn't bother me. In some cases, it will literally be a reason for me to stop being friends with someone. Unfortunately I have to deal with my parents and professors being okay with gen AI, because I live with my parents, and I want my degree. But it is so frustrating how unserious so many people are about it. The amount of indifference is actually bothersome. It's like they are choosing not to listen to the arguments against AI. Even when they do admit that using it to make your art or write your essays is bad, they gloss over the environmental impact like it doesn't matter, they don't consider the direction that AI is going in and the fact that they're complacent with that, they say "well YOU not using AI isn't going to make a difference!" FUCK YOU!!! OBVIOUSLY I'm not expecting to singlehandedly end generative AI, that's not the FUCKING point. I stand for what I stand for and I'm gonna be loud about it. I don't know what the fuck I can do about it personally. I'm not a politician, or even a tech person (I'll stick to learning html and js before I even try to figure out what's going on with AI) but I can tell you for certain I'm not going to sit here and fucking melt my brain away feeding into the further success of AI companies by using and promoting it, or pretending it's good for anything.
I don't care if you're "not using it to generate youir essay, just using it to edit it!" Edit your own work with your own fucking brain. Even if you think it's just giving you better word suggestions and fixing your grammar, it's not the way the ideas came out of your head. You're letting a machine speak for you, fix your words, and hide the fact that you're actually incompetent due to constantly relying on AI to do every fucking thing for you. AI is everywhere and it makes it hard to do things myself even if I want to. AI is implemented into most programs I am forced to use for school, like office 365 programs, even adobe programs which are meant for art and creation, but won't stop shoving pop-ups in my face like, "Try the new AI feature! Make your art better and use AI! You have to use AI if you want to be good enough!" Get the fuck off my screen, PLEASE! I wish I could turn off suggestions, and autocorrect, and everything else that is automatically enabled and extremely hard to find the settings for to turn it off.
Then of course there's the other issue of AI compromising the legitimacy of real artists' work. Any videography that is shot with professional lighting and setup is deemed AI because it looks too polished. Any CGI is labelled AI because it's "obviously not real" like yeah! it's not real! it's art! just because it's digitally made art doesn't mean it's AI! It's getting harder and harder for digital artists especially to verify their work and prove that it's human-made, and the possible hit that their reputation as a professional artist can take because of accusations is going to really start to harm the art community. Honestly, that's a bigger concern than AI actually just taking over artists' jobs.
In conclusion, I'm fucking tired. Of AI and also physically right now because it's 3:36AM. I just got sick of watching youtube and my homepage being 90% "AI is going to end us all" type videos, and I needed to take some time to just create something (writing this angry rant and working on my website) and listen to some music made by other real people and just... there has to be something special left about being human. AI isn't better than us. It never will be.