What am I going to do?
It's weird to think there was a time when all this AI stuff was...fun. When it wasn't this terrifying, all-consuming force. When it was being used in absurd ways as we poked and prodded at it from behind our caveman keyboards. When did we go from liking this stuff to being completely scared of it? What happened?
Oh yeah, it was when money got involved. When people started using genAI not for fun and for the benevolent enrichment of others' lives, but for profit. I'm not gonna get on some soapbox about capitalism, but I feel like we need to be comfortable placing boundaries on where money is allowed to flow, because when unchecked, I feel like it leads to these kinds of situations where you can't even breathe on something without needing to first pay several different fees.
Europeans have taxes. Americans have fees. Big difference, you see.
I mean yeah, personally speaking, I'm not drowning. I'm doing...decent...as far as money. A few extra fees here and there are whatever. I've had to live on literally $0 dollars a week before. I'm not gonna run around saying I can relate with those who grew up in ghettos or in conditions of abject poverty, but I've had to learn to count my pennies throughout life.
What the hell am I even going on about
Oh right, AI. I used to like it, now it scares me. It's gaslighting me. It's the first time I've ever had something encroach across my entire space and have me wondering if reality is even real. Is the music I listen to real? I listen to more ambient stuff than before, some more stuff that is kinda vaporwave-esque. Is it real or is it slop?
I love how "slop" has become slang for mass-generated zero-quality AI content that gets distributed over the web.
But yeah, I follow some people on YouTube too that I suspect of being AI. I feel like I've probably read my share of AI-generated articles by this point, too. I've even talked to AI-generated characters before.
How long until everything I touch is intellectual plastic? Not something to be treasured and experienced, but something to fulfill a single use and then be discarded forever? I can't stand to think about that.
The bottom is gonna fall out hard on the entertainment industry. As someone who spent his life developing skills in music composition, I worry that the competition is gonna increase on both sides. AI music will squeeze me out of the low end, and the consolidation of human talent into a handful of gatekeeping performative dipshits brooding in Southern California will squeeze me out of the high end.
I enjoyed learning how to make music and it still brings me joy from time to time. And yet, I lament having spent all this time to develop this skill only to suddenly find I cannot leverage it at all in life. I'm too broke to network, I'm too dumb to learn new tricks, and I'm too human to be in the right place with the right buyer. I'm Gordon Freeman, seeing the massive Dyson sphere orbiting before him and realizing that the Combine Empire is simply too large and too mighty to be stopped.
Illustration is its own can of worms. Trying to find an inexpensive freelance artist who isn't using AI is like trying to find an elderly person without problematic social beliefs. Like yeah, they exist, but they're not very plentiful and hard to certify. And now they get to charge a premium for the luxury of being real people.
Why can't I do the same? Well, there's too damn many of us. And so many of them are better than me.
I know I just got done saying I live somewhat decently on my current income, but that doesn't mean I am a walking wallet when I need to have stuff drawn. I pay fair and I accomodate greatly. Do I take a chance on someone who might secretly be another AI grifter? Do I pay someone abroad, taking work away from my fellow American and continuing to maintain a substandard standard of living for someone less fortunate than me? Is it not enough to simply be a customer? Do I need to network with people in fields I'm not interested in just to be a customer later on? I'm just looking for a sketch, not a date to an upscale restaurant.
Is it...enough to be a human? I don't even like being human sometimes.
That's why I tend to just work by myself.
Where am I going with this
Take AI with a grain of salt. Some aspects of it I love, such as it being a very capable virtual librarian. But other aspects, like the rush to take the human out of humanity, scare me more now than they ever have. I don't want to be forgotten. I want to touch things and know that they are real.
I guess that means I just have to do more legwork from now on.