A brilliant piece by Séamas O'Reilly on being stolen from by Big AI.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-41606539.html
Excerpt:
"I hate all of this in almost every way a thing can be hated. I hate the factless waffle that surrounds Big AI’s every improbable goal. I hate how insipidly stupid, or just plain evil, those goals so often are, and the yawning chasm between them and any form of achievable reality. I hate that Big AI’s successes are inflated and its failures ignored — or are even categorised as hilarious mis-steps, like when AI chatbots tell people to eat poisonous mushrooms, put glue on pizza, or make air diffusers from chlorine gas.
"I hate that Big AI consumes so much energy that every time you generate a six-fingered portrait of Anne Frank or a scene from the Vietnam war in the style of Studio Ghibli, you might as well just kill a polar bear with a crossbow. I hate that it can run roughshod over every copyright law and environmental protection on the planet in pursuit of the data it needs to continue failing, with no consequences save for the enrichment of the worst people on Earth, who have managed to make all of this magical bullshit seem sensible to an intellectual class comprised of people I wouldn’t trust to print an email.
"And, yes, I hate what Big AI means for culture. I hate that writers and artists must suffer the indignity of being pickpocketed by the richest men who’ve ever lived. I hate the constant, deadening marketing of machine-generated slop as a replacement for human thought and creativity. I hate every shiny, godawful image from an 'AI artist', and each lifeless line of pilfered prose, Frankensteined into existence by an 'AI author', posited as a substitute for illustrators and writers facing pay and working conditions already decimated by assaults on their professions from those self-same Silicon Valley hordes."
