🌊 Path to the Ceasefire Pt. 2

This article hammered home how badly we need to back away from AI. I’m a writer and will admit to having used ChatGPT to help me break through a block, but I’ve never used anything that it’s written verbatim and never would. And sadly, we won’t back away from it. Every software I use, from the most elemental (Microsoft Office) to the most cutting edge, has shoe-horned AI into its latest versions, making my experience worse by forcing me to either spend literal hours trying disable the useless “tool” or find a way to ignore it. It’s hell and Clippy is Lucifer. With all my heart, I wish that the voices of actual creatives could stop the unethical and frightening tsunami of AI-generated everything, but we’re inherently lazy beings.

To take Max's point further, the proliferation of AI, for me as a mom, has emphasized how important it is to raise kids who can read well, write succinctly, who understand the history of ideas in literature and art, who have an attention span of longer than 10 minutes, and who understand ethics and morals that AI will never be able to grasp. Gone are the days when education could simply exist for the purposes of getting you a good job in the future. Now, education must be about cultivating HUMAN BEINGS, exploring what it means to be human and teaching children how to be human well. While you all take care of the media we consume, me and all the other alert moms of the world will continue to produce readers who see the inherent sadness in AI slop and seek to create something more.

I'm an author, currently writing short stories and novellas with plans to release novels in the future. When AI first hit the ground, it caused a lot of buzz, as well as division, in the author-sphere. When Sora dropped, it felt like a dystopian twist on a roller coaster that no one remembered agreeing to ride.

While I desperately wish I had the optimism displayed in your write-up on Sora, I can't help but to be a little cynical. People were taken in by hoaxes on Facebook long before Sora came along. My own husband, who knows more about computers, programs, and film than I do, has been fooled by AI videos. It was a weird moment where I had to point out to him the discrepancies. If he was taken in, what about other people? If people keep consuming this crap like it's an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, where's the room for honest creators?

Normally, I'm a proponent of small government. But in this case, we desperately need regulation. We need a leash put on this technology before it goes too far, and we lose ourselves. I'm not against AI entirely. I see it as a tool, but a tool used with discretion and wisdom. But if we're not careful, we're going to let this reshape the world into something horrible, and the last line in Casey Neistat will prove to be prophetic.

While I respect that Max is trying to stay hopeful in the face of a pretty dark-looking future, I think that some of his optimism is misguided, specifically when it comes to how human-created content will outcompete AI slop. I think that this hope is predicated on the fallacious assumption that we will be able to distinguish human-created content from AI-generated content in the future, which I honestly don't think we will. The rate at which the believability of AI-generated has progressed just within the past 5 years has been incredible, so I can only imagine what it will be like in even just a decade. Even if Max is right that content consumers will crave human-created content in the future, the real question is whether they will be able to identify it. I really do believe that the only logical step to prevent this is for laws to be made that heavily regulate technologies such as this that do not present any obvious societal benefits but pose very large risks. And this is coming from someone who prefers as little government intervention in our lives as possible. But as Max said, sometimes people are very bad at knowing what is good for them and if it takes the government stepping in to keep us from rotting our own brains away then so be it.

​​Name the last truly “original” movie that had an original storyline…  The last one I can think of is The Matrix.  25 years ago, it had a new idea that we were all controlled by… well… AI.  One could even argue that thought came from Terminator.  I would even assume, that thought came from an article or book written well before either of those.  I love watching movies but they are all the same story retold.  All the Avenger’s and Superhero’s movies are from comic books that were written decades ago and some of those, Thor for example, are from centuries ago.  Sorcery, Magic, Dragons, all came from centuries ago.  All the adventure seeking YouTube people are copying X Games which is just commercialized 1980’s skateboarding and stunts.  Other YouTube or podcast are debating or bringing up topics… humans have been doing that for centuries.  Humans aren’t great at coming up with new thoughts, we can tweak thoughts of others and improve on ideas but that’s not original thoughts.  Star Trek… that may have been one of the most original shows and a lot of modern technology is built on those shows (cell phones, automatic doors, etc.).  AI is just human thought regurgitated.  So, to sit here and say “AI is going to ruin creativity” is pretty nonsense.  The only thing that ruins creativity is sharing ideas.  Sharing ideas started with written language some 5000 years ago (possibly speaking or any form of communication before that) and has only advanced since.  Books to theater to radio to television/movie to internet/email to video streaming to Sora.  Original thought can only be created by a mind that hasn’t been filled with other thoughts and ideas.