Why No AI?

AI can do what it does because it’s copying and reproducing the work of authors and artists, without regard to consent, license, or compensation. In other words, its training data is based on theft on a massive scale.

AI companies are bombarding sites with unprecedented numbers of requests as they scrape the web for training data, which can generate so much bot traffic that web operators are forced to shut down.

AI-based search generate “answers” by reproducing content from scraped websites, but they don’t send readers to the source. This causes human traffic to plummet, robbing authors of customers.

Artists, authors, musicians, and other publishers are angry about the theft and reproduction of their work.

It isn’t unusual to encounter AI-powered deepfakes of women and children online. There are current criminal investigations around the use of AI to generate nonconsensual sexual material at large scales.

AI is used to surveil and profile people in public. AI is used to automatically arrest and target innocent people. AI allows some people to stalk and abuse individuals for personal gain.

A lot of AI products need data centers to run. AI data centers consume a lot of energy. The largest planned data center in Texas alone uses the equivalent energy of 14 million homes.

A lot of this new energy comes from burning additional fossil fuels like methane (“natural gas”). Not only will this make climate change worse, it’s bad for the local environment, raising local temperatures and using up massive amounts of water for cooling. Data centers also create a lot of noise and air pollution and are bad for people’s health.

A lot of people are angry about data centers built around them and are protesting to stop their construction.

Today’s AI economy is an unsustainable bubble. AI subscriptions are sold below cost and AI companies are losing billions of dollars a year. Trillions of dollars are wrapped up in AI’s circular financing, in which a few companies are promising to spend enormous amounts of money on each other based on improbable revenue projections.

The AI industry has absorbed so much money that we may experience a global financial catastrophe when the bubble finally bursts, which will mean retirements losing value, businesses going bankrupt, and jobs lost.

AI use causes deskilling, a process by which people and organizations lose the ability to perform skilled tasks. AI use is also known to interfere with the learning process needed to build new skills.

People who fail to develop skills often fall into a trap called cognitive surrender by which they become helplessly reliant on AI to make choices for them.

Interfering with skill-building robs us of future experts and innovators.

AI is mostly trained on material found on the Internet, so it copies and replays popular social and cognitive biases found online. Without constant mitigation, AI perpetuates existing biases such as sexism and racism.

AI use can cause vulnerable people to become addicted to it. AI coding is often compared to a slot machine in its reward structure. AI chatbots appear to effectively prey on people’s loneliness to addict them.

AI chatbots have a well-documented tendency to agree with the user even when they’re wrong. This can cause a delusion loop popularly called “AI Psychosis” in which people lose their grip on reality.

Many of the people profiting from today’s AI hype are adherents of a cult-like belief system called TESCREAL. Broadly speaking, they aim to bring about an AI God that will eventually replace humans with human-simulations that live in space in such great numbers that the human population on earth is expendable. If you think that sounds insane, you’re right, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

AI produces generic, mediocre output because that’s what the models are trained to do: they predict the most likely output based on your input and their training data. This causes the models to produce repetitive, average output, by design.

On social media, the effect of AI slop is akin to spam.

Much of AI training relies on exploitation of global labor, which is done by exploiting people living in poverty and incarceration in a process similar to colonialism.

AI is used by employers to surveil employees and automate punishing workers, while simultaneously laundering responsibility for evaluating worker performance. It’s used to monitor and suppress union-building.

AI is used to deploy disinformation and propaganda. State-sponsored models contain explicit training to adhere to specific political messaging.

The use of AI to generate convincing fakes is used to spread false news, pseudoscience, and misleading health information, and flood social media with misinformation.

Certain communications like reviews, opinions, and art are inherently human expressions, and people feel betrayed when they discover AI-generated content in its place.

Communicating using AI output prevents the receiver from learning about the sender and their personality or expertise, because it runs the message through a filter that removes the sender’s humanity.

Versions of the AI products you use are used for military purposes.

The use of AI in war means that AI data centers could be considered legitimate military targets, including the ones near you.

Some of your customers dislike AI media, even if they don’t tell you about it.

People dislike AI food menus. They dislike AI event flyers. They dislike AI drive-thru chatbots. They don’t want AI customer service. They distrust AI output in their online communication.

Publishing AI media damages your brand.