Now that the dust has settled, what's going on with AI?

2025-04-10

(or: N0's opinions on AI, the blog post)

A quick note on terminology before we start

Honestly I don't even like calling it "AI", because the term is so vague. It's easy to justify calling a calculator artificially intelligent. Many completely different things have been and continue to be called "AI". Some people further specify by saying "generative AI". I have in the past referred to LLMs as "artificial pseudo intelligence", which I think is a pretty accurate term, but "API" is already a commonly used initialism for something else entirely. So for now, I'm just going to begrudgingly call it AI even though I don't like the term, just so that we can get through this blog post understanding each other.

Are the criticisms of AI valid?

AI is as widespread as it is hated, due to trillions of dollars riding on the future profitability of the technology it has been square-peggedly shoved into any round holes in sight. Nobody likes this. Nobody asked for this. It's very annoying. It seems that people want to justify this annoyance and resistance against AI with further moral reasoning beyond "it's annoying and doesn't work", and here I will address the most common complaints.

AI is stealing!

On this subject I must apologise for my counter-signalling but as a staunch intellectual property abolitionist I cannot agree. "Copying is not theft" is trivially true. If AI is stealing your images or text, then so is anyone who copy pastes or saves it at any point. When the NFT scam was at it's peak hype train, everyone seemed to intuitively understand that copying is not theft, the idea of "right click saving" NFTs to prove they can't be owned despite what "smart contracts" might say was a widespread action. The absurdity of the idea of trying to claim ownership over something in direct contradiction of the mechanics of how the web fundamentally works was widely mocked as obviously silly to a comical degree. However for some reason I'm yet to wrap by head around, when that arbitrary instruction which claims to declare ownership over a jpeg comes not in the form of a "smart contract" but instead in the severely outdated legal concept of "intellectual property", people seem to suddenly decide that right click saving actually is somehow equivalent to real life theft. At this point I could easily opine at length about the many, many flaws in IP and copyright, but I think I'll save that for another time so as to stay on topic. But no, AI is not stealing, it's not capable of depriving anyone of access to or possession of whatever images or text it scrapes from the internet for training data.

AI is however doing just that, it relies on scraping and web crawling to gather it's training data. Web crawlers have historically been expected to follow a certain etiquette. While this might not seem like a big deal, the web and in fact all computer technology in general, fundamentally is only possible because of standards. Standards are important, and they are also impossible to enforce and have much more to do with human social interaction than they do with the hard maths of computer science. Real human beings have to agree to do things in a certain way such that different machines can execute the same code and expect the same output. Without standards, everything sucks, and what holds people to standards ultimately is the same sort of rule that stops people from littering. Sure you throwing one piece of litter in the streets is probably no big deal, but if everyone did it, this place would be a mess and that would suck for everyone including you, so please don't litter. Following gentleman's agreements and etiquette is important, and when it comes to the web crawlers that scrape data for AI training, they are widely known to break every piece of etiquette which web crawlers are supposed to adhere to. This is bad and they should not do this. For this reason I find myself in agreement with attempts to circumvent AI training web crawlers and poison the data they scrape. If you're not going to stick to our rules, we're not going to stick to yours. This is perfectly reasonable. By all means, use Nepenthes until these fuckers decide to actually adhere to robots.txt "no scraping" rules, I fully support you.

AI is an environmental disaster!

AI training takes a large amount of energy and computer hardware. This comes at a steep environmental cost. This is an inarguable fact. There are also lots of other technologies which come at a high environmental or social cost, which aren't generally as frowned upon as AI. Your phone contains cobalt mined by children. People got along ok for all of human history without refrigerators in their houses, but we all have them despite their energy costs. If I had to sum up my position on AI's energy and hardware needs and the damage they cause, I would say I agree that it is too high, and I wish people would pay more attention to these sorts of things across the computing landscape. It takes an obscene quantity of resource extraction and energy consumption to produce GPUs for AI, and bitcoin mining, and also high end gaming. If you don't like the environmental costs of AI, you should also oppose the AAA gaming industry. This is not a gotcha or whataboutism, I'm saying I personally oppose both for the same reason.

There's also a somewhat convoluted argument about generative AI vs an equivalent human. It costs more in resources and energy to grow a human from scratch and provide them with the time and resources which would enable them to draw a picture than it would cost for an AI to generate the same picture. Therefore using generative AI to do x task is actually more environmentally sustainable than having a human do it. This implies that an AI is interchangeable with a human, which is obviously not the case. That line of reasoning assumes that the human in question would not exist otherwise, which isn't true. Rather, you're repurposing an existing human who has already consumed those resources, whereas the AI was brought into existence specifically for the purposes of doing this task. Also, it's a human who is using the AI at the end point, so the cost of growing and maintaining a human is already "priced in", you can't act like it's an either-or.

One more thing to consider is the question of usefulness. The medical industry is incredibly energy and resource intensive, but when it comes to cutting consumption, most would say that the medical industry is important enough that it's worth that cost of keeping around roughly as is. So it's not just a question of "is x thing energy intensive" but rather "is the energy cost of x thing worth it for the product?" So is AI useful enough that the environmental cost is worth it? I'll explore this more in a second but I'm going to say no, AI is not that useful.

As a final caveat I will say that not all neural networks are created equal. It's perfectly possible to run very small neural networks with negligible energy costs. They can't do the same sorts of things as the giant models which we generally think about as "AI", but they have their niches. I don't see any problem with them.

AI is taking my job!

Since AI can automate portions of the work which some programmers and artists do, this takes away employment from those people. I'm going to briefly comment on the artists in particular here. Frankly, I doubt this is the case on a large enough scale to be worried about. The jobs that AI art is taking away are mostly illustrators rather than artists. Corporate illustrator is not in my opinion a vital part of the human project. At no point has anyone with an interest in the arts stopped caring about their favourite artists because they can just generate whatever they want with midjourney. This is because AI generated art doesn't typically serve the same function we go to art for. Art isn't reducible to "pretty pictures". An AI couldn't generate "Artist's Shit" by Piero Manzoni although it could probably generate an image of it, ceci ne pas une pipe. Artists producing more physical and conceptual works which couldn't be AI generated has been the standard expectation for interesting art ever since the proliferation of photography. Not to mention there are some artists who take the uncanny, dreamlike, and sometimes horrifying aspects of AI generation and play into those flaws, which I personally think is pretty cool. As an example, the youtube channel cat soup makes some wonderfully cronenburgian videos using AI. So AI is not killing art. Art is not a profitable career path (trust me). No one made cave paintings because it was profitable. Art is a fundamental aspect of the human experience and something as benign as image generators couldn't possibly threaten it.

But is AI hurting artists financially? I would love it if everyone could sustain a comfortable living standard just through their artistic passions. That is not the case under capitalism. AI continues to make this not the case, and likely worsens it. I'm sure there are artists who's job involves producing corporate art which they would rather not being doing, but they need to in order to fund their real passions. The idea that these people might be out of a job saddens me. I will say that the estimate of just how many artist's jobs will suffer is likely overestimated. A similar mistake is often made when calculating the costs of piracy to media industries. You can't assume that everyone who pirates a video game would otherwise have been a paying customer. In all likelihood they would have just not played the game at all if it weren't for piracy. The same is true for corporate AI art. Every random ass vape shop which AI generates a logo would not have otherwise paid a real artist to make that logo, they just would have had no logo, or a shitty MS paint logo made by the owner's nephew for $5. It's not the case that every instance of corporate AI art is a missed employment opportunity for a human artist.

While I think it's a shame that people are losing their livelihoods to automation, I am more inclined to direct my frustration at the economic system which withholds resources from people to coerce them into wage slavery rather than the automation itself. It would be better to live in a world without a distinction between professional artists and everyone else, because everyone has the ability to realise their artistic potential without it being tied to a career. It would be better to live in a world without shitty, mundane, low paying code monkey jobs. It's good that those shitty jobs are being automated. Or at least it would be good in a world with a more logical economic system. Automation should leave us with more free time to live our lives and develop ourselves, not leave us destitute and hungry through no fault of our own. The problem here is capitalism, not AI. AI automation is not a good thing, it is causing material harm to real people who find themselves without a wage. Therefore we should be up at arms at the system of wage labour which produces this problem while also opposing the technology itself. Capitalism created the set of conditions which required people to be stuck in shitty code monkey jobs and shitty corporate illustrator jobs, and now capitalism is obsoleting those jobs. It created whole classes of specialised workers and then pulled the rug from under them. Once again, I could derail this post and go on a longer rant about the link between capitalism and computer technology, but I'll save that for it's own dedicated post where I can go into more detail.

Safe to say my thoughts on this particular issue are a little complex but they boil down to, "capitalism is really the problem here, but it's not like AI is helping".

AI is bad at doing stuff!

I can't even pretend to present both sides of this issue, I wholeheartedly agree. I am not a programmer but I do occasionally have write some code. I've tried using various LLMs to generate code, and it has always been garbage. At least, garbage at first. It takes about the same amount of effort to coerce the LLM into writing the code I actually want as it would have taken to just figure it out myself. It's also a miserable experience, like talking to a toddler. They say the problem with writing code is that computers do exactly what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do. LLMs don't even do what you tell them to do. They also constantly get shit wrong. I see no reason why I would ever use an AI to do any task, they suck as tools. I don't know how anyone manages to get anything useful out of them. They were a fun novelty magic trick when they first became commonplace, but now that the novelty has warn off they are just a virtual idiot. AI is, appropriately, a function of a flaw in capitalism which produces hallucinatory speculative investment bubbles. Having AI forced into a bunch of random tech products where it's not needed or wanted sucks, and I avoid it as much as possible.

From a pseudo-accelerationist perspective, it might be a good thing that a lot of these people might stand to lose money on this garbage product, but the structure of modern monopoly capital means that ultimately I'm certain the cost will be paid by the working class some way or another, and the people at the top will retain their money and power. AI generated slop listicles shitting up search engines drives more people away from the corponet and hopefully towards the real internet made by real people. I can only hope that the inevitable failure of AI leads to something positive, which is about the best thing I have to say about AI as a technology.

AI art isn't real art!

This complaint is hard to address because I'm not really sure what it means. I have no clue what "real art" is, or why it would be desirable. Quite famously it's really hard to determine what "art" even is. Questions about what is or isn't "real art" are nonsensical. Simply framing the idea that there is such a thing as "real art" reveals that you misunderstand the nature of art and the nature of language. Is AI art "bad art"? In my experience, the vast majority of the time, yes. I would also say the majority of conventional art is bad too. That's not relevant. If you think that the existence of bad art is a moral evil, you are literally Hitler. As we've seen, there are enough legitimate problems with AI that there's no reason to appeal to some notion of degenerate art to criticise the technology.

In summation:

Please use these conclusions to direct your criticism of AI in a productive direction.

Addendum: Just because these are my opinions on AI as a technology, does not mean they extend to the megacorps making use of AI. To the extent that opposing chat-GPT is opposing Micro$oft and so on, that opposition of course has my full support.