My (ir)rational Fear of AI

I haven’t written a blog post since January 29th? Why? The usual suspects of course. Depression. Stress. Trying to deal with life in general. Oh, and a little bit of pure nihilism tossed in just for the fun of it. Perfect conditions to make a blog post, right? Hence a post, um, now I guess.

One huge trigger that made me lose my way with blogging has been AI, artificial intelligence if you’ve really been living under a rock. The worst part of this is I don’t even know that much about AI, at least the current strain of AI. I’m just some dude-blogger who has heard the newsworthy stories and watched a few YouTube videos about our current AI breeds; I’m nowhere near an expert on the field and I’m terrified of AI. It’s some scary shit! And if I’m afraid of AI I bet a bunch of other people are also afraid of AI. Citation needed but didn’t a bunch of experts call on an AI moratorium a month back? I don’t know, I’m too scared to read about it anymore than I have to. I’m serious, ignorance is bliss.

Someone on the Kerbal Space Program subreddit made a mod for his game using ChatGPT. This someone had zero programming experience and the AI did all the work for him. It worked with minimal bugs to fix. Citation-needed of course which I’m too lazy to do. Imagine the total whiplash to the programming industry that could possibly happen soon if AI can help people with zero experience create programs…

Stories of kids having ChatGPT writing their English papers; imagine the total whiplash that is about to hit the schooling sector now that AI can churn out essays like it’s no big deal. Will AI make it so learning or knowing anything is pointless? Probably not but it makes me nervous…

And stories of AI creating art, writing scripts/novels/shows/blog posts, making music, making all sorts of creative shit and it doesn’t take long for someone like myself — depressive and lacking vitamin D — to start questioning the whole fucking point of writing in the first place. Like I’ve always feared that writing as a medium was on it’s way out — who wants to read when you can listen and watch — and this isn’t helping at all. What does this mean for art and artists, writers included, in the new AI world?

So round this back to this blog post: No I haven’t been in the mood to write, especially blog. What’s the point? AI could do it better, or quicker, or easier, or all of the above. Once again I ask what is the point of me, a human, sitting here and slapping keys in 2023 when I could have AI do it.

Don’t worry, I’m not that sulky anymore. See, I wrote a post.

AI only got me started on the inability to write. It soon sent me spiraling down the nihilism-hole on everything creative. What was creativity? Was being creative that essential to being human? Did people have the need or will to create? Is creativity just something us Homo Sapiens do as a way to cope with our lives? To express the unexpressible? To make sense of *waves arms all around* this whole fucking mess around us that makes zero sense if you think about it a bit too long? Yeah, I actually think that might be why art is so important to us.

But even that line of reasoning has contradictions and counterpoints and guys I have no fucking clue what art is. I haven’t even justified myself writing this blog post. Sometimes you just have to create/write just because there’s nothing else to fucking do so why not do it. Maybe that’s the essence of art. A big, fat, simple “Why not?!” Ya gotta do something, why not create?