Apologies if this is strongly worded, but I'm pretty passionate about this. In addition to the functions public-facing AI tools have, we have to consider what the goal of AI is for corporations. This is an old cliché, but it's a useful one: follow the money. When we see some of the biggest tech companies in the world going all-in on this stuff, alarm bells should be going off. We're seeing a complete buy in by Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and even Meta suddenly pivoted to AI and seems to be quietly abandoning their beloved Metaverse. For decades, the goal of all these companies has always been infinite growth, taking a bigger share of the market, and making a bigger profit. When these are the main motivators, the workforce that carries out the labor supporting an industry is what inevitably suffers. People are told to do more with less, and cuts are made where C-suite executives see fit at the detriment of everyone down the hierarchy. Where AI is unique to other tangible products is that it is an efficiency beast in so many different ways. I have personally seen it affect my job as part of a larger cost-cutting measure. Microsoft's latest IT solutions are designed to automate as much as possible in favor of having actual people carry out typically client-facing tasks. Copy writers/editors inevitably won't be hired if people could instead type a prompt into ChatGPT to spit out a product description. Already, there are so many publications and Substacks that use AI image generators to create attention-grabbing header and link images - before this, an artist could have been paid to create something that might afford them food for the week. All this is to say that we will see a widening discrepancy between the ultra-wealthy and the working class, and the socio-economic structure we're in actively encourages consolidation of power. There are other moral implications with it that I could go on about, but they're kind of subjective. In relation to art, dedicating oneself to a craft often lends itself to fostering a community for support in one's journey, and if we collectively lean on AI more instead of other people, we risk isolating ourselves further in an environment that is already designed to do that. In my opinion, we shouldn't try to co-exist with something that is made to make our physical and emotional work obsolete.
