I feel tricked by AI- Why I won’t be using it anymore.

I consider myself to be a Generalist, in that I have worked reasonably well in many different areas and businesses. Two major ones being Design and Coding, neither of which I ever considered myself to be a master of.

Which is when AI came along and started offering both ways to generate images as well as ways to generate code for my projects and businesses.

AI comes with promises, such as “saving time”, “as easy as writing a prompt”, and “what you generate is yours not someone else’s”. I always have some projects I’m working on and so it was so easy to just generate an image that goes along with it, or generate some code to add something here or there. It was a “path of least resistance”.

Pretty soon I had integrated image generation into product design flows, working on A/B testing between AI vs Non-AI assisted products. I had AI-assisted coded development tools and websites that were running without problems, no bugs (that I knew of). I was using the Chatbot daily to help answer questions.

AI markets itself as being genuinely helpful… and that’s part of the problem.

It was only after some time that the problems and issues regarding AI started to come to light.

The first indication that something was wrong was when it was found out that the developers of popular AI were literally ripping apart books to scan in to train their AI, knowing something was wrong about that but doing it anyway because of the profit potential, with members of the public mentioning flatly “we’re all trained or educated on theft/stolen ideas.” so we should all just do that. So it is genuinely built on theft.

The second indication came from when I was using the AI to help me with facts and help with finding words. Often brushed off as a harmless hallucination, the AI actually came up with words that were non-existent and claimed it as a real word, as well as facts and numbers to support the facts that were not accurate and claimed them as accurate. It was trained on Social Media data, so viral factoids that are completely untrue were considered legitimate… so it is genuinely increasing misinformation.

The third indication was when it was found out that most of the popular AI don’t care about the environmental impact of their data-centers, and that Big Tech is willing to pollute the water, not use renewable energy, increase air and noise pollution with secondary generators, and often build near Black and low-income communities. So without major changes in how the technology expands, it is genuinely harming communities and the environment.

The fourth indication was learning that the data the AI’s were trained on is literally biased, scraped from data that is determined by who had internet access and who was most active on the sites scraped. So it is genuinely increasing social bias such as misogyny, racism, ageism, and ableism.

The fifth indication that something was wrong was when I was looking at all the new projects being created on places like ProductHunt. Every single new project was not being built with the intention of making the world a better place in some way, and half of the new products being created were made with AI or leveraging AI for some purpose. This means that the incentives related to new product making are all wrong. When working with AI in my previous projects, I noticed that sadly the AI-generated products were more popular in terms of sales than the hand-crafted items. The A/B testing proved it. Then there’s AI being integrated into everything in Big Tech. What all this tells me is that the people who care about ethics will decide not to use AI, while the people who don’t care about ethics will leverage it for their own financial benefit. This increases the probability that AI will generally be used for unethical profit making ultimately leading to increased corruption. If we continue to integrate AI into everything, the capitalism you thought you knew becomes something else entirely because the incentives overall have changed.

This also means that it is becomes more and more important, crucial even, for people to focus on starting and supporting more ethical projects, ignoring the profit motive and instead creating something that makes the world a better place.

The six indication actually came after stopping using AI. This was when I exhibited evidence of withdrawal symptoms. Every time I had a question I was tempted to go straight to the AI to try and answer it. That’s really what people want to do on search engines is typically find an answer to something. Every time I needed and image for a project, and every time I needed some code, I was tempted to ask the AI because it was the path of least resistance.

I remember thinking trying to rationalize the AI use: “Well, I can use this AI because it was trained on ethical data and actually cares about the environment”, but this is when an important realization came in and why I won’t be using AI at all, even the ones that purport to solve all the above issues: AI was really a shortcut that merely offers approximations, always with the possibility of misinforming, essentially becoming a mental crutch (and a wobbly one at that). It was around the same time that I turned off my iPhone’s spelling auto-correction, predictive text, smart punctuation, etc…because I realized that I wasn’t learning how to write properly.

The realization was solidified when I began building a science facts project with zero AI. The work took longer, I was working slower but more carefully, the results were created with more intention, and the writing and information was much richer and more accurate. Not using AI doesn’t mean you will fall behind, it means you will create something that’s better and you will learn from it too.

NoAILogo.orgDownload the No AI Logo - Public Domainnoailogo.org

So what can we do? Support projects that do not use AI. Support real artists, support real developers. Support freedom increasing software. Avoid using Big Tech, avoid using AI even if it feels easier and beneficial. Download the No AI Logo and place it on your projects. https://noailogo.org/ it’s going to be seen as a good thing, a very good thing. Take solace in knowing that people are working on projects without AI, are building things that aren’t incentivized by AI and profit. Look for the IndieWeb, check out https://bubbles.town/, join anti-big-tech networks like Mastodon. Remember that you still have the power to choose which tech to support.