If You Use AI, Why Are You Alive?
By: Nick Cosgrove
This summer, I began working for the marketing team for the Mighty Sound of Maryland, UMD’s marching band. It has been awesome so far; I’ve gotten to develop my photography skills, create a variety of social media designs on various platforms, and have gotten a ton of positive feedback on my work, which is always nice. Being able to express my creativity across a number of disciplines while supporting the musical heritage that I am a part of has been a highlight for me in a time that is often very dark for those in the humanities. All of this to say, when I saw a series of AI-generated designs showing UMD athletes as Lego figures from the official Maryland Terrapins account this summer, something inside me broke. This university made hundreds of millions of dollars last year from the athletics department alone, and they couldn’t be bothered to pay a student designer double digits to make these using actual creative methods. It just reeks of laziness and a lack of care. They couldn’t even get the Maryland flag right! As someone who knows the branding guidelines around logo usage when human designers are involved, and who hand-paints the flag on my nails before every big sporting event the band plays at, that was a particularly sore point. It’s so lazy! Between everything this experience represents and the points I’ll go on to elaborate, I really cannot overstate how deeply I despise AI, so what follows is my attempt to explain why I truly believe it is one of the biggest threats to humanity as a concept.
Even without touching on AI’s horrible energy usage and environmental impacts, this water-guzzling mockery can only function by stealing the work of people who actually bothered to use their time on this planet for something meaningful. “Artificial Intelligence” is a misnomer. These programs cannot and do not do any thinking themselves, because that isn’t how they work at all. They are essentially glorified auto-complete programs, designed to output the next most likely word one at a time. The probabilities are informed by the data each model has access to, as it bases its output only on what it has already seen. There is no intelligence involved; all of the output is based on unfathomably large datasets of textual and visual information that are frequently taken without consent or compensation. As such, it is not an exaggeration to say these programs literally cannot function without the stolen work of artists, authors, and creatives in every field. As an author, graphic designer, photographer, videographer, and editor, this is very personal to me. People rightfully recognize the act of stealing someone’s work and passing it off as their own as plagiarism, but somehow when millions of people have the same thing happen to them, it gets written off as the cost of innovation. “If we had to pay artists for every single piece we used to train our models,” the argument goes, “we’d go bankrupt!” If only!
AI is awful for the planet, it can’t exist without stealing from actually talented people, and if that wasn’t enough, using it makes you stupid. Studies such as this one from MIT consistently show that people using AI to complete tasks have much lower brain engagement and have “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Information processing and retention are also lower for AI users in this study, which makes sense given that people are replacing doing their own thinking with reliance on AI to do it for them. A big defense for these programs is that people use them to help complete tasks, but clearly this is not a healthy relationship, even if one claims they’re using the programs as an aid. AI psychosis is also becoming more common, where people talk to AI chat programs as if they are real people and are ensnared by AI’s practice of constantly telling you what you want to hear. Parents were right about phones rotting your brains, but we as a society aren’t nearly aware enough of how bad AI is for the mental faculties of those who use it.
It’s all been bad so far, but my biggest sticking point with AI is how profoundly anti-humanity it is. I genuinely believe that one of the things that separates humans from other species is our creativity and our ability to not simply think, but to imagine and to create. We are on this planet for such a short amount of time, and the thought of offloading even a second of that time to a thoughtless machine fills me with dread. Why would I want to read something no one wanted to write? Why would I want to look at something no one wanted to make? If you didn’t care enough to put it into the world yourself, it clearly is worth nothing. AI-generated content is soulless garbage trying and failing to copy far better works from people who are actually capable of having ideas.
Something I like doing is taking a minute every so often to look at the environment around me and appreciate the work that went into the human-made elements. Every single inch of the constructed world is there because someone made a choice. From art to architecture to product design to street markings to furniture and anything you can imagine, someone had an idea for a thing they wanted to bring into the world, and the result of their passion and effort is the world we all call home today. In the time of AI, the enthusiasm and sense of being this exercise brought me has dimmed. I look up and see an AI-generated flyer for a local business; I go on my phone and see an AI-generated social media promotion from a billion-dollar corporation. The option to have thought behind their design was not only passed by, but actively rejected. The world we once inhabited with artistry and intentional choice behind every element of our designed lives is gone, and that makes me really sad.
The symbolism surrounding AI’s relationship to artistic effort was recently brought to a head in Anthropic’s purchasing of vintage books en masse for the express purpose of scanning them into their proprietary data set in a manner that avoided dealing with copyright laws before violently shredding the books. The works of people who had a desire to contribute their thoughts and artistic endeavors to the collective human experience were taken, processed into a database with no consent given, and then destroyed in a manner that prevents humanity from ever being able to experience them again. It is an act profoundly insulting to life itself, and symbolizes how lost the Silicon Valley champions of AI are in their lust for profit and technological development.
It is for all these reasons that I am over anyone who still uses AI three years in. You’re destroying the environment, stealing from those with actual talent and ambition, and mentally strangling yourself all because you don’t want to write an email. Watching this rapid shift towards AI usage for everyday tasks makes me feel insane. People managed to read emails and make low-quality flyers and do their math homework without AI not even five years ago. Did we all just forget how to do these basic things? Or is it that people are using these programs as an excuse not to try things they might not immediately succeed at? AI has made tons of people content with never pushing themselves intellectually and creatively, and if AI executives have their way, this is the least present AI will ever be in our lives. We desperately need people to stop using this mental grindstone before we lose our chance to resist.
There is more to life than survival. I don’t want to click a button to make a painting that looks like every other painting ever. I want to struggle to make art. I want to pour everything I have into my creative expression; I want to constantly revise and find new ways to create and to showcase the ideas and stories I am trying to share. The goings-on of your daily life are not items you can check off of a spreadsheet. I don’t want to complete life. I want to live.
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