All my fucks are accounted for
Full disclosure: My site was co-coded with an AI.
I suppose it's a little antithetical, as I don't do digital art seeing that I personally need the tactile experience of manually creating the illusion of depth, textures and movement with my lil ghost hand.
I've a finite amount of time, energy, or fucks to give. I weighed the pros and cons.. and made the choice to use AI assistance with MCP tools for the JS and some of the CSS. To brainstorm ideas, to create playgrounds for me to test things out. I wrote specs, leaning on my experience in functional analysis. It worked pretty well.
Is that so unethical? To have completed in days what I would have normally in weeks?
It's conflicting for me, because for small scale stuff, personal projects, helping one make sense of the ADHD word salad and transforming it into neat to-do lists... it's useful. Text transformation. Translation from a tangled mass of thoughts into a coherent list, into structured data.
I can do all this shit manually of course and still do. Just well, I'm not a teenager at home anymore, I don't have that much time. So I find ways to save time so I can spend that time on people that matter, or write, draw, paint.
In essence helping me with the mental load of managing a home, family, life.. when I often face task paralysis and overstimulation on a daily basis.
Distorting reality
I didn't actually mention why I felt conflicted eh?
If AI were limited to the scope I mentioned before I don't think we'd be facing the acceleration of a post-truth society and the breakdown of our civilization as we know it. The value with attribute to facts as a society is erroding, and what's replacing it are opinions-as-facts and manufactured realities superimposed on what is actually real. Qualitative assessements and judgements versus quantitative. Talk about a systemic regression.
To reference the concept of Maps and Territory lemme throw out some quotes from Eliezer Yudkowsky from Less Wrong:
Our mental frameworks for understanding the world often differ from reality itself. It's easy to mistake the map that we hold in our minds for the actual territory it's representing. Recognizing the difference between the map and the territory is crucial for clear thinking, open-mindedness, and avoiding biases. 1
Step 1 : Understanding that our perceptions are not reality.
For example, we might assume that all neighborhoods are as safe or unsafe as the one we grew up in, or that all jobs involve the same daily tasks as our current one. But those are just maps in our mind - the territory, or what's really out there, differs. Updating our mental maps to more closely match the territory leads to better choices and less surprising encounters with the unexpected. 1
Step 2: Understanding that we can correct our perceptions to more closely match reality.
It has always been my goal to ensure that my maps correlate to the territory as much as possible.
But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious is to worship your own ignorance. 1
TLDR : the map is not the territory, a belief is not fact, and AI is fucking with our ability to determine the state of the territory by poisoning the media we consume to inform us. It is so much more difficult to update our mental maps to correlate to reality, and be less wrong.
I ran a survey for a paper we did in university back in 2019 about the potential for election interference and post-truth accelerationism using AI, we showed short clips of deepfakes and real videos. Even with the limited tech at the time, a third of respondents believed it was real. What was even more concerning was that about the same amount disbelieved the real vids.
The mere existence of generative AI eroded the notion of truth.
Is it ethical to use it at all? Is it ethical to make use of anything currently manufactured or created within our current economical systems based on oppression?
So I stay conflicted about it.
I can't do shit about it. So, I hide away in this tiny ass corner of the web.
I often cry about it in my art