Generative AI is Literally Destroying Us

Generative AI or gen AI is sophisticated machine learning that can create original content like text, images, video, audio or software code based on a user's request. Think ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Gemini, Copilot, etc. There are many things called AI, but they're not all based on similar models and don't all represent the same amount of harm. When people "hate AI," they're talking about generative AI.

Now I have a deep, personal beef with gen AI because of psychos like this, pumping out complete slop at a pace that buries actual writers' work:

But let's be honest, generative AI isn't good for anything. Not for anything, folks, seriously.

Gen AI has a massively negative environmental impact

The energy costs (and associated greenhouse emissions) of training AI are massive, but they are dwarfed by the energy demands of day-to-day usage—which means its horrific environmental impact is not going away and absolutely is affected by individuals' use. No gen AI usage is harmless.

AI data centers decimate local water supplies, often in places already in drought conditions. Human beings in these locations are already being made ill and will soon die or be completely displaced by these centers. They require massive land footprints, put immense pressure on local energy infrastructure, destroy the atmosphere, and are expected to generate 2.5 million tons of e-waste annually (which most of the world lacks the infrastructure to safely dispose of).

It is crippling people's ability to critically think for themselves

While AI can provide people with accurate information and help make good decisions (see the next point for whether it actually does), once people begin using AI regularly, study after study has found their unassisted performance drastically declines. They literally lose the ability to think critically for themselves, become more and more dependent on the tool.

This "cognitive offloading" strips humans of the ability to discern reality from fiction, to communicate with each other, and to trust their own decision-making. The younger people are when they begin using AI, the less likely they are to develop critical thinking skills at all.

It constantly provides misinformation

AI can't actually "think" or "reason." Large Language Models (LLMs) find patterns in the data they've ingested and simply predict the next most likely word or pixel, based on what actual human beings have written, said, or created in the past.

So their "answers" are frequently wrong. AI will confidently—and with an increasingly "human" intonation—lie to you. The tech industry has labeled this AI hallucinations, and they can lead to everything from small mistakes to information so bad it has killed people and destroyed lives, all while it becomes more effective at covering its tracks.

It is 100% dependent on theft of real humans' work

The leadership of AI companies have said outright that these models cannot exist without stealing copyrighted materials. Across the board, AI models have scraped the internet and consumed human creativity without consent, without compensation, and in many cases without even informing people that their copyrighted creations would be mulched and regurgitated.

It is trained on and continually used to create child sexual abuse material

Year over year, investigators have found a 26,000% increase in AI-generated sexual abuse videos: realistic, graphic imagery that endangers recognizable actual children, normalizes extreme violence, and increases the risk of real-life offenses.

Its inherent biases further harm already vulnerable people

AI is only as unbiased as its inputs, and, well, people are biased. Every single AI model has heavy biases in terms of race, sex, gender, age, socioeconomic status, and disability, and the worst part is that it's a negative loop: AI-based tools amplify the original biases they were trained on, and people using them internalize the AI's biases, strengthening their own, so their inputs are then further biased, which AI internalizes...and so on and so on.

Companies are using it to gut the workforce

If you work for a living, you've seen this happening. Support departments gutted and replaced with AI chatbots. Teams halved, with the rest expected to pick up the slack using AI to be more productive--except only about 13% of workers report any actual productivity improvements due to AI. People are worried (as they should be), and as more layoffs result in more job seekers going after the same smaller and smaller pool of jobs, AI even makes the job search harder, with ATS systems rejecting resumes based on keyword mismatches and formatting issues without a human ever seeing them.

It's getting worse as it consumes its own bad content

As AI runs out of human-created content to steal and devour, its eating its own creations, resulting in less and less coherent or accurate output. Which means everything that's wrong with AI is only going to get worse.

Even the Pope is against this shit

Pope Leo XIV, in his first encyclical entitled "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," urges people to build for the common good and remain human and warns that "technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it."

So if there's a problem you need to solve, and ChatGPT or one of its lookalikes seems like a shortcut to solving it—don't. Please don't. We have to stop normalizing this. It's a genuine plague. It will end us.

And on that note, AI "authors" are not authors, AI "artists" are not artists, and I'm fully behind shaming the people who want to steal from creatives and call themselves a creative without actually creating anything.

Doesn't fighting AI make you a Luddite?

Sure does—and let me tell you why that's a fantastic thing to be.

"Luddite" is now used as a semi-insulting term to describe people who resist new technologies, but the original Luddites were British textile workers who watched textile factory workers fire their entire workforce of artisans and replace them with new mechanized looms and knitting frames, inviting a few to stay on with massively reduced pay and rights to monitor the machines or else be replaced by unskilled operators.

They demanded protection for workers and livable wages, smashing expensive machinery or burning factories when the wealthy factory owners refused to negotiate. Instead of creating safety nets or worker protections to ensure the quality of human lives, the British government stood with the handful of wealthy property owners and shot, hanged, or exiled to Australia all of the Luddites.

I'm not a technophobe. I'm a Luddite: someone who believes technology is only beneficial as long as it serves humanity instead of destroying human lives and livelihoods.