SuperFolder Stingray
no art today – I want to share something important that’s been on my mind for a while. It would mean a lot if you took a few minutes out of your day to read it.
And don’t worry, this isn’t political; I am merely expressing my concern for the environment. Caring for the environment is something all of us SFs should worry about, since we’re all kids who will inherit a world desperately in need of help.
Generative AI (chatGPT, Snapchat AI, Microsoft copilot, Google Gemini, etc) is a HUGE PROBLEM that is going unaddressed and your goal for 2025 should be to stop using it.
Here’s why.
A) intellectual property
Using AI for “creative” purposes, for instance AI art or character.ai, is a very morally gray area where intellectual property is concerned. AI art generators train using art pulled from across the internet, stolen from artists without consent or compensation. Character.AI or anything that takes to you in the same voice/style a fictional character would steals from authors, scriptwriters, comic book writers, fanfic authors, again without consent or compensation. We are all artists here, and many of us are authors as well. This is /wrong/.
(Worried about art you post to the internet being stolen by AI? There are computer softwares to guard against that; two major ones are Glaze and Nightshade, which both make undetectable-to-the-human-eye changes to your art that will trick the AI software.)
If that somehow didn’t convince you, reason B: academic honesty.
YES, asking ChatGPT to do your homework for you is cheating. Even worse, asking ChatGPT to help you on an online *test* is cheating. I see this happen in my own school, among my own classmates, in a daily basis. It’s extremely disheartening to be struggling on a test, when I studied hard, then look across the room and see a classmate ChatGPT-ing all the answers, ruining the grading curve. And on homework, I can do my own work in the same time as it takes someone to ChatGPT the answers, and mine are higher quality. It’s really sad that this is so prevalent now, because it undermines hard work and critical thinking.
If you’re somehow still not convinced:
Reason C) environmental impact
A 100 word ChatGPT email uses the equivalent of one bottle of water. How does this work, you ask? Generative ai processes requests on large servers (think a hard drive in a computer, but huge and there are hundreds of them in one building.) these servers get very hot. To cool them down, water is used. A lot of water.
Often these servers are built in locations where water is already scarce, diverting previous water supply from the actual humans that need it.
If everybody in my 17-person chem class cheats on every question on a 14-question test, that’s 238 bottles of water down the drain.
Don’t believe in climate change? Look at the wildfires that are devastating LA. It’s not normal to have those weather conditions in the middle of winter. The cold weather on rhe east coast? It’s due to North Pole ice melting and changing weather patterns. Climate change is real. Science is real. It’s so disheartening that a very real issue has been polarized and politicized (but that’s off topic).
AI could be used to do good. But it’s not being used to do good. This is why I never use AI, and neither should you. Delete ChatGPT if you have it installed, delete any ai art makers or c.ai, and delete those ai homework solver apps. You can disable ai overviews in google chrome — we’ve all been fine without them for the majority of our lives.
Please, PLEASE stop using AI.
— Stingray
