Our Collective Interest in AI is Yet Another Symptom of the Disease that Gave Us Elon

You know it's true. AI generators aren't doing anything good, just like Elon Musk isn't a genius.

The above cover was commissioned from a human artist, overlaid over an image created by another human artist, which I paid for. Cool, right? Book six of the Trystero series, Cracked Palace, is out now. You can pick it up here.

If you’ve yet to start the series, check out Broken Ascension.

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There will be a time in the near future where technology stops serving humanity. Perhaps this has already happened, and it was such a subtle change that nobody noticed?

Ultra wealthy hype man Elon Musk has been doing a speed run on tanking Twitter as quickly as possible. No, the site hasn’t shut down yet like people were predicting, but that doesn’t fundamentally change what’s actually happening there. Musk is a lot of things (a carnival barker, a living marketing campaign, a beneficiary of blood emeralds and more!), but what he is not is an inventor, innovator or any of the accolades that have been shoveled onto him.

He’s proof that the “liberal media” (as deemed a boogeyman by some) will never truly serve the people while they help run PR campaigns and myth-building for the wealthy donor class types like Musk, who until recently, was a proud Democrat donor.

His vast wealth could end world hunger, help rebalance the environment and do many other great things. Instead, he lives in a sci-fi-inspired fantasy world where humanity needs to expand out to colonize other planets to survive, when there’s no overpopulation crisis and radical action could help with climate change.

Elon is, of course, not the “final boss” here, because he’s but a symptom of how the western world values wealth, power, whiteness and the illusions over the reality.

Right now, Elon isn’t what’s on my mind. Elon sucks. Elon is also a product that the media and its benefactors have built into prominence.

My problem right now is AI generated images, text and whatever else will come next. I’ve dabbled in some of the AI image generators to see how they work and what they can do, even used some for article banners and whatever else. With every advance in technology, there will be pushback and fear that said technology will serve as an existential threat to us. A lot of these new “AI” tools are not an existential threat to us because they aren’t true artificial intelligence. They’re tools trained to do tasks, built on “learning” algorithms.

What they actually do is what’s frustrating.

Being an indie author, I’ve watched these tools roll out and authors salivating at conquering the next big thing before the unwashed masses discover them and they become commonplace. I won’t fault anyone for exploring these tools, or monetizing them, although I wish they’d exercised more caution. Yeah, one of the first things I did was make a badass mockup for a book cover using AI generated images, but I still hired my normal artist for my next cover.

What these tools have done is show us the value of “art” to the common people and the misunderstanding of what art really is to the business class. These tools are solutions for businesses. It cuts out the folks in the middle, allowing anyone with access to said tools to type in commands and generate some approximation of what they want. For these people, there was something they couldn’t do, but now with these tools, they can produce “art” for their projects.

The same can be said for writing, with tools like ChatGPT being the new thing everyone is fawning over, and has people scared for what these AI tools are going to do to future generations who may not need to learn how to communicate via writing anymore. Imagine being assigned an essay in high school and manipulating a prompt until the essay is written for you, because that’s a reality now.

There are people who see these tools as removing barriers. Being able to write well is a learned skill that requires a lot of work and patience. Things like grammar and the idea of “good writing” are also built on a foundation of white supremacy, which has been a hot topic in literature of late.

This means for people who aren’t looking to make their life’s work as an artist or a writer, these tools can help them produce professional work they would have otherwise needed to hire out for, or struggle through on their own. That annoying work email you need to reply to? An AI tool can write it without mistakes or effort. A lush forest background needed for a blog post? An AI tool can smash that in seconds. No need to buy a stock image or use up a credit. For things that would have previously required hiring a professional; like producing an illustration for a book cover, or crafting a professional blog post or a press release, there’s no longer that need.

AI tools can handle it.

What this does is impacts creators. People who spent considerable time and effort honing their respective skills and who would normally do jobs like these, even if the pay was miserable and the projects frustrating. It reduces these craftspeople to mere tools to be discarded when a cheaper, more effective tool came to the market.

If I can go on MidJourney and within a few trial-and-error sessions have a competently done illustration I can use as a book cover, why would I need to pay anyone? If you always wanted to write a book but never wanted to sit down and learn the appropriate skills to do so, tools like ChatGPT are only going to get stronger and require less of a human touch.

My cautionary warning has always been this: having fun with these tools is merely training these tools for their future use. Right now you may need to fiddle with MidJourney via a Discord bot, or handle the unwieldy ChatGPT site to get some piece of writing, but every fun experiment is training these tools to be better, more efficient, and less irksome. Authors having fun with AI text generators, especially indie authors who get stuck in the hamster wheel of being single-person content farms, are training their replacements.

There’s no assurance these tools, which are free or inexpensive now, will remain as they currently sit. Are you telling me the bigger tech companies won’t want these tools under their control at some point? You’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise. Amazon would love nothing better than to own an AI text generator capable of creating full-length Kindle books on the fly. Imagine, if you will, Amazon licensing out a writer’s style or even their works, to allow for them to create personal, iterative works. The Tolkien estate signs a big deal with Amazon and suddenly you can pay Amazon $4.99, give it a list of features you want in a story, and within minutes you’re delivered your own, personal book that exists within the realm of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

… Do you really think an indie fantasy author could compete with that? Books delivered at the speed the reader can devour them in?

The same goes for art. How far off are we from AI generated animated sequences? Remember those gauche NFT cartoons that happened in 2021? This is going to be so [somehow] much worse. You think Disney wouldn’t want to get their hands on tools that could create special effects for them that they didn’t need teams of artists to create?

Don’t get me started on music.

Because this is the future the tech people are envisioning. They are envisioning one where humans who create don’t exist, at least not as highly trained specialists. They want you to feel empowered by feeding a machine a string of text, getting whatever you want, then forgetting about it shortly after.

Machines can’t create art. They don’t have feelings. They didn’t have to learn to create or pour themselves into a creation. There can’t be real human connections that come from machine generated things.

Artists already struggle enough to exist right now. Supporting these tools and pretending they’re “breaking barriers” or providing accessibility is feeding into what the tech people want. They could have created these tools as aids for artists, done in a collaborative environment with actual artists. Instead, they were built to scrape the internet for data, data no artist ever agreed to handing over for these purposes, and use them to craft another dystopian set of tools to deprive us of our collective humanity.

A common refrain I’ve heard is that art is “elitist” and only for the wealthy to consume or own. The value of human created art, especially that of the higher tier art that has high price tags, will never go away. In fact, that art will be more valuable in a sea of machine created commercial trash. These tools will not change that. All they’ll do is empower the wealthy even more and create larger barriers between art, artists and the people who enjoy it. All while destroying the livelihoods of working artists.

We’ve already seen we can’t trust the Elon Musks of the world. Why allow more of these tools to create new Elon Musks become normal?

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If you want to check out my books via paperback, you can do so at BookShop. Myself, a human, wrote all of them. My editor, Amanda, is also a human, a human that I pay for her skills. Skills that catch things that a grammar check, powered by machine learning, can’t. Oh, and the covers? I hire a human to do those as well.

In addition to that, I’ve got a neat little section on this page that shows my favorite books of all time as well.

Thanks for reading.