Don't drink the kool-aid - The con of AI

You are not an AI artist. You prompted a diffusion model to guesstimate an image based on stolen work from people who spent lifetimes honing a craft. They put a tool to a blank canvas, and from a lifetime of experiences, rendered onto the universe something that did not exist before. That is authentic craft defined I think.

This perspective can be applied to many creative practices: video, music, 3D, writing, poetry, graphics, ui, and so many others. I've seen many netizens share and express the perspective that authenticity is a very important aspect of craft. Especially in today's hyper-consumer online landscape. Ergo, in my opinion, prompting ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini or any of the other model to generate an image is not an artistic craft. What about prompt engineering? That's a skill. You mean detail oriented writing as a communication skill, something we're taught in school? The ability to describe what you want or need is a useful skill, but prompt engineering is nothing more than a marketing term.

A body of creative work is not authentic because it was made by human hands. Its authenticity comes from the arduous amount of resources spent to make it. I say this as someone who wishes that I could pick up a pencil and draw with detail. I cannot. I don't have that skill. Thus I can not in truth call my drawings a practice of my craft.

Most individuals who've spent years honing their creative craft would roll their eyes at the self-acclaimed AI artist. Not because of wanting to gatekeep, but because they can acknowledge the truth of what we're claiming to do here.

All that said, my site footer, the means by which you came to this piece of writing, credits a robot. I built this site using AI. Why then use AI, given my stance?

A final note: I hold the opinion that what we call "AI" now is not artificial intelligence. What we have now are very intricately designed software. Exceptionally precisely fine-tuned, if-this-then-that statements. The term "AI", including "AGI", seems more like a marketing strategy, used to bolster company stock valuations. The autonomy of AI as we saw it in media are the fantasies of children. The reality of it all is far more crude and difficult to define. Our so-called AI can not think for itself, let alone feel as Anthropic might have us think. You need just listen to how the heads of these tech companies talk about humanity to understand that you are the product and a means to an end. These tools that we've built should serve us, extend our capabilities, not castrate and enslave us, rendering human-life inert, pointless.I refuse to drink the kool-aid. Long live human craft.

~Every letter, every stroke, every punctuation mark in this article was typed by me.
AI was not used.