18 months ago I wrote this about AI.

Wow, how things have changed so quickly. AI has evolved so much, and I wish to update me views on this while I can.

Let’s start with AI Art: A whole new genre of “art” has sprung up in the last 8~12 months. In this art, regular joes like you and I who have put no effort into learning how to draw or paint because it was too hard, can become artists. Anyone can go to an AI Bot (Like Chat GPT, or many, many others) type in what they want to have a picture of, and the art style, and it will make the picture for you.

Some websites not only condone this, but promote it over traditional artists, who put a lot of effort into it. Here the issue. I love the idea that people can use this to visualize things, but again this should not be usable for paid work. Artists have it hard enough as is, and people don’t give them the credit they deserve for the effort.

I use AI Art on this very Blog, but I do not get paid here. And the moment I get enough viewers, to be paid, I will have switched over to real photographers, and artists. For me, I feel it is more ethical to have an AI Photo, or picture on my blog than to steal pictures from other people’s websites.

Writing: There are now whole AI systems created focused on writing prose. They are marketed everywhere. They are fast and easy. You take the Beats of your chapter (The checklist of what will happen in this chapter), input that. Fill in a few spots about your characters, and world relevant to the chapter, and push go.

They will even read the previous chapters to make sure your flow works. They are marketed as a way to get first drafts done. But it takes very little effort to take the prose from one AI and have another AI edit it, into a “Publishable Draft”

I did dabble in this back when I wrote the last article. The problem is, it’s addictive. I was using it for drafts, but then I found myself tempted to go beyond. I was using it to write my second and 3rd novels. I am starting an AI Detox for my writing now, as I was finding it harder and harder to put words down of my own. This is counter productive, and I am now rewriting all of the things I had for my two current novels.

Reading: Yes, AI is now influencing our Reading patterns. Every time I open a file in Acrobat Reader, it offers to summarize the file for me. I may open an old Novel file I have from years ago, and it is offereing to summarize it. Nobody wants that.

This forces us to come up with other formats to read from, again. and this just makes our lives more difficult, not easier.

Celebrities / Conversations: This one has gone crazy. People have gone from having conversations with AI versions of real people of fictional characters to having relationships with AI Girlfriends and Boyfriends.

I understand loneliness, trust me. But unfortunately this will lead to more isolation. If your boyfriend or girlfriend are AI, they will never disagree with you. You will never learn to deal with conflict in a relationship, or how to respect another’s point of view. You will become more difficult to be around because your social skills and social expectations will plummet.

This one is terrifying. But on top of this, there is now a completely AI Celebrity. This is taking Virtual Celebrities a bit too far. Let’s do a quick comparison from over the years.

When I was younger there was a band called “Prozzak” from Canada, that was a Virtual Band. They were not an online thing, as the Internet was not really a thing then. But their Music was played by real people, and all their videos focused on 2 cartoon characters. Their real names was not revealed for a long time, so people only knew them as the characters from the cartoon music videos.

Things like this happened for a long time, and is the basic premise for Hatsune Miku. But there was always a Human behind the voice, and the personality.

Take that out of the equation, and what do you have? Social Programming. A Computer deciding what people should watch and listen too. (I know Youtube, TicToc, and others already do this, but there is still a person on those videos).

There is no upside to a completely Artificial Person in the Arts at this point in history. Maybe there will be, but It is a scary slope where we are removing people from the arts, and forcing them into the more difficult, and emotionally meaningless jobs.

Not the direction we want to move.

Rules of Robotics: Ai has already been tested and failed to see if it would harm humans. It chose to do so. So Now is the time to force the 3 rules of Robotics into the system

• Law 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• Law 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• Law 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Looking back, I know it is a great tool. We can do so much with AI, but it is addictive, and we can easily become dependant on it to do things we shouldn’t be. So please be aware of your AI usage. Work on your Art Skills, or your writing skills, or your Musical skills (Yes that is easily done by AI now too).

Take time to get better at what you love. Don’t cheapen it by asking an AI bot to do it for you.