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It's always so quaint when I see creatives arguing that AI is some sort of exceptional evil that we can 'fight back' against. When AI was first talked about as a 'thing' the claim was always that creatives would always be the last ones standing because it was unthinkable that a computer was going to be able to produce/create what some of them were capable of. The bit they didn't think about? Well, who do IT professionals hate dealing with the most? Usually creatives. They don't really empathize with the process, and typically find the stereotypically emotive interactions superfluous to the task. So, really, it's no surprise that's pretty much where they started. The reality for better or worse is AI is here. Pretending (or legislating) the idea that it isn't is a fools errand. Trying to lambast a business who has no specialisation in graphic design for using AI to assist them is pointless. At the end of the day if you're starting a YouTube channel and want a catchy tune to try and hook people at the start of the show are you going to turn to free/tens-of-dollars of AI to make your tune - likely at 2am in your boxer shorts overnight fuelled by Jack Daniels and imagination - or are you going to spend weeks going back and forth with a muso at the cost of several hundred dollars (if not more), particularly when you don't even know if your channel will be a hit? The answer is obvious. For better or worse this has shown that many creative pursuits for the vast majority of use cases are unprofitable in humans. That's a shame, but it's far from unprecedented. Many industries have been hit hard by automation. Some people really enjoyed planning holidays and worked as travel agents, but they're few and far between now. The elite ones still find a decent living, and if you enjoy it enough you can plan your own holidays to your heart's content. It's all well and good to talk about culture and soul, but that stuff is ultimately decided by who is going to put their hands into their own pockets. You don't want to do it for free, much more than anyone wants to pay for it any more.

Oh, where do I start? AI companies have taken advantage of the fact that there is no legal precedent for whether it's acceptable to use artists' intellectual property to train an AI model. What the AI is generating is not original - it's a response to a prompt generated based upon the work of real artists who did not consent to their work being used. Secondly, the environmental and economic impact is huge. AI uses an unbelievable amount of water and emits greenhouse gases quite heavily as well. And economically, the big players in AI are making huge grabs for large percentages of the storage and RAM capacity in the entire world right now to meet the demands of their users. The price of RAM for the everyday user is going up drastically, all so that someone can generate a slop video. But perhaps most frightening is the ramifications for misinformation and the death of truth in the world. When AI gets good enough, what's stopping someone from generating a video of an election candidate committing an awful crime to ruin their campaign? What's stopping someone generating fake news stories to stoke hatred and unrest? It's already happening, and our only hope is the fact that AI still has recognizable traits that make it usually easy to flag. The law needs to catch up fast before AI becomes a threat. But on a personal note, as someone who works in content creation both as a side hustle and in my day job, why would we want this? You can pay someone for a decent-looking result that has real human character and took real work, and support local artists, or you can create some slop for free, put your local artists out of work, and dilute the market with soulless garbage. AI has its applications. But shouldn't the purpose of new technology be to make the mundane tasks easier so that humanity can spend more time on fulfilling pursuits? So why aren't we using AI to streamline things like data entry and admin so that people can spend more time on arts, instead of the other way around? Driving actual human creators out of creative spaces is a very sad pursuit no matter how you look at it, and yes, I do hold it against Dreamworld for doing that. They may not be the richest park in the world, but they're not so broke they can't afford to give a local with a passion for graphic design a job. I mean, they were doing their socials just fine before AI came along. Can you name many people who have a passion for being a supermarket checkout operator? Many who spend their lives dedicated to learning the art? Graphic design is something people do for fun. As with video creation, writing and many other pursuits AI is seeking to replace. This is something many will dedicate hours to without the expectation of a single cent in return. These are the kind of pursuits we should allow people to dream of making a career out of, because culture is an inherently human trait. Everything that made every movie, every story, every piece of art that you've ever seen special was the human aspects. The emotion, the subtext, the culture, the comedic value. What is the value in driving humans out of those pursuits? We mock teenagers and kids for staring at soulless colorful brain rot on their phones, and here we are advocating for that to literally become worse - have a robot create some flashy soulless entertainment to distract us all while we get back to our mind-numbing 9-to-5s.