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Advice neededHow to deal with extreme dread about the rise of AI
Posted June 1, 2023 by kalina in STEM

I work in IT. Almost everyone in my professional area loves AI and talks about it nonstop. We are constantly being nudged to start using AI even for writing code.

I fucking hate the very idea of AI and it makes me feel a deep dread whenever I remember it exists. I admit I played around with it a little bit early on when all it did was generate blurry, anatomically incorrect images, thought it was kinda fun and then moved on. But it has improved and risen so quickly. Coworkers are already using it in a professional context. Jobs are already being replaced by it. I hate that AI can generate sentences they never said in someone's voice convincingly. I hate that it can generate pictures of real people that they never consented to. Someone recently mentioned that it's only a matter of time until AI can be used to generate music in whatever style you want with some popular singer's voice, and as a semi-professional singer that realisation hurled me towards depression. Not even just because I might be out of a job but because it is just the bleakest idea i can imagine to let AI generate art for you. I took some stories I have written offline so AI can't use them. Today at a company party the group I was sitting with started discussing AI and its benefits and I had to excuse myself because I just don't even want to discuss it anymore with people who are for it.

I mean, we have this tradition in the office of drawing a card for people's birthdays. Today someone suggested using AI in the future for it instead. Here have this heartfelt card that we made a computer generate for you. I read that recently a suicide hotline decided to make AI write the replies to users. Yes, they switched back because the answers were not good, but for how long? Is that not the most cynical shit you can imagine?

I don't know. The fact that it is being so readily accepted is making me truly lose the last of my hope in humanity. It's just a matter of time until AI content will not have to be controlled by people anymore. You won't be able to tell which content is human created and which isn't anymore. I don't want to live in a world like that but I know nothing can be done to stop it.

How do you feel about it and how do we not completely lose hope?

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