It is time to water the flowers of humanity and generate new ideas, not new forms of artificial intelligence

by ELIZABETH KYNE

Staff Writer

ChatGPT might be the easy way out for your next essay, but it’ll come at a great cost for humanity, emotionally and environmentally.

The production of computers is already a messy one, given the exploitation of many children and victims of human trafficking who are forced to mine the minerals needed for production and the byproducts of electrical materials like mercury and lead. Powering generative artificial intelligence tech that runs on already environmentally questionable hardware is damaging. 

According to the United Nations Environment Program and International Energy Agency, a ChatGPT request takes 10 times the energy to compute that a Google search would. The UN estimates that AI infrastructure could come to consume more than six times the water the entire country of Denmark does. 

High levels of cooling water are already consumed by AI infrastructure across the Globe. Residents of Lagos, Nigeria, who have had to resort to drinking from boreholes, have reported that the influx of data centers has only made things worse. While all tech poses a share of issues, AI exacerbates these issues to an unacceptable level. The focus should be on making the playing ground even for all people, not worsening the conditions for a model that steals from hardworking artists to benefit the lazy.

Generative AI has become quite popular in recent times, and we should be worried. The idea has its own allure when it comes to artwork. Why spend hours working to create a masterpiece when you can type a few lines and have the machine do it for you? AI sidesteps years of training needed to become a professional in any field. Although we have a responsibility to condemn the environmental impacts of AI, those of us with access to it must also recognize the privilege we have in using it.

These so-called “benefits” are actually enough reasons on their own to avoid AI. AI art is not real art. Defining art has always been difficult. Art is such a subjective thing, encompassing everything from painting to singing to sculpting. The definition of art is not its medium or its personal appeal, but the labor of its creation. An algorithm is not a replacement for a human brain in the case of art. Computers may excel at solving equations and getting exact data, but they cannot possess emotions the way humans do. These emotions are the basis of conscious thought and creativity. Without the conscious input of a living being to make something with their individual creative drive, there is no artistic aspect in a piece. 

Perfection has never been the end goal of art, obvious from decades of stylization in all mediums. It’s about the individual emotional reactions in a conscious brain. Generative AI “art” runs algorithms based on real human art pieces without credit to the original creator, and takes the jobs away from people who have dedicated their lives to their craft. 

In January of 2024, the Animation Guild speculated that the introduction of AI into the art world would cause an “era of disruption” involving “the elimination of many jobs entirely.” AG predicted that by 2026, 510,800 jobs across film, audio and gaming fields would be disrupted by AI. With the intense use of AI in the past year, its capabilities have grown further than anyone could’ve predicted, likely heightening those numbers.

To say that all artificial intelligence is harmful is not entirely accurate. There are degrees of AI involved in anything tech-related. For example, video game developers program movements and capabilities into non-playable characters, counting as a form of AI. There are AIs called reactive machines, which respond to real time input, such as automated sensors, like motion-detecting lights or doors. These are AIs that respond to inputs, but mostly cannot learn new information. Limited memory AI can learn from user input. For example, Apple’s assistant Siri is a limited memory AI that can use data from past user interactions to inform new user interactions. While these machines are still AI, they are trained by human interaction and do not generate content on their own, instead reflecting information to which they have access.

Some will not share these sentiments, feeling that this is just the future of art and that artists need to adjust or be left behind. This is a perception hard to correct. I believe it would behoove supporters of generative AI to look into the damage it does to the very Earth on which they live.