09-09-26
RAH! I am annoyed. Or rather, I am passionate. I feel compelled to start my blog all of a sudden. I have too much to say and nowhere to say it! So here we are, I am saying it here. The subject of today's blog will be AI. Ugh. I hate even typing it. I feel fatigued at the thought of it but UNFORTUNATELY it never gets tired of popping up in my life. Just now someone on a discord server I am on reccomended that someone else use AI to vibe code a personal website that they could use to upload blog posts. I decided to give said person alternative advice, recommending this site (neocities) and reassuring them that the learning curve for HTML/CSS isn't too steep and I made sure to express my opinion on AI sites. They all look the same, they are boring and not at all personal, and making one will not teach you any skills. I stopped myself there so as not to aggravate or shame anyone, but for you lucky readers I will allow myself to let loose a little more for this blog post. I find it mind blowing and a little offensive that someone could come into a music-based community and recommend a completely anti-creative approach to what could be a wonderful and rewarding passion project. Creating a website to share your thoughts via blogging is inherently personal in my opinion, and to take away the merit of building this space that is completely yours and offloading that creativity, skill building and exploration of the indie web community to an LLM is just repulsive. Yes I am using strong language because I feel passionate. I am absolutely passionate about discovering new hobbies and skills, and staying true to who you are. Now I have heard a lot of takes on AI in recent years. I suppose I am on one of the more polar ends of the spectrum where I refuse to use any generative AI where possible, and I go out of my way to disable any generative AI features that get forced upon me by apps that I use. There is no perfect solution to this problem, but I do what I can. I enjoy reading and learning and making stuff from scratch. I enjoy listening to music and watching content made by people who put passion into their endevours, and I can feel that passion and emotion when I experience their art. I was getting along just fine in life before gen AI became a huge thing, and I will continue to live my life without interacting with it. People have said to me that I shouldn't hate AI for the sake of hating it. That feels like a very shallow dismissal of the way I feel. I would like to think that I haven't been radicalised into riding on some hate train against it. I know that the companies that make these models exploit people to train them, harm the environment with their datacentres, are creating awful advertisements that glamorise the concept of not needing to think for yourself or have genuine human interaction, because who needs that anyway? I know that consistently using LLMs to do work for me would just reduce my skills because, you guessed it, not doing stuff yourself generally doesn't make you good at doing said stuff. I am rambling about obvious things here. But at the end of the day, this is a rant. I feel so strongly that as HUMAN BEINGS we should seek out connection, passion, creativity, adventure, and just generally try new things and experience life! Why the hell would you get some chatbot to make something when you could learn to do it in your own unique way???? Isn't that what life is about? Having your own unique experience and using that to guide you on whatever journeys you find yourself on????? I really hope the person who wanted to learn how to code their own websites sees my messages and decides to opt for the "hard" (rewarding!) option of doing it themself. Sigh. I think that's all I have to say on this one. Never let AI kill your curiosity and creativity. I should write more blog posts. It's cathartic and someone might actually read it and take something from it! Well anyway, if you got this far, I hope you have a wonderful day. C ya!