AI Fucking Sucks

A lot has been written about AI recently as more and more industries race to include it in their business models. Most recently, SAG-AFTRA struck a deal to allow voice actors to license their work for use in AI.

There are many other thoughtful pieces that get to the core of the issues with it, from environmental effects to labor impacts to copyright issues, and I’d just be regurgitating their work.

So instead I’m going to focus on the thing that’s been bothering me about this whole stupid bubble:

AI fucking sucks.

Oh it’s fun! It’s a cool toy. My dad sent me an AI-generated picture of a steampunk Panther playing a Switch once and I was very touched. It’s cool how it can make complete sentences that are utter nonsense.

But oh my gosh it is not good enough to be used half as much as it's being used right now. Sure, in a hypothetical future it could be actually good at doing things on account of having years of tweaking. Eventually.

Though, a  half-finished plane can eventually fly, but if you demanded someone ride in it before it’s done you’d be insane.

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Here are some of the known problems with AI that I thought of off the top of my head:

AI constantly makes things up.

Its art has weird mistakes even if you’re trying very hard to hide the fact that it’s AI.

It can’t discern between real stories and fake stories.

The voice acting doesn’t sound right.

Here’s one that’s been plaguing me as a writer, have you noticed spell and grammar check being worse now? Constantly offering corrections that are wrong? Guess why!

Did I mention it makes things up? In ways that could literally kill someone?

Hell, Elon Musk tried to program an AI that agrees with him and he couldn’t even do that.

I don’t like Musk and I think his attempts to build an AI that isn’t “woke” is laughable, but it speaks to the fact that AI is not reliable.

So what, we’re just supposed to accept this, quite frankly, pretty high rate of being shit just because it’s cool? Because we watched Star Trek and thought the replicators were awesome and want to do that?

(Not that it always worked in Star Trek either…)

What AI is good at is being fast. 

Except when it’s fast, it's shit, so now you have to hire a human to look over it and fix it, and at some point do you think it would be cheaper to just, I don’t know, hire a person from the beginning?

We have to take a stand against things that suck. We do not just have to have AI in everything because it’s new, AI evangelists should have to prove their shit actually works and doesn’t need to be babysat by overworked humans who you pretend shouldn’t be paid a living wage.

It’s not going to replace anything, not really. Stuff that is really good will still have humans involved. What it’s going to do is flood the internet with static until it cannibalizes itself.