Support Real Artists - Blog Posts

This is the second time I've posted about AI (once on spacehey) but this is crazy important. Please read the post even if you don't read mine. People underestimate just how much such an 'easy' thing requires.

I'm gonna be honest and say that I used to rely on it as a very lonely kid. But right now I'm doing everything in my power to avoid feeding the machine. Blogging, journaling, reading etc. the words of a real human are so much better than anything a bot could write, however cringey they might be. If everyone keeps on using things like this, so many more artists will be rendered powerless. So many will get hooked on the feeling of a real person and then start defending it. It may not be targeting you nefariously, it may help you in the short term, but its impact is absolutely terrible, and it leads to MORE pollution and MORE plagiarism and MORE reliance on bigger, better AI models. Eventually it won't just be roleplays.

Not to mention all the real people being made into (let's be real here, usually) smut bots. There is no person to track that down to. There is no way to message a creator and get them to take something down, and reports are kinda useless. I've seen <18 creators get bots made of them and it's terrible :(

AI will never be your friend. Please know that. It will never be your boyfriend or girlfriend or parent. I know it may be hard right now for some of you but I beg you to live real life. Read real books and get lost in them. Write your own stories about the life you wish you lived. If you can't find friends outside, try to find them online. Find communities. Live through music. TV. Anything. But AI, no matter how deep it may feel, is never real. It is a hollow shell of feelings people have felt before. It will leave you feeling more isolated and terrible than ever. If it takes our physical jobs, please do not let it destroy our creations.

Why is c.ai bad? Like genuine question

One of the main reasons you will see people giving as to why c.ai is bad is that much like all "generative" ai it's basically a copy/paste machine. The algorithm that runs c.ai is made by scraping the writing of millions of human authors in order to train the machine on how sentences and "romance" should be structured in order to appeal to the people using it. This is, by and large, just straight up plagiarism and authors like @/ceilidho end up having their content stolen by c.ai users in order to farm more bots.

If you don't care about the plagiarism aspect of c.ai bots then you should care about the environmental aspect of them. ChatGPT alone uses about 2.9 Wh of electricity just to run a single query, and the water used to cool the servers (again for just one question) is equal to about 3 16 oz bottles of water. Google reported their greenhouse gas emissions rose 50% in 5 years just due to ai use. 1 query can power a lightbulb for about 20 seconds, and every question is routed through a data center which uses even more electricity to answer the question. So you sending a chat to c.ai uses a massive amount of electricity, and for the bot to respond takes even more.

Not to mention data centers have to be built, which consumes a lot of resources and energy, and releases a lot of greenhouse gases. Then they have to be powered, which consumes more energy and more water, and releases even more greenhouse gases.

If 1 in 10 working US Americans asked 1 question every week for a year (52 x 17 million) that would use the same amount of energy that it would take to power EVERY HOUSEHOLD IN WASHINGTON DC (671,803) for 20 days. NPR reported on this as an "energy emergency" this is an unprecedented and explosive amount of energy being used very suddenly, very often, and by a lot of people.

Ok you don't care about that either, then let me appeal to you the person who uses c.ai. Maybe you love your favorite author's work and you really want to rp with one of their characters. Is the bot's ability to write that character really as good as the author's? Is it as satisfying? Or are you just caught up in the short-term dopamine rush of the rp?

Because I tried c.ai when it was first getting popular and let me tell you, it was nowhere near as good as the human role plays I was used to. There was no riffing, no plotting out where we wanted the rp to go, no standard reply length, I had to retry replies multiple times to get something even remotely close to something I could work with to respond to. There were filters, I couldn't use certain words or phrases. The bot couldn't remember anything past a few replies. It was BAD. The shot of dopamine I got after the first reply was gone by the time I was on the third one.

Now maybe I was just spoiled by good human rp partners, but I kept seeing people on tiktok complaining about the same problems. "How to break the c.ai filter" was a major issue. People wanted the experience of role playing or writing a fic, but they didn't want to put the effort into actually doing either of those things.

"Just let people enjoy things!" I hear you cry.

You go on c.ai because you're lonely, or bored, or because you think that finding a human to rp with is too hard or they won't like your scenario/kink/whatever. You are actively contributing to the expulsion of artists from fandom spaces and the destruction of the planet in equal measure. If all you care about is short term gratification, then go on the r/IWishIWasHer subreddit and read the rps threads there. If you actually want to roleplay with someone there are a million discord servers that do that. Hell, there are communities on tumblr that you could join and ask about roleplaying!

Relying on instant gratification will numb you to all the joys that creep towards you. If the only thing you can see is the object in front of you, then you're never going to reach for something better further away.

Not to mention none of your chats on c.ai are actually private, the server is scraping all your responses to have the ai send to other people. So if you're telling the bot some real smutty/embarrassing things that you wouldn't want anyone else to see, congrats on everyone else getting a piece of it.

Anytime I think my art, writing, or video sucks, I just remember the monstrosity that is AI "art" and the people who make it, and I feel a lot better, because at least I'm putting in some effort and not letting a Machine to do it for me.

THIS👆👆👆👆

If we let ai image generators and their users discourage us and stop us from making art, then yes, they win. If we literally ignore them and make art because we can and because we are human, then we win. The people who use ai will eventually get bored of it and stop using it as much. There’s only so many things that people who are unwilling to use their imaginations can think of. How we keep human made art alive is by supporting human made art and human artists!! AND, ai art is digital, not physical. There’s no ai oil painting, there’s no ai sketching, there’s no ai pencil and paper, if you’re worried about ai stealing your digital art, make traditional art! Don’t ever give up because if we give up then they automatically win. Nothing will ever replace human made art because we won’t let it. We will always be here creating because we can, and because WE are human.

I think the best way to fight this AI shit is just to support actual creators. The cat's out of the bag with AI; our data's going to be taken and used without our consent whether we like it or not, so maybe we should put efforts into holding up those who create their own stuff. Comment/interact on people's writings and art. Make it worth them posting; make it clear that what the people are interested in isn't generated stuff, but things that people have actually done themselves. It's a drop in the ocean, but showing creators that it's them that deserve the support at least serves to cut off a tiny bit of oxygen to these AI hogs - and make a difference to creatives who are trying against hope to share with a community.