Why I don’t use AI

(and don’t think you should either)

It’s time to get on my soapbox and yell.

I’ve tried to ignore this issue, choosing to just opt out of the many ways to use AI or machine learning that are flooding the internet. But day after day, my feeds and timelines are inundated with images and text that are just – off. They are not quite right. Extra fingers on people, stairs to nowhere in décor inspiration, sentence structure that makes a writer want to throw up. It is a relentless stream of bad content.

I can’t keep quiet anymore. I have to talk about AI.

Look, I really wish I could moderate my opinions here, be even handed and balanced, acknowledge that like all things AI is a tool and it’s mostly how we use it that makes a difference. But when it comes to this new tech, I’m afraid I can’t equivocate. I just hate it.

There. That’s my bias declared and out of the way.

So, what is AI? The UN environment programme has a helpful description: AI is a catch-all term for a group of technologies that can process information and, at least superficially, mimic human thinking. Rudimentary forms of AI have been around since the 1950s. But the technology has evolved at a breakneck pace in recent years, in part because of advances in computing power and the explosion of data, which is crucial for training AI models.

So, AI can be fed information, images, videos, and then be asked to generate things – a report, a song, an image. This has led to all kinds of fun challenges of generating your family as Disney characters or generating tv characters as Barbie dolls or asking AI to answer philosophical questions. It’s just a bit of fun right? What’s the harm?

Well, the fun comes with a cost. A huge environmental cost.

RMIT reported about the Federal Inquiry hearing warning on environmental impacts of AI in September last year. It makes it very clear that these technologies have a significant impact on our environment and energy usage, that is only increasing, and doing so rapidly.

Some facts:

These AI models are now run millions, or possibly billions, of times every day. Their popularity is growing, and they are being embedded within many of the software platforms we all regularly use.

Using ChatGPT to generate text uses somewhere between 10 to 90 times more energy per query than a conventional Google search.

Producing an image via generative AI uses about 20 times more energy than a generative AI text query.

Australia has a significant number of data centres that use approximately 5% of Australia’s electricity supply.

Okay, so it’s destroying the environment. So does just about everything. We’re still meant to live our lives, right?

Well as a writer, creator, and a Christian, I also have moral and ethical issues with the entire structure of AI and how it gets the content it claims to produce.

You can’t create something from nothing. AI isn’t coming up with any ideas by itself. It can’t. It’s stealing ideas – ideas created by real people – and garbling them into something that looks new (or most of the time, just looks like nonsense).

I see people posting these images or generated creations and acknowledging that AI is bad for the environment or not good for creatives – but they are still doing it. Sure, it’s just one photo, just one experiment – but they all add up. And it’s (almost) never just one. You get curious and you want to play around and see what else the magic internet machine can come up with for you, with just a little bit of time and almost none of the actual work or effort that goes into creative work.

If I sound upset about this, it’s because I am.

Stephanie Duncan Smith writes eloquently here about the devastation many authors faced earlier this year when it was revealed Meta has been using a pirated digital library of 7.5 million books and 81 million academic papers to train its AI language model. For many authors this feels like someone has broken into our home and taken our most precious items.

An Author and Editor's Plea to Writers in the Age of AI

But even more poignantly, Stephanie writes about what AI takes from writers as creators, what it actually steals from humanity. It takes away the joy and wonder of making things: of making bad things so that you can then make better and better and better. The making-better part isn’t a bug or issue we need to wipe out. That work is where the growth happens, the growth in skills as a writer or artist or whatever creative you are, but also the growth as a person.

It’s in trying things and failing and trying again and spinning lumpy clay into beautiful pots that we learn and grow. And as Christians, it’s part of how we are sanctified and shaped to be more like Jesus.

God is creator. The first thing he did was create. And when he made us, he created us in his image. We were made to be creators as well. Adam and Eve were called to create names and identities for all the animals. They were also told to tend the garden – grow and create good things – and create more humans, more little creators.

All the best things in life involve creating something new. AI is trying to take that away from us. AI wants to steal what we create and pump out content for us to consume instead. AI doesn’t want us to be an active part of our own lives; what recipes we’ll try or what emails we send or even what opinions we have.

This is why I won’t, can’t, touch anything created with AI with a ten-foot-pole. I know that sounds extreme and maybe my opinion on this is extreme, but it is where I am. I have stopped following YouTube historians I loved, because the AI images they use in their videos now are historically inaccurate, creatively lazy, stealing work from other artists and destroying the environment. I stopped playing a colouring game on my phone when it became clear the pictures were being generated by AI instead of drawn by an artist. I can’t in good conscience support it, not even through passive consumption.

So, my promise is that these words I write and publish here will always my own imperfect attempts: the process of becoming and growing. A million years ago when I started writing online, I called it Searching For Grace, and I’ve kept that name through lots of different changes. I think it still sums up what I believe: that there is grace and goodness in the world, and that the searching is not accidental but a key part of being human.

And my challenge to you is: if you use AI, what is it taking from you? What growth is being short-cut? What chance to create is being replaced by something to consume?

Thanks, as always, for reading. A reminder to my subscribers that I sent out a survey recently and it would be really helpful for you to fill it out if you haven’t already! Not a subscriber and jealous you are missing fun surveys? By signing up you can get my work directly to your email inbox.