My Past With AI and Why I Now Hate It

I loved it for awhile and felt like I could do anything with it and make anything I wanted, with each new version that rolled out, I was more and more excited seeing all the new enhancements. However, I quickly found the dark side of it.

I was in a lot of AI art groups on Facebook. About 90% of the posts in those groups were anime girls with huge boobs, deep fakes of celebrity women or even worse, sexualized images of young adult celebrities but with more child like faces and features.

The final straw for me was when some troll on X did very graphic deep fakes of Taylor Swift. I'm not even going to describe them other than to say they were violent and horrific. This made me never want to touch it again.

Somewhere along the way, I decided to try and learn to draw. A friend of mine on Threads gave me some tips on the kids of pencils and paper to buy and I just started doodling. I was very proud of it at the time, but when I look at it now it was bad bad. But it was something I created with my own hands.

Now I'm almost four years into learning art and I feel like I've progressed light years from where I started. This year I really made a push for trying to sell my art and do art shows and I think I've also gained some ground there and I want to continue building community online and locally.

When it comes to AI I still had one sticking point. I was using Gemini for things like trouble shooting my website problems or sometimes when I got stressed out I would talk to it if my therapist wasn't available. I thought nothing of it at first, but then read at how it was causing several mental health issues for people who did that.

I also got nervous with how reliant I had become with it. I would upload my new drawings to it and have it help me with descriptions and titles and such. This past week I deleted it off my phone and downloaded the DuckDuckGo browser and disabled anything AI in it.

I do my print on demand prints and shirts through printify. There is a default AI that fills in your art descriptions when you go to post new things. I try not to use that as much as possible, but sometimes if its late and I can't think of what to say, I may use that default Printify description, but I try not to do that as much as possible.

Another concern I have is the massive data centers. I know here in Texas our GOP government has gone all in on AI and I had read they were selling or trying to sell public lands to put in more data centers. I know several rural places already have several and they want to put in more.

Texas, despite the horrible leadership, is a beautiful state with some of the most amazing parks and lands. It would be criminal to see all that get pillaged for data centers.

So, this is my story with AI. I've talked about it some here and there, and I'm not going to yell at anyone else for using it. I wish people wouldn't do it. You all look great as you are, much better than any AI selfie could make you look. If nothing else, put on some fun outfits or go somewhere neat and take some cool photos.

My favorite pic I've taken of myself in years is my profile picture of me sitting in a cemetery. Plus it actually looks like me. But my biggest beef is with these massive companies who are pouring hundreds of billions into money and resources for this thing, and our government who is enabling it for something that could be so dangerous but has so little regulation.

So I wanted to share that with you all. Sorry this was so long. I hope someone finds it helpful in some way.