Talk of artificial intelligence is everywhere right now, but nowhere do I hear it more maligned than within the art community. So, I wanted to take the time here to present my views on AI in an attempt to be transparent as I did in my last post about selling prints. Let's get to the point - Do I use AI for my art? No. Never. Do I use AI? Yes, but in a very limited way. I've spent the last month developing my website and there are so many meta descriptions and summary boxes with tight character limits that make the use of AI, well, useful. I write my own narratives and product descriptions, but I run them through AI to summarize my own words in 160 characters, or to help when I just don't like the way a product description sounds, but I don't use it here in the blog because I want this to be a place where my voice can be heard. Truth be told, when you read the product descriptions for the bear and the pronghorn, they sound flowery and way too poetic and "salesy" to have come from me. Don't get me wrong, most of that is my voice and it is the way I feel about the art, but the flowery language is superfluous and doesn't have the same tone as my personal writing has. I don't think I'll be using AI for product descriptions in the future because it bugs me that it's not my voice when I read them. But for a blog excerpt, or to summarize a whole page of text in 160 characters, I guess I don't see the harm. Which brings me to my next point - the harm AI is doing.
As a former conservation biologist, looking into the externalities and interrelatedness of things was just the job. I was good at it. I could put abstract or tangentially related ideas together into a cohesive and rational thought. I'm not there for the tenets of art yet, but I am keenly aware of the potential harm that AI is doing to the natural environment. This may be old news to some, but for anyone who doesn't know, AI uses a ton of energy and creates a lot of demand for physical resources such as buildings and servers, not to mention the water to cool those giant server farms. Don't get all high and mighty on me if you've eschewed AI though - those server farms are for all your cloud data too. That ever-expanding iCloud subscription we all have is adding to the problem. Here in Nevada those warehouses full of servers sit in bighorn sheep habitat and take up enormous tracts of land. They use groundwater and some even build their own power plants to generate the energy they need to operate. Data generation and storage have helped to transform an area outside of Reno from unnoticed to overwhelming in just the past decade. It's a problem that's not going away anytime soon. I'll make every effort to transition back to the perpetual pondering of a sentence or word choice, but for now I at least wanted to comment on AI - in my own words.
