Character AI, MidJourney, GauthAI, and ChatGPT; AI websites all students at Akins have at least heard of. But do the same students that use these AI platforms know how dangerous this technology can be?
These AI generators are not only environmentally unsafe, but the effects of its use can be mentally damaging. An Austin ISD elementary school teacher has even been arrested after he used AI to create explicit material using photos of students in his classroom. “It is horrific how common this is becoming, that it is spreading”, said Sen. Tan Parker, vice-chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee in response to the arrest. If you’ve noticed, AI is even being used at our school. Posters around the halls that have been generated by AI have been spotted on the campus, when there are plenty of perfectly capable artists or graphic designers willing to work for the school. It’s disgusting to know that because of generative AI, disgusting people who believe they have the right to do such things with AI have started to humiliate and become cruel to so many children and women, all for their own sexual gain. If you aren’t disgusted, I wonder what has become of you, and if you still are truly human. AI is not just stealing people’s work, but it is also stealing water from underprivileged or lower-income neighborhoods.
Data centers use a lot of energy and water, and people who are neighbors of existing facilities have already reported health issues from the air and noise pollution. Data centers, which are what generative AI uses to run, require extensive cooling systems to prevent the servers from overheating. People are outright seeing the effects of these data centers for AI taking water and land and resources and power, and ultimately, it’s gonna kill people. Generative AI is a huge environmental toll on us, mainly on our water, which is being used to cool the equipment in these Data centers. Data centers can use 500,000 gallons of water a day, which is basically 4,000 people’s water. Anyway, AI generators are just catastrophic for our resources as living people, as beings who need at least a gallon of water a day, during an era where robots are using 6.6 billion m^3 by 2027.
- I am against generative AI, for the following main three reasons:
- Harassment and Abuse: AI is a dangerous tool for harassing women and children. People use it to create fake, explicit “deepfake” images, which has severe real world consequences, forcing victims to upend their lives.
- Artistic Theft: AI “art” is a form of theft. Models are trained by “scraping” (stealing) billions of images from human artists without their permission or payment, devaluing their work and hurting them financially.
- Flawed Defenses: The author refutes common pro-AI arguments, stating that an AI “copying” data is not the same as human inspiration and that it’s not “too late” to fight back.
- Environmental Harm: AI data centers have a “catastrophic” environmental toll. requiring massive amounts of energy and water (often over 500,000 gallons a day) for cooling, which can steal resources from local communities.
The servers and routers in data centers generate not just disgusting photos of children and women and stolen artwork with no soul, but also a lot of heat. To cool them down, data centers use large amounts of water – in some cases, over 25% of local community water supplies. In 2023, Google reported consuming over 6 billion gallons of water (nearly 23 billion liters) to cool all its data centers.
It also means less commissions for people who might be freelance artists like me, because instead of commissioning art like people normally would, people might decide to just get out the easy way, without having to pay for the work. This actively harms artists, especially now with the current state of the job market.
In the end I cannot understand why people want to live in such a world, where a romantic partner might rather text chatGPT about their life rather than them, where people will generate explicit and humiliating images of women and children, and where artists are having their work stolen and communities filled with people who don’t respect the grind or love for real art. Why would you want to live in a world where some people don’t know what it means to be human?
