My stance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in relation to my work

A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) is sold to us as the next inevitable step in efficiency and speed. Deliver projects faster. Deliver products faster. Adapt faster. Work faster.

Here’s the thing: I do what I do not because I enjoy doing it fast; it’s exactly the slow process that I enjoy: the mistakes and challenges along the way. Everything that slows me down while creating is what makes me love doing what I do. I love nothing more than getting stuck in a project and taking a good hot shower, walk around the local neighborhood park or sit on the train and mulling the whole thing over and over, until I suddenly think of a solution (that might not even work right away!). Does it make my process slower than someone else’s who might use A.I. to solve these problems? Definitely. But that’s the point.

The incredibly aggressive entrance of A.I. in my fields of work has ironically helped me deal with my historically very problematic and extreme perfectionism. The insurgence of A.I. has shown me that perfection is not something to strive for: perfection is the lack of the pits and dents of experience or the unique and silly mistakes that only I could make. Perfection is the absence of personality.

The process of my work, which is inherently personal, is what makes my work and art mine. You’ll never find anything else like my work, because it was created with the mistakes and inefficiencies only I could make, and above all: the passion, love and dedication that I uniquely pour into my work. Work created with A.I. will never be personal, as touching or as impactful as work created personally and humanly; with mistakes, with breaks, with this-sucks-let’s-start-all-over-agains. Especially in the field of web-development has A.I. become the standard; what’s personal and human about code anyway? Well, quite simply: I wrote it. It’s inefficient and imperfect in a way that only I could make it, and still, it works. I know it inside and out and I know exactly why it works.

Have I been tempted to generate an easy end-result of an image or project I have in my head? Absolutely! I have even tried it in the past. Not many things are as frustrating as having a clear idea of the end result but lacking the skills or know-how to bring it to fruition. I could just put in the perfect prompt into an A.I. chatbot and have it be over with. But, I could never love the end-result. I could never proudly show it to my friends and family. To be proud of my work I need to have actually worked on it. The intricate process of creating something is what actually makes it mine.

Then there’s the issue of how A.I. algorithms are trained: they’re trained on overwhelmingly stolen materials. The work of millions and millions of humans, created with passion, love and intention has been scraped without their consent to enable these algorithms to spit out frankensteined imitations (and sometimes even flat-out copies) of art and work diligently created by humans, without any notion of credit or compensation. Even if I would be willing to get over the unemotional inhuman part of artificial intelligence, this theft-issue alone is enough for me to definitively and absolutely turn my back on artificial intelligence and dismiss it, however much people might be trying to convince me “I’ll be left behind”. I’ll gladly be left behind in the past where at least I’ll know that what I make and create, has been made and created with love, joy and my uniquely human experiences. No one can take that away from me.

What’s left of our humanity if we outsource the things that make us human – love, dedication, passion and experience – to a machine?