For those that have been, those that will be and those who may never be
- kayleighgreig
- Sep 13
- 8 min read
Design Assistant Katrina Wang discusses the harsh impacts Generative AI has on creative integrity, the environment and human existence as a whole.
When someone writes, draws, or creates music, they love not only the process but also looking at the finished result and back at the half-formed ideas and discarded drafts that they worked their way through.
At least for me, I do.
AI has no doubt changed not only the way we live our world but also the way we interact with it. Firstly, before everything else, I am not against AI on the whole. I am not some lamenting old artist talking about the current generation and its obsession with technology. I have seen the good it can do, the ability to identify diseases and patterns faster and more accurately, aiding a floundering health industry.
But I have seen the harm.
I have seen fellow artists despair and fight against people who take their work without their permission, companies knowing full well that they will not be stopped by a little bit of criticism.
Secondly, and more importantly, why are we allowing this? I recently read AI's short story "Grief," which brought me grief.
It broke my heart as I read the lines, knowing full well that this was not written by a human, not someone whom the deceptively soft caress of grief has ever touched. There is a beauty in that this is a conglomeration of many, many voices. An aberration, for all of their deepest thoughts and feelings have been rummaged through as if it were nothing but a database on the internet.
What's worse is that a human could have written this story. That is what strikes me the deepest.
Someone in this world could have written that, with their hand in a paper notebook, scribbling their thoughts and dreams or on a document on their laptop or phone, scrolling far, far back hundreds of lines ago to find that line that just didn't quite convey their meaning or was scattered with so many grammatical errors that they had to change it now.
But they didn't.
Instead, they used a tool to gain instant, fleeting gratification, like a whisper in a storm.
Why let the AI industry turn us against each other?
Why let them—those who are now worth billions of dollars, money that most of us will never have in our lifetime—take our work from under our own hands and lie down like a dead dog and let them sneer and parade a falsely human work around, thinking only of the next profit jump.
The next goal is not progress for humanity but a deliberate and cruel sabotage of what makes us human.
Our ability to create is in our blood; it is in our heritage.
Anyone can create, and for those who say they do not have enough time, that Generative AI is more convenient, hear me say this:
Fuck you.
You are a fool repeating the lies that AI industries have been pushing you to say. It is people like you who have not only allowed the blatant theft of work but also encouraged bigger corporations to continue this agenda to replace creators. They are not making AI a tool for us creators. They are creating it to replace us, to find cheaper labour and more time-efficient workers who won't protest their questionable morals or debate with them about the intended message to convey to their consumers.
Dylan Patel, a chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, a trusted and reputable research firm, said this in a Wealthion interview:
“The only way to access AI isn’t cheap […] They charge, I believe, six cents per 750 words [...] to be generated. So incredibly cheap when you think about it. But obviously, the chat, the nice user interface, and all of that cost a little bit more money.”[1]
Cheap labour, not paying creators, I wonder where I’ve heard that before?
You don't let this farce of an excuse continue to happen to the music industry; you don’t hear AI music being dragged through these debates we have with artists and writers, because famous songs are copyrighted, and the AI industry knows this and explicitly states it does not use copyrighted works.
Copyrighted, you hear me?
Small artists and writers, like myself and millions of others, cannot have our work copyrighted.
We cannot rely on the legal system to protect us because it has already failed us.
AI industries have manipulated legal loopholes to get where they are now.
We cannot change that it is too late for the millions of artworks online that have already been data mined, scraped and reconfigured into a piece that has no say in what it is and should be.
But we can change the future.
For all those of you who will use AI because you don't know what else to do—
You can draw. You can write. You can sing.
It doesn't have to be good to be art. It doesn't have to be pretty; it doesn't have to be large.
A small flower in the corner of your speaker notes. A word sung instead of said. A sentence or two musing about what you saw and thought during the day that has a nice rhythm and flow. A word or picture painted across the canvas that is your life, joining the millions already there that you didn't know existed.
Take joy in the tiny little cat you drew, take that disappointment you feel when the work you produce is not what you imagined in your mind and use it.
Use that feeling of despair and hopelessness to create something else.
Use the free resources because it is written in our being as the stars shine above us and the world pulses with yet another new life growing under heavy blood-soaked earth, under the smog of heavy machinery and every churning gear to a system that destroys and perverts all that we love.
For those who think I'm being overly emotional and petty and a luddite and whatever other terminology you see fit to call me, think about the future.
How many of you have seen warehouses upon warehouses of hard drives and humming fans that are used for data mining? How many of you have seen the environmental changes not only because of PFAs, carcinogens, pesticides, etc., but also because we relied on technology?
Do you know how much energy it takes to run a single ChatGPT prompt?
Here, Dylan Patel's advice is laid bare for you, if you are unable to read the full cited articles.
Interviewer Adam Taggart asked him, “Does AI really understand how to create an early impression poem?”[1] Essentially, does the AI know what it is creating?
And what's interesting and what most people misunderstand about Generative AI models is that it has no idea what it is doing.
Dylan Patel explains it in layman’s terms: “All it’s programmed to do is either generate the next port, we have in terms of a large language model, generate the next four legs. That’s all it’s trained to do, right? You input something, it runs through all of the math, and it just outputs the next four letters. It’s just predicting what would be the next four letters in the sequence that you input it into…”[1]
The reason the specialised creative writing generative AI could generate that heart-moving piece was because it was trained on encoded data about human emotions.
That means, for each and every specialised generative AI, behind it is a whole database of stolen content that is legally defensible because of hard-to-spot, exploitable loopholes. It also means that for future Generative AI, they will have to retrain the models if they want to update them. They would have to spend thousands upon millions of dollars of time and energy to do this. Total Datacenter Critical IT Power demand is estimated to double from about 49 GW in 2023 to 96 GW by 2026, with 90% of the growth coming from AI-related demand.[2]
Australians are facing housing crises, unemployment and a whole list of other maladies that plague us. Most of us don’t have time to worry about petty little things such as AI; it is but a worm that nudges aside some soil and churns it under the ground on which our feet tread.
It matters. Everything matters to someone.
Here's another hard fact—not quite backed by science, mainly by logic and psychology: Generative AI is not some magic tool that will unlock every one of your deepest desires and liberate you of them through its words or art.
By using it, you are not creating something that emotionally satisfies you, but instead contributing to the continued degradation of artistic individuality, not just of others but of yourself as well, by standing by big corporations and short-sighted selfishness.
The world is already burning down around us, from wars enriching the soil with the blood of our people, from our inability to react to larger corporations taking advantage of us, from the government, which is too slow to change despite experts' continued and frequent pleas for us to simply hear them out. Look at the understory underlying the facades of a life dancing across tiny pixels alight because of human innovation.
So if emotional pleas do not work for you, let me tell you, and all those that came before me who are willfully ignorant of the ravaging our earth and all those within it:
You gave us this problem for us to deal with. Your parents gave it to you to deal with.
The current rise in everything that is potentially world-ending is not our fault.
We are not lazy, we are burnt out and despairing, hopelessly working for a future that even we may not get to see.
We are not emotionless, we're trying to protect ourselves from the millions of problems that are the direct cause of corporations that only see the next jump in sales, that see commodifying humans as a reasonable action to do because think of the profit, it could be yours.
And we're coping the best we can.
Just because there is a significant and good decrease in younger people not drinking or smoking, doesn't mean we don't have our own harmful coping mechanisms. It doesn't mean we can't get lung cancer at twenty years old, because the world is killing us as we are killing it.
If the next person you see online is doing a shopping spree in fast fashion that will eventually end up in the wastelands that contain every scrap of humanity woven into its core, then think why before you disparage. I'm not telling you to pardon or forgive them, because in this current system, things like this are not sustainable in any sense of the word. I'm telling you to think before you write that comment, whether complimenting the fit or disparaging her with insults and hateful speech.
It's complicated.
Life is complicated, and it's only getting more complicated every second we're in it.
For all those creators out there:
I may not know what pride is, I may not know how to identify it in my own body, but I can tell you this: I am proud of you, nonetheless. Every word you have sung, every word that you have written, every sketch you have drawn, I am proud of you for that. Somewhere in the world, someone has seen it, read it, heard it and is happier for it. Someone unknown to you loves you not for the monetary value you bring but for the joy you bring others. Every minute you are on this earth creating is another second that the world celebrates that it is still alive and worth something.
*
I will not lay down in silence on a bed of my own contradictions and insecurity. I will fight in the only way I can with the time this world has given me, and that is by creating something I enjoy the process of doing.
The ground we walk on faces towards an unknown. It may be the soft, welcoming rain-fed dirt; it may be the hard, rough, unforgiving concrete of urban pathways; it may be lush and green with life blooming with every step.
I will not know. I may never know.
But I will try, anyway.
– From a soon-to-be nineteen-year-old who has no hope, whose interests are pointless in a world that needs money to be run on, who has grown numb to the events of the world, yet still works and lives for that unknown.
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