As an artist, a scientist, and an environmentalist, I take a strong stance against generative “AI”. It’s bad for our brains, it’s bad for the environment, and data centers are polluting our communities, just to name the obvious issues. I will never use generative AI in my art, in my writing, or in any part of my process, and I am doing everything in my power to keep AI companies from using stealing my work to train their models.

I’m not an idiot. As a scientist, I have used language learning models to process crazy amounts of data. Language learning models have valuable, legitimate applications in medicine, scientific research, and data processing. If we can leverage these models to help make peoples’ lives better, that’s amazing! Aaaand these models have been around much longer than the buzzword “AI”. Because artificial intelligence does not exist.

You probably know where this is going.

Generative “AI” is nothing more than a trained model wrapped up in a chat box gui to make it easy for people to offload their thinking and creating. It does not “make art accessible to those without skills.” Skills are gained. You don’t win a foot race by blasting past everyone in a jeep. You don’t write an award-winning novel by outsourcing the work to someone else. If you use a model trained off of the stolen art of others to generate an image, you are not an artist.

I think that the value of art, like any practice, is the heart that goes into it. Including all the bumps along the way. Heck this is my second time writing this stupid statement because I’m typing it all by hand and the website builder FREAKED out at me and crashed, causing me to lose all of it. And you know what, that just happens sometimes. I’m not going to ask a generative “AI” chatbot to write a few paragraphs for me just so I can save a few minutes of mild frustration. This time, I’m just making sure to press the save button every couple of minutes.

ANYWAY, all of this is to say that I would rather rewrite this page a hundred times than use generative models to write it for me. If you’re still reading this, I hope you too are taking a stand against generative “AI”. The people that are telling us that “it’s the future so we should accept it” are regurgitating propaganda that AI companies want us to fall for. This is only the future if we let it happen. I for one will fight tooth and claw against it.

Anti Generative AI Statement