The AI Hate Progression

I think I've spoken at length in other places about how I am a very staunch AI hater and everything I hate about how the tech is presented to us today. But I want to take a second to talk about how I became this way, because I wasn't always like this! Oh no, I thought the whole "I fed the Bee Movie script into a bot and had them make a sequel" thing that perpetuated the early era of generative AI was...amusing, but easily ignored at worst. In fact, if ChatGPT just kinda sat over there and existed, I probably wouldn't have hated it. Hated the people that used it to "well, acksually" people and be annoying? Of course, but that's no real fault of the technology. Technology is a tool, and takes on the will of the people using it and controlling it, and therein lies the problem. At some point, the entire tech industry saw ChatGPT and fell into a collective psychosis and decided that this, this is the next big thing, and that we must pull out the stops to ensure the prophecy is fulfilled of generative AI/LLMs becoming the next big thing. I'm sure copyrighted material was already being fed into LLMs at this point (I mean, you also had people willingly feeding it in, like the example I gave above) but once the techbros caught on and wanted to accelerate this, suddenly EVERYTHING public facing was fair game to training their models. They didn't care whether or not you consented to training their AI (that would later be pitched as a replacement for creatives, cool). If you posted a publicly-accessible photo, they took it and absolutely used it for commercial purposes. Again, without so much as asking for your permission. Things took an even darker turn once the Money People got involved. Investors proclaimed that they were all in on AI (arguably without understanding what it is past it being the trend of the time and believing false promises that it was going to make them Big Money) and that anyone not going all in on AI wouldn't be getting as much (if any) sweet investor dosh. Your company would also be branded as "behind the times" and doomed to fail because you didn't get in when the going was hot. (Hmm, where have I heard this before? Oh yeah. Crypto shitheads screaming "ngmi" at people who rightfully called them on their hubris.)