My Thoughts About AI
“Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.” is what my friend told me when I was talking shit about AI several months ago. So, I gave it a try. I went to ClaudeAI, my friend’s recommendation, to see if it could help me write. This was around the 2024 holiday season. So, I asked it to help me write a blog post about being available for sessions on Christmas.
Stupid me, right? It was probably very dumb of me to put my website in here. And don’t worry, I took measures to protect my privacy. I should have known that sex work + AI do not mix well in this day and age. That’s to be expected. What bothered me was the sanctimonious suggestions that followed about the adult industry being exploitative and that writing about “family friendly” topics would be a better use of my time. First of all, all work is exploitative (is Claude AI going to cause me to finally go on a rant about the horrors of capitalism on my blog?!) Personally, sex work is the least exploitative type of work I’ve ever done.
So, then I changed my tactics. I requested ideas for a “coach” instead of an escort. But Claude relented with their wholesome, Focus-on-the-Family-inspired approach. Excuse me, bot. It’s unethical to offer services to people on holidays? Not everyone celebrates. This whole thing reeks of Christian supremacy. The holidays can be a hard time of year when people need support. It would be reasonable for a coach to say they are available for people who need some extra support during that time of year, but not according to Claude!
So then I complained to Claude about capitalism. And yet, it relented. After this point, I decided AI is not for me. I have since learned that other AI platforms are less sanctimonious, but this first experience really turned me off.
The Environmental Impact
I haven’t done much research into this personally, but I keep hearing and reading about the environmental impact of AI. From what I know, it takes an immense amount of water and energy to run the data centers needed to power the increased usage of AI. According to the UN Environment Programme, a request made via an AI GPT uses 10 times more resources than a Google query. They state that the number of energy-guzzling data centers has grown from 500k to over 8 million since 2012.
It’s Bad for Our Brains
According to a recent MIT study, people who used ChatGPT to write several SAT essays over the course of a few months had less brain engagement and underperformed, with their performance, memory, and engagement, getting worse over time. According to a Time Magazine article about the study, English teachers who rated the essays in the study called the ChatGPT group’s work soulless. The ChatGPT group could not earily recreate the essay when asked to rewrite it based on what they remembered. This suggests that using AI in certain ways could be detrimental to the learning process.
AI Customer Service
I would rather scoop out my eyeball with a spoon than use an AI chatbot for customer service. I personally actively avoid companies that don’t have a clear path to communicating with a human. The chatbots rarely work and just lead to a lot of frustration. I can imagine them working if they try once to solve your problem and then direct you to a human quickly when they can’t, but too many companies are using them as a 90% customer service solution and making it incredibly challenging to reach a human with the power to help you.
Will AI Replace Sex Work?
It’s already happening bit by bit. AI babes are becoming more popular on social media, but they are largely seen as scammers. People are starting to fall in love with GPTs they have trained to their tastes. People are generating their own AI porn. In my opinion, nothing will ever replace real human interaction. But, it may become rarer, and/or even more of a luxury service than it already is.
It’s already starting in other industries. Waymo, the driverless cars that are so abundant in SF, seeks to replace services like Uber and Lyft, which in turn, replaced traditional cab services. HR departments are using AI tools to manage all the resumes they receive, causing job seekers to have to tailor their resume tactics to AI preferences.
Is This Just What It’s Like Getting Older?
As I’m in the 2nd half of my 30s, I have wondered if my resistance to AI is just part of the aging process. You know, the stereotype that “older” people resist technology and “younger” people glom onto it? But I’ve talked to many people about this, and most agree that no, AI is just kind of…bad.
I’ve read countless articles about how students are losing the ability to think, create, and research for themselves. We’ve already had this problem developing for over a decade with “fake news” etc. What young people need to be able to learn is critical thinking, so they can determine reality from falsehoods on the ‘net and beyond. What we don’t need is a tool that just does the thinking for them. (and get off my lawn too…)
Maybe I’m just old school. I’ve always related more to Gen X than my own millennial era. But I won’t be using any AI GPTs for anything. This blog is completely written by me, no help needed. Maybe that will eventually make me come off as unpolished or ranting or something. I’d much rather have those human qualities come across than the predictable tone and bullet-pointed, em-dashed cadence of an AI-written article. (I am pro em-dash in general, but you know what I mean!)
