I’ve long had a very idealistic worldview. A strong sense of right and wrong (although that is deeply subjective, as I’ve come to realise).
This month, I had yet another long discussion about “AI” with an old friend from my school days. It made me question whether I’m being too idealistic again. Whether I’m once more being blinded and held back by my (subjective) ideals.
Perhaps ideals are just naïveté.
A Brief Look into my History
To provide a better context of where these questions are coming from, I’ll have to look back to my adolescence. Back then, I had very strong opinions of what love was and how it should be. Ideals that were completely unreachable and shortsighted.
That viewpoint and my unwillingness to face it and adapt hurt my early love life. I felt so confused and lonely, it seemed completely incomprehensible to me how love and romance could be pictured in this idealistic way in media, yet be so completely different in real life.
It took me a long time to learn that love, and by extension romantic relationships, are not perfect. Not ideal. The ideals are something to aspire to, nothing that can exist.
Growing Up
Once I realised that, my love life stabilised, became satisfying even. Yet it still felt like less somehow. Imperfect. Perhaps that’s just how things have to be.
I have another ideal that I haven’t moved away from. I don’t use Meta products. No Facebook, no Instagram—and certainly no WhatsApp, which in Germany is a huge deal, since it’s basically the messaging app everyone uses.
This choice means that I am isolated. I don’t know what my friends are talking about in their group chats. I only know about social gatherings if one of them makes the effort to reach out to me on another platform, sometimes I just get forgotten.
Even those of my friends that use the messaging apps I use sometimes leave me on read for weeks—because they don’t see our chat often enough, as they’re mostly using WhatsApp.
It hurts, makes me feel lonely—which could be prevented so easily. All I’d need to do is give up this ideal of mine to use Meta’s services.
Compromising
It’s not like I haven’t made concessions before. I accepted that the perfect love story doesn’t exist. And while I refused to use Adobe software (because it doesn’t run on Linux and comes from a predatory company) throughout my entire time studying design, eventually I had to use them at work. There just wasn’t a choice other than start using and getting good at them, or look for a different job.
It feels icky, I still don’t like using those tools, but I’m reminded at least on a weekly basis how my idealism hurt my career and skills as a designer. How good, how fast would I be if I had been using Adobe software for a decade? Nobody cares that I know GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus like the back of my hand. It’s sad, but that’s how it is.
Circling Back to the GPT in the Room
These days, my idealism prevents me from using LLMs and other forms of generative “AI”. I find it deeply unethical how they are trained and how much intentional misinformation is being proliferated in the surrounding marketing. I feel like they’re being used to devalue highly valuable skills that need to be honed over years.
Unfortunately, these tools are everywhere now and went from demos to daily helpers in a few short years. We do use things like “generative fill” in Photoshop to extend and alter images more quickly. In fact, it’s pretty much the only instance where I feel like the technology has actually made my work easier.
But I still feel icky when using it. Just as I’m questioning whether it’s wrong to have a bash script generated by it and then just tweaking and proofreading it instead of writing it myself.
My ideals say, I should boycott these technologies. They are a fad, a bubble, like crypto, web 3.0, NFTs and VR and 3D TVs. Nothing trumps actual skill, actual knowledge. That’s what I’ve told my friend as well, during our discussion. And they asked me, “but where does your idealism end?”
And I found out it ends pretty quickly. I probably wear clothing made by exploited people. I definitely use hardware produced with unethical processes. I reach for the convenience of Amazon when I need something. I do eat imported foods.
I feel like I can understand how LLMs and other generative models work a little better than non-technical people, and I move in a very much anti-“AI” bubble. But I feel like that is a minority?
Most people I know just use these new tools without questioning them or the way they were made. They know the results sometimes aren’t particularly accurate, but that’s fine for them. They just care that they made their work easier. Most people are fine with mediocrity. Especially when it concerns their tasks at their job.
I can’t do that. I take pride in my craft. I put a lot of thought and effort into my designs, carefully write each line of code. That makes me slow in this “new” world. Slow and expensive. My customers and managers don’t care, for them, speed and low cost are more important than sustainability. Most of them cannot distinguish a human-crafted design from a generated one. Almost all of them, including my superiors at work, cannot tell a generated program from a handwritten one.
Questioning
So should I just throw my ideals away so I can be more adapted to society? Work less, grift the system, make more profit by cheating? Because that’s what it feels like to me to use “AI”. The same as when people cheated during exams back in school and I wouldn’t even try to look at what the person next to me was writing because it felt wrong.
I used to be very adamant about how it is wrong to use ChatGPT for everything, but this last discussion changed that. I still think it’s wrong, but I’m considering that I might be wrong myself. There are so many questions.
Am I betting on the wrong horse in renouncing LLMs? Is my world view too narrowed by my bubble? Why did I have such a hard time coming up with convincing arguments why “AI” is bad in that discussion?
These tools will get better and better. They will make fewer mistakes, and hopefully they’ll get much more efficient. They’ll probably always be trained / created unethically, as so much else in our industrialised society is.
Will I get left behind by rejecting them? At what point will the price for idealism be too high?
These days I find my ideals slipping away from me … and that worries me.