I genuinely don't get the total, absolute opposition to generative AI tools that some people have. Especially on social media. Why be against AI but not against Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube? And what if I told you all of that runs on AI? What would those platforms even be without their recommendation engines? Does anyone remember YouTube before recommendations? It was a portal you visited when you wanted to find a video about something specific. You didn't open it "to see what came up", and you didn't just sit there scrolling until something interesting appeared. Should we go back to the web from before social media? Or before Google and SEO? Where exactly is the line?
And while we're at it: what about cars? Trucks, ships, planes, automated ports, SHEIN, ZARA, McDonald's, Carrefour, Mercadona, or any giant chain that uses logistics and AI to keep its stores stocked? And smartphones? All of that gets a pass, but generative AI is the villain?!
We should push for regulating AI the same way we regulate cars, planes, or music. Decide which uses are legitimate and which should be punishable. Force companies to pay taxes, declare what data they use, and require a paid opt-in from authors before using their work.
But calling for AI to be banned is like calling for electricity to be banned. Pretending to ignore it is like carefully sorting your recycling and then watching it all end up in the same landfill. Like trying to fix climate change by tending a bonsai.
The problem is not the technology, or the tools. The problem is the extractive, profit-driven capitalist system we live in. Generative image tools are just an extension of the stock photo concept. ChatGPT is the culmination of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Yahoo Answers. Why were Yahoo Answers or Stack Overflow perfectly fine, but ChatGPT is the wrong one?
People poured hundreds and thousands of hours into those forums — writing detailed answers to hard questions, maintaining them, editing them, fixing every mistake — in exchange for a few likes or some karma. Then the company sold all of that content. It never belonged to the people who gave their time to build it. But the problem is AI.
There have always been agencies and companies that nickel-and-dimed designers and writers. If they could get away with it, they'd grab an image from a stock photo bank — watermark and all — and slap it on their website or their ads. Or they'd get whoever to commit some design atrocity with 25 fonts and images scraped from Google for their poster, their cheap event, or their junk directory. Some have gone much further: newspapers today have more ads than content, and more servers than people working on them. And we still point at AI.
AI is the new carbon footprint. The new "smoking kills". I understand people being angry that everything is getting worse, angry that their jobs are at risk, angry that what they've dedicated most of their lives to is now being devalued and sold for a few cents per million tokens. What I don't understand is the response. AI is not going to take your job. Another worker using AI is not going to take your job either. The person who takes your job is the one who decides to do the work with AI instead of paying you — because it's cheaper, because that way they don't pay taxes, or commissions, or for the hours, and they don't have to ask anyone for anything.
And surprise: that someone is all of us. If you use social media, you use AI. If you have a smartphone, you use AI. If you take photos, you use AI. If you buy from any chain, any brand, any piece of fruit or meat that isn't local and that you don't pay for in cash, you use AI. If you travel, if you work and pay taxes, if you use electricity or water, you use AI.
Generative AI is just one more step. But we've been walking this path for a very long time.
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