AI and AI Art

[DoubleO]

I have a friend who is just totally into the whole AI schtick. He'll acknowledge the issues but in a very 'yeahhhh I know' kind of way but he uses ChatGPT for so much shit. We're going to China together and he used ChatGPT to make an itinerary that was so full of errors and just completely ridiculous and outside the realms of possibility. He's always sharing AI song covers or AI videos and he even used it to come up for slogans for posters he has to make for work and then gets upset when everyone is like 'wow that's so shit' despite the fact he didn't come up with it. He has essentially replaced googling with asking an AI chatbot.
It's very frustrating to me. I'm very anti-AI in the forms it's reared its head recently. The AI art, videos, music, it all just feels like a bad direction to take. Part of a thing being admirable and impressive is that it was somebody's idea that they either enlisted others to realise or realised themselves. Art in all its forms should be a celebration of human collaboration. Machines can be used as tools to reach that end but I have no interest in art where a myriad of the decisions were made by an AI.
This absolute buzzword-ification of it as well is hindering tools that artists have been using for years. Automated processes on blender or photoshop that an artist makes use of are now being lumbered in with fully generative AI. Every company ever is trying to shove it down our throats without actually bothering to explain what they're talking about. 'Enhanced by AI,' 'Now with AI,' 'Powered by AI.' These phrases have been true of many computer products and processes for a very long time...so what are they talking about? The spearheading of the phrase is flattening the public's understanding of what it truly means and obscures what 'AI' is actually in use. The advancement of these tools and the way in which they're used can very easily get out of hand. And who is in charge of it? Who keeps it in check? The corporations? The government?
Companies have been training their AI on sources like the internet archive and libgen secretly, these sites are then being targeted and taken down. The information isn't just being amassed but gatekept. These sites are some of the backbones of what the internet has been for since its inception. They encourage free access to information and learning, they are massive collections of human culture and history, preserved digitally. Some people have dedicated their lives to helping that cause. And now their work has been co-opted and is under threat of being scrubbed off the web. It's the kind of act you'd read about in a cyberpunk story.
There's an obvious hypocrisy in this using generative replications of voice actor's work to make this point, but it does drive home just how relevant the kind of things MGS2 was saying are to this situation:

I saw my comment on this video from 2 years ago, I still think it's excellently written. 
Your last comment is exactly why I can't completely hate on AI and why I love AND hate it, I think it's great it can be used to help enhance or accelerate the process of more larger projects but it saddens me how it has cheapened simple art pieces, portraits ects. 
Whether we like it or not this is gonna change the way we consume and rate art and entertainment and it's gonna be next to impossible to truly decipher who uses it as a tool similar to photoshop or 3DSMAX, who uses it to do everything and who doesn't use it at all. 
I'm sure when photoshop first came out people thought it was too cheap, easy slop and the art of cutting, glueing and pasting for thing like magazine covers irl was lost. 
When digital art came about people weren't too fond of that. I don't know if this is the same but I'll tell you that storytellers and writers can still use this to possibly do amazing things, it allows people without the resources to bring their stories to life in a way that the soulless art seems less soulless because of the writing behind it but then... they'll start using AI for the writing too.
If you can't tell I both love and hate AI by now with my ramblings lol