AI and Anxiety

When ChatGPT 3 came out, I was initially terrified how it might make my job irrelevant and all creative professions along with it.

Now I have had time to let that fear simmer a bit, and I have changed my mind. These days, when I think about AI, I come to think about how irrelevant it is to the problem I face. For the problems I try to solve AI feels at best like a tool that can take care of some chores, and at worst: exploitative and actively harmful.

My current project is to help people live more sustainably. From that perspective, AI is an ecological disaster. At the same time, I think the way that AI removes our need to think,actively harm our public institutions. The more software I build, the more I understand the importance of understanding how things work, from the hardware to the software, in order to be able to fix it myself when something breaks. In that sense, I am skeptical of the way AI encourages us to just copy-paste without knowing what we are doing. It is like stackoverflow but on steroids.

When I find out a picture is AI generated, I cannot help but to feel that it looks cheap. It is about as interesting as a stock photo to me, and that makes me think that it will not be replacing art anytime soon.

These days I feel a relief that AI actually does not help me in what I try to achieve, my initial anxiety is gone. Instead I feel more pressure to make sure that my projects succeed so I do not end up in an organization where I have to use AI tools.

- Marc