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 for 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 major problems 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 harms 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 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 am forced to use AI tools.

- Marc