Artificial intelligence (AI) has been rapidly advancing in skill and popularity over the last couple of years, proving itself as a useful tool that can either help make mundane tasks easier or do them for us without our involvement. It’s changing the way our world works, and while discovering something like AI, it comes with many dangers that we don’t fully understand.
While I don’t actually know how much I use AI, in the moments where I get to choose how I do something, I won’t ever decide to use it. That seems inevitable, though, as AI itself is everywhere. It shows up in every Google search, with no option to turn it off, and no matter how much you fight it, most people just read the AI overview, which often provides incorrect information.
It has been turned into a tool of convenience, used as a replacement for passion and thinking, driving the world to a place where you have no option but to use it, or you’ll fall behind.
For a creative person like me, it is not just a piece of technology; it is also a threat. Since fifth grade, I have always known I would become an animator, but now I am not sure if I can.
Every day, I see people use AI art for their business logos, in their lesson plans, or as little as their wallpaper. I’ve seen people make movies or deepfakes of celebrities, books to sell on Amazon for easy money, and even to replace concept and costume designers for visual media.
Not only are AI creations being used in the fine arts, but also in classrooms, and not by the students. In a few of my classes, teachers have begun using AI to plan the entire year’s curriculum. In addition, a vast majority of my assignments have also been generated by programs like ChatGPT.
For me, the thing I dislike most about the effects of AI is the way I’ve seen it affect my family. On several occasions, my grandma has shown me products that she gets really excited about and believes are real, but are, unfortunately, AI.
My mom has also sent me Instagram reels of cute animals doing funny little tricks and, of course, it’s AI. I don’t like how easily it can fool someone with just an image, possibly tricking them into buying a product that doesn’t exist. To me, it’s scary that it just takes a photo for someone to make you do or say something that never happened.
I hope that we start to see a shift in the use of AI. No longer will it be a common way to write the essay you do not want to write, but instead, it will be guided towards replacing the dangerous jobs that put human workers at risk. Jobs similar to climbing a wind turbine to fix a mechanical error on the control panel, or reconnecting the underwater cables that a shark has mistaken for its lunch. In addition to that, I dream that the environmental effects of AI appear on the For You pages and News articles of those who need it, to deeply show how every prompt someone types in costs someone else something, be it water in their lake or the temperature of their town.
