welcome to the azalea garden!

This is a final post for my blog. It took me nearly half an hour to figure out that the AI chat box present when making posts here can’t be removed, so I’m finished using this website. Generative AI options are, unfortunately, a feature of just about every platform, despite being fundamentally incompatible with creativity. I don’t need something incapable of thinking or feeling, something that operates solely on the stolen thoughts, ideas, and creations of other human beings, to help me be creative. If I had any desire to use generative AI to help me write, I wouldn’t fucking write, because no one who actually likes what they’re doing wants some theft machine “trained” by slaves to help them. If that’s how you’re engaging with your hobbies, find a new hobby or go inhale date center fumes and consider learning firsthand what being enslaved is like. This isn’t edited because I’m really sick of the Ask AI at the bottom of the page, so I’m hitting post the second this is done.

The thing about AI art is that it doesn’t exist. Some piece of shit black box that can do nothing but plagiarize the art of human beings and only “learned” what things are, what it should or shouldn’t create, how to “interpret” certain things, etc through literal fucking slave labor (largely in Kenya; by the way, AI doesn’t write in a mechanical, inhuman way, it writes like real-life Africans who were taught English in their schools in Africa, I’m getting really fucking sick of people talking about AI writing as though it’s not also stolen from extremely colonized people) isn’t capable of creating art. AI generated images and text are also incapable of becoming art; the touch of human hands being operated by a human brain to make choices thought up by a human does nothing but help obscure the fact that the only thought and creativity that went into what was originally generated was from the people whose works were stolen in order to “teach” a black box how to imitate the creativity of the human mind. Generative AI can’t think, feel, or be creative. Anyone who even considers telling others that actually it takes soooo much work and effort and creativity to think up a prompt is either profoundly fucking stupid or profoundly fucking dishonest. You can’t turn anything puked out by a plagiarism machine that was “trained” using slaves in the global south into anything approaching art.

I’m also so unbelievably sick of the whole “every artist takes inspiration from somewhere, how is that different from an unthinking, unfeeling machine stealing art to bastardize it upon the request of whoever has no moral qualms with utilizing a black box built off of slave labor that’s actively causing significant harm to the environment?” Obviously it’s mostly only dishonest pieces of shit saying something like that but I do think there are people stupid enough to genuinely believe that they’re making a point. It’s appalling. Something bad should happen to them. The way you can tell none of them are actually artists, and if they are they’re just brazenly dishonest, is in the fact that inspiration isn’t copying. If I told you that John Steinbeck is my primary literary inspiration, you wouldn’t take that to mean that I’m going to plagiarize his works, would you? My friend takes artistic inspiration from Osamu Tezuka; when I say that, you can clearly understand that they’re not just tracing over AstroBoy panels and saying it’s their own, right? To take inspiration is to admire the artistic merit of something that you want to fold your love for it into your own style. That’s not the same as, like, asking a black box for an image or story that’s informed by a vast, vast quantity of stolen works that were not appreciated, admired, or loved by either the black box or by the person asking the black box.

If you need generative AI to perform your hobby, find some hobbies you actually give a fuck about. People’s willingness to benefit from stolen art (which, to be clear, is stolen labor, because actual art takes fucking work), slave labor, and environmental harm for fun or profit or whatever the fuck else speaks volumes about their moral integrity and something should happen to them. They should suffer in the same way as the African slaves who “taught” the models. They should suffer the way in the same way as people whose communities are being choked out and poisoned by data centers. They should suffer the same way as everyone who is is presently most affected by climate change. I truly do mean that. There’s no such thing as AI art.