This rant has been brewing for about a year, and it hit a boiling point last week when I attended a meeting where the first half was as advertised and the last half of the meeting was a pro-AI presentation from my alma mater. The presentation was not on the meeting invite and was required as my part in a program I’m involved in for work. It is loosely art related but mostly related to my being an art therapist.
I’m going to start this out by stating that I’m not totally against AI. I’m in favor of it’s use for editing and cleaning up written work. I’m not in favor of using it to create new work, written or art based, whole cloth.
My ethical struggles begin with how the MLM are trained- on blog posts, books, and writing stolen from the authors to train the AI. Art pulled from images shared online to train the AI. None of it with credit.
My struggles continue with how AI data centers are set up up in small rural communities under the guise of creating jobs. While the construction of the data centers gives a few temporary jobs there are few jobs as the centers are not maintained by a local person. These data centers suck energy resources and use water to cool them. The ecological impact is immense. The energy costs to the community increase drastically.
The ethical struggles are continued through my concerns for data privacy. I get several alerts about data breaches per year. My data has been stolen from my credit card company, Home Depot, Meta, my former health insurance company(s), and many other places. The breach from the health insurance companies is the most concerning. In that breach my personal identifying information was stolen as well as a great deal of my health information. Sure we got a pay out, something like $200, but that doesn’t help the fact that my very private information is now out there. *waves at the air*
So I’m not totally anti-AI. But I also don’t know that there is a truly ethical way of using it. I use it to soften the tone of my emails since I’ve been told that I’m too direct in my online communication. I have used Grammarly and Hemmingway to edit my writing. I believe it has it’s use in making some things go faster and more easily. But I struggle with all the aforementioned information. I struggle knowing that my writing would be labeled as AI in a college class. College writing gets pushed through an AI detector that uses AI to check for AI. These AI detectors are trained on AI that was trained on my writing (and yours if you’ve published anything online). I’ve read account by student who swear that they didn’t sue AI getting flagged for use of AI when the issue is that they have a great vocabulary and are good writers. I’ve spoken with students who have told me that they purposefully put grammatical and spelling errors into their writing so that their essays are not picked up by the AI detector, and they don’t even know if that works or not.
Know that when you read my writing, it’s all my work. It’s also been harvested by at least on AI MLM. I know this because I had several link backs to my blog from ChatGPT. It’s clear someone asked for sources from ChatGPT and followed a bunch of links back to my blog. I’d always assumed that Comfortable Shoes Studio would have been farmed, after all it’s been online since 2003? and the current version of it dates back to at LEAST 2006. That’s a lot of writing.
Part of the reason I was so heated about the pro-AI presentation by my alma mater was their stance on technology when I attended (2013 to 2016 I went back to school at 35). Many of my professors were extremely anti technology. Anti the use of tablets for drawing. When I floated my thesis topic- the use of online tools for art therapy with a heavy focus on accessibility for rural and disabled people it was met with extreme negativity. I was dissuaded from the topic. My thesis professor had extreme issues using technology herself and struggled to get edits back to me in a way I could access. Eventually I was handed off to the dean for editing help and that was the first professor at my grad program who was positive about my topic.
As part of the presentation I sat through several people mentioned all of the concerns I outlined above. We were met with the statement, “Well the students are already using it.” One of the presenters had the gall to bring up accessibility for rural and disabled people and the use of AI therapists. Honestly, this probably angered me the most. As someone who grew up in an extremely rural area, with rampant poverty around me, access to therapy and medical care is hard. But I would argue that everyone, disabled or rural, deserve access to the best medical and psychological care. Frankly, AI ain’t it. AI isn’t even close.
I was shocked. Especially with the recent articles coming out about AI offering up the worst psychological information to teenagers. There are already lawsuits about these topics. But these people want to offer up the very worst in health care to rural and disabled people.
/rant