AI Disclaimer
On using AI as a Media Artist who hates the industry, or: A reluctant common-sense defense of my tiny temporary robot slave army.
Why does this page exist?
I am a vocal critic of generative AI and the AI industry and I travel in creative circles where these tools have been used to destroy lives and livelihoods, including at times deeply impacting my own.
Much of what I care about no longer exists online. I frequently argue in favor of lo-fi, handmade, handbuilt and handcrafted work. I love zines, dead media, homemade websites, hobby projects. If I ever see another fucking AI-slop Canva advertisement or Figma UI board again it'll be too soon.
Daily I despair of ever getting back to a world where anyone (let alone I) believes technology might make our lives better instead of openly cheering on the torment nexus.
I also subscribe to Claude and use it frequently.
I don't really think anyone needs to publicly justify or disclaim how they get through the day, but I want to pre-emptively talk about how I use these tools in a bid to avoid being "called out" for using AI in my work.
Plainly: I use AI tools in my work.
If you are deeply bothered by that, feel free to close this tab and click the block button, it'll probably make us both happier.
So you use AI tools?
Yes, sometimes. I subscribe to Claude and use it fairly frequently. I also drive a car with a gasoline engine, I fly on commercial airlines and I shop at a grocery store likely supplied by factory farming.
Don't you think that's fundamentally evil?
Purity politics are exhausting. Please stop.
But but...
Yeah, AI is conceptually bullshit (it's an LLM, we've had those for a long time, it's not intelligent, it's basic pattern matching at scale). Wealth and resource hoarding is fundamentally evil. There are no good AI companies. We would probably be better off if this "revolution" hadn't happened. We're going to be cleaning up for decades, if we live that long. Everything (in tech) pretty much sucks now. We need to solve the energy and climate crisis before we dig more oil wells and run diesel generators. Billionaires are why we can't have nice things. I wish none of this had happened. If I could Thanos-snap us back to 2016 I would. I would be ok with gasoline being $20 a gallon and the AI industry imploding, we would be better off. We're not there yet.
So you make generative AI work?
Not really, no. I have done some generative projects where the generative part was the point, but I am as sick as you are of seeing AI slop. I do not produce AI output whole-cloth and pass it off as my work, but I frequently use AI for tasks. I have used AI to: make a static image spin, remove a background, replicate something I drew into HTML, provide interactivity, modernize older code, port things across platforms, troubleshoot complicated routing issues, resolve bugs with libraries I'm not so familiar with, remove the silence from an audio file, update and port themes, explain tech stacks to me that I don't understand, find and compare things like AWS usage across providers.
Then you code with AI?
I do, frequently. I have been writing code since I taught myself BASIC in the 1980s. There are endless things I'm not good at and tons of stuff I want to learn and even more things I am just sick of doing. I used to use libraries for a lot of this work, I still do, but sometimes I can get it done faster or cleaner with AI-assist. I don't believe there's any particular moral value in being able to implement basic CS tasks from first principles (although if you're that kind of nerd, I hope you have fun. Yay you.) I do not derive any self-worth from being able to hand-code a search algorithm from memory using pen on paper. I use computers to get jobs done, not because I love the jobs.
Personally: I don't ever want to write another JS date parser. I don't ever want to ace a FAANG whiteboard interview from 2010. I don't ever want to figure out how to structure my CSS (again). I am not excited to learn yet another half-baked game engine or port my avatar to yet another proprietary SDK or write another fucking jest test (although test-driven development is still really useful and you should use it!)
Isn't that vibe-coding?
I don't know and I don't care.
I will say I have the impression that vibe coding is when you just ask an LLM for an end result and blindly let it go. I like the suggestion to rename this to 'cuckcoding' since you just sit in a chair and watch. I don't know why you would do that, but I don't have a robot lawnmower or vacuum or any home-assistant products either.
I wash my own dishes and I clean my own floors. I think a lot of this "offloading of labor" is ultimately wasteful and the output is usually a deformed echo of what you meant to do anyway, but I'm also too old and too stressed not to recognize where a good shortcut might help me out.
I have vibe-coded personal projects that never see the light of day. Sometimes they're really helpful ("claude: build me a CLI to download youtube videos." "claude: make me a one-liner to rename HEIC files to the date they were taken, strip exif and save them as JPG"). Basically a lot of stuff I used to shell script I probably let Claude do.
Most of the time these projects are sub-optimal and I end up rewriting them by hand anyway. If I find I ask Claude the same question 10 times, I have it (or me) write a script instead. I'm also working on some local LLMs to handle personal data and to make better use of my local compute.
A local LLM? A Robot in your Very Home?
If you have an Alexa or a Ring doorbell, I'm judging you quietly for installing a pipeline directly from inside your home to an online ad-network in exchange for some questionable utility. Not to mention the erosion of our civil liberties (wiretap warrants exist for a reason and my generation didn't live through the Patriot Act to be ok with this.)
Also as a VR veteran I own a powerful GPU. It's hard for me to argue that using electricity to render video game worlds is morally superior to using that same resource for sorting my email.
I have been exploring offloading tasks to local LLMs so I can stop paying into the implosion of the tech industry. I think it would be even cooler if that was powered by local solar.
We can have nice things, if we also accept the consequences and costs of ownership.
As far as I can tell, all of the problems with the AI industry have to do with how it is being run and what we are doing with the tech, not the tech itself. I will keep using LLMs to take care of things I don't care about so that I can focus on the things that I do, and I will simultaneously look for ways to do that more efficiently.
Nothing I have ever done is "pure" and I don't think that's a worthy goal. That said, I will never pass off substandard whole-cloth AI-generated work as my own not because AI is evil or because it never touches my workflow but because I have some basic self respect. If I put something out in the world, I stand behind it regardless of the tooling. If you are reading something I've written, I actually wrote it and I have enough respect for you as the reader that I assume you can tell.
I will continue to celebrate handcrafted work, uplift traditional creators financially and otherwise and dream of the day our capitalist death cult offs itself and we can carry on making a world worth living in.
PS If we just privatized Elon Musk alone we'd have free food, housing and universal basic income for everyone. Let's start with a millionare tax and a ban on private jet travel.