Percy Bartelt, opinions editor

I will never stop talking about my immense dislike for artificial intelligence. As long as companies keep releasing new AI models or assistants, I will still be avoiding them like the goddamn plague. Not only are they damaging on an academic level, where people use these systems and don’t learn anything from their courses, but there’s also serious copyright infringement when it comes to generative AI used in “artistic” pieces of AI. 

The most damaging effect of AI? Literally the major environmental effects of using a metric f— ton of water used to cool the servers and computers, because when millions of people use AI, they need more servers to handle the amount of people — but having that insane amount of servers raises the risk of overheating. Not only are we losing real-life skills, but we’re losing artists and our very own environment needed to live! I’m so tired of repeating these same things over and over again to AI bros going on about how “useful” it is, or how they can be soooo creative. Are we just going to ignore the effects?

Recently, I’ve been seeing more generative AI models pop up out of nowhere, or are even implemented without users knowing. We see AI showing up on Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, the list could go on. But it’s become a default setting for new users, instead of being something to be opted in on it’s automatically there and being used — just like we see with Google’s AI overview that’s wrong half the time! We also see generative AI being implemented on platforms that are supposed to uplift artists, like Adobe for a prime example. Now any tech bro could type something up, wait 10 seconds and a horrific amalgamation of other artists’ work shows up or it’s simply just sources from the internet. How exactly is that art? How do we define art in the first place? This isn’t a philosophy class, but you could just as easily look up a picture online, print it out and say you made it; equally as terrible as generating a fake image. 

It’s also worth mentioning the politics behind AI, because you can’t talk about technology without politics. Back in Dec. 2024, a whistleblower from OpenAI, Suchir Balaji, went to various news sources and outed OpenAI’s sourcing for their code by stealing people’s data. Like every normal company and normal whistleblower, Suchir Balaji was found dead in his apartment at 26 years old. Nothing suspicious there at all! This is simply just a conspiracy, but don’t you see what I’m talking about? AI is ruining our lives in every single way. Academics. Art. Politics. Propaganda. The literal Earth! It’s beyond annoying that rich tech-bros can openly use these systems by stealing people’s information, then in turn ruin our lives and claim it’s in the name of innovation and progress. What a joke.