If you haven't already today, Go. Touch. Grass. NOW!
When I was 6 years old, I was at m friend's house and watched this video:
Being young and ingnorant, I thought that the giant expanding peep was real. I didn't know what the word "gag" meant in either sense of the word, only that there was a scared man running from a peep that grew and grew and grew. But, as I grew and grew and I began to separate fiction from reality, I began to notice that these were just images cut, pasted and animated in some video editing software. It didn't look real, and, frankly, it didn't need to. The Annoyong Orange didn't need a big budget to succeed and go viral, it just had to be funny.
This was the Golden Age of the internet. YouTube and Facebook were the big platforms, no one had to worry about copyright and stockholder medling or direct sponsorships, and the only "AI" chatbots we had were Cleverbot and Evie. The internet was a treasure trove of new emerging creators that made the transition from the late 2000s to the early 2010s some of the best years to be alive. I will never forget watching all of those goofy, sometimes violent Pac-Man parody animations, or the Sonic Volume series, or playing Tails' Nightmare on Newgrounds, or beliving that the Slenderman was actually real. A good photoshop artist knew what they were doing.
Recently, OpenAI rolled out their Sora 2 AI video generator. I can't stomach watching these. Initially, I laughed at the memes of late celebrities (and Hitler, too) digitally ressurected from the dead in a photorealistic video getting arrested or duking it out in the WWE ring. But then, I watched some AI creepypasta videos involving Spongebob Squarepants or other sorts of media and it got me thinking about those old creepy pasta videos in the likes of "Marble Hornets" or the Petscop series. I kept up with Daisy Brown as it came out. The basic formula is this: a shot of an old RCT tv showing some "lost episode" of a TV show or a game would appear and there would be some type of jumpscare, like Spongebob having razor-sharp teeth and pulling a FNaF 2 Foxy before the TV explodes or a random glitch in some game. One video had a National emergency alert followed by a shot towards the window as a nuclear bomb was going off. It got me thinking about how, now, with this AI, as normal people (at the cost of our electric bills going up) can make much more realistic movies than Disney. I couldn't even try replicating that and making it look that good. That is time and energy that I just don't have.
I then see a video where the "cameraman's" face is shown, and I realized that that person wasn't real. I really wanted to believe that there were maybe real videos that were tampered with AI, but no. Nothing on my screen was real. It's one thing to see Gojo fight Peter Griffin or fake bodycam footage of Spongebob speeding off, but it's another to make a video of real people, some of the modern idols of our age like Bob Ross, Steven Hawking, Tupac, Biggie Smalls, JFK, Mister Rogers, MLKJ, and even Queen Elizabeth, all whom were once alive, appear in hypothetical, reality defying situaions. While it's funny to see Micheal Jackson smoothly snatch someone's KFC, you sort of have to remind yourself that he died in 2009.
Watching these was having a bad effect on me. I began to notice that my own viewpoint of reality was becoming dreamlike. I was entering a state of derealization, where all my senses came into question. I looked back at a photo of a doll I had sent to my friends, one I took today, and my brain, having just been exposed to Sora AI videos, was still in "that's fake" mode. It's been about am hour since, and I'm still recovering.
This use of modern technology isn't just bad, it's evil. You play necromancer when you use Sora to make a dead person say things they've never said or do things they have never nor probably would ever do. I've thus come to the conclusion that this is akin to witchcraft, creating something with your own will that would never happen in real life. So, I'm calling it "virtual witchcraft."
To clarify, I'm not calling you a virtual witch if you use AI responsibly, like asking ChatGPT to fix up your work scedule, but Open AI proves itself to be a money-grubbing corporation without a care for human rights or dignity, both in likeness and in their environment. Any company who wishes to catch up with OpenAI (looking at you, Must and Zuckerberg) is also participating in the same evil. I used to flippantly make generations based on descriptions of my chatracters with ChatGPT, knowing that they wouldn't look good, but now I can generate exactly what I want after feeding it some reference photos.
Earlier today, about the time I discovered the Sora 2 model, I was thinking to myself about how I might keep my raw images offline for good by focusing on traditional disribution, such as with prints at artist alley. Initially, I had the mindset of "don't take it seriously," but now, I'm more antsyu than ever to glaze every artpiece I post online. In a way, it makes me feel better about my drawing of hands...
If there was any one bit of advice I could give, it would be to keep you art off the broader world wide web and to only share it to gated art communities that ban AI, like Discord servers and Cara. Also, stop using ChatGPT. The only chatbots I use are the free versions of Claude as a creative and productivity assistantant (it has it's faults and only humans have the final say on anything; plus, it can't generate images) and Perplexity for research. ChatGPT, something I ignorantly fed much of my old (thankfully super amature) writings and ramblings when it came out, just sucks at doing anything other than organizing data. At the end of the day, LLMs are tools, not people, and should never be treated as such. Otherwise, you make the broader mainstream internet more and more of an obsolete wasteland. If you are against AI images and videos, do not engage with it except for attacking and defending from it.
Stay strong out there!