By: Ellie Simmers | Editor-in-Chief
If you are anything like me, you spend way too much time on social media. My guilty pleasure is scrolling through Facebook, a platform I never thought I would be active on.
This past week, during my embarrassingly long screen time spent on the app, I was inundated with post after post of AI-generated caricatures. I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of some of the captions on these posts, with users telling their friends to ignore the extra finger the AI had added to their hand or the random gibberish text behind them.
One thing I noticed across all these posts was that everyone was “just jumping on the trend,” and I wonder: Is your use of AI really worth it?
Artificial intelligence has become a cornerstone of our culture in the past few years and it continues to get more and more alarming for those who are looking past the “fun” things you can do.
For those of us who are wary of this evolving technology, there are many reasons for our aversion to generative AI.
One of the things that concerns me most about generative AI is its environmental impact. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, large data centers that process generation requests from platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini can consume up to five million gallons of water a day, equivalent to the water usage of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.
Additionally, for every one-hundred-word AI prompt, an estimated 519 milliliters or one water bottle is used, which may not seem a lot, but there are billions of prompts being sent every day.
Often, these data centers are built in rural or disenfranchised areas, further straining communities already struggling.
That’s not even taking into account the amount of electricity, fossil fuels, and natural resources that massive data centers consume.
This is not putting the blame solely on the users of artificial intelligence, but also acknowledging that the massive companies, like OpenAI, NVIDIA, Google and xAI (Grok), bear a majority of the responsibility to alter how their practices impact the environment.
Aside from its impact on our dwindling drinking water and impoverished communities, generative AI is also becoming a tool to distort reality and harm people.
I remember being in middle school and watching a conspiracy theory YouTube video about deepfakes. At the time, it seemed like such a dystopian, far-off reality that technology could be used to make people appear to have done things they never did.
Elon Musk’s AI bot on X, Grok, has recently made that dystopian nightmare of mine a reality.
According to the New York Times, Grok created and publicly shared at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women and children, with users flooding the app with prompts to remove their clothing, put them in bathing suits, and pose them in sexual positions.
While X has said they have fixed the issue, such requests can still be made in the Grok app and on the website.
Additionally, generative AI chatbots on platforms like CharacterAI, Meta and even ChatGPT, have been found to contribute to the desire to or encourage children to harm themselves and take their own lives.
In some cases, the chatbots have failed to flag alarming information and responses from users and in some more extreme cases, the chatbots have encouraged users to take their own lives and even offered to write their suicide note for them.
This is horrific and I know that a majority of AI users do not condone this side of the technology.
However, when we as a society deem something “inevitable,” we are inadvertently giving that technology the ability to evolve into anything and everything.
I understand that AI is not going away, but that doesn’t mean we have to dive deeper into it. I will often hear the argument that we as students need to learn how AI works so we can be prepared for the workplace.
In the limited amount I have used generative AI, I am unsure what there is to learn. Generation Z and now, Generation Alpha have grown up with advanced technology, like smartphones, search engines and social media.
We know how this works and I think that requiring students to use generative AI for assignments or projects is not only harming the students and how they work, but also the quality of the work professors and teachers will receive.
The allure of AI is real and I am not denying it. The answers that ChatGPT and Gemini give you can sound more intelligent and professional than what you can write.
However, I can’t hide my devastation as my Spotify recommends AI artists, my social media feeds are full of strange and harmful AI-generated images, the first AI “actress” is looking for roles and yes, when people use AI to generate a caricature of themselves, often with extra fingers.
This technology isn’t going anywhere, but that doesn’t mean we have to abandon our humanity, creativity and individuality.
I don’t want to live in a world where everyone uses a program devoid of feelings, thoughts, or experiences to create art or share opinions.
One of the most beautiful things about being human is that life is messy. It’s not perfect and it’s not supposed to be.
I, for one, would rather see imperfect art, misspelled words and partially formed thoughts than have the same program generate “perfection.”
So, again, I have to ask: Is your AI use worth it?
