Artificial Intelligence

ˌär-tə-ˈfi-shᵊl  in-ˈte-lə-jən(t)s

Artificial: made, produced, or done by humans especially to seem like something natural
Intelligence: the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations

Made up ability to learn is a good definition for this fabricated marketing term. What we call Artificial Intelligence (AI) is nothing more than a bunch of heuristic functions who got fed a lot of data and spew out the most probable answer to an input. It's a law of averages of our collective output. It does not know the truth, it does not know the meaning of things, it's incapable of computing data without some clever programing behind it. The oracle status, the hype, and widespread adoption of this technology is something I look at with a high degree of skepticism.

One of the biggest problems with this technology is blatant copyright infringement and the subsequent gaslighting that follows. By claiming that the AI operates as a black box, its creators argue that nobody can ever be sure whether the system is copying protected material. The New York Times has shown, however, that with the right prompt the system can output almost verbatim passages. No attribution or sourcing mechanism exists, and as they say in the IT world: It's not a bug, it's a feature!

The Miyazaki incident is one of the most notorious fiascos. Every time you ask the model to “average out” something that belongs to another creator, you are either stealing a commission that should have gone to that artist or producing something that should not exist at all. Artists are selective about the commissions they accept; when their work is copied without consent, you undermine their creative intention and dilute their work.

This erosion of creativity has spawned a phenomenon called AI slop: content created for the sake of content, on a mission to chase algorithmic success, and increase consumption. It is the ultimate expression of the dopamine‑farming era we live in — a death of intention!
When a piece of content drives engagement, it becomes food for the next fake video, and move forward ot the Slop singularity. Every platform now floods users with images that share the same soft glow and rounded edges. The “Dead Internet theory" is proving itself to be a lumpy, gooey landscape of these average-looking artifacts.

Every time I encounter a nice image and realize it's AI I get sad - This could have been a real moment! - I think. Ironically, this frenzy has pushed me toward the digital detox I’ve been craving. This year’s Pantone color could easily be described as “the hue of junk,” and next year’s choice is equally bland. Is it a sign of the times, a coincidence, or planetary retrograde? Who knows... ¯\(ツ)/¯

An AI‑generated snippet appeared when I prompted a search bar for “word of the year”. It read:

For 2025, Merriam-Webster selected "slop," defined as low-quality digital content produced by AI, while Oxford chose "rage bait," referring to content designed to provoke anger online.

Rage bait certainly fuels engagement, and you’ll find endless arguments under fabricated posts. Even though I didn’t want to use AI to research for this paragraph, the averaging bot is everywhere, spreading like a cosmic viral that evangelizes anything that it touches.

The tool can be a wonderful text companion. Like any digital innovations, it's a low cost to entry to something like hiring an editor. Something that I, for example, at a personal level wouldn't normaly do and now can have access to. In the right hands it is powerful, but, as with any new technology, it brings serious problems: corporate greed, lax oversight, and malicious intent. Adding to that, we find ourselves at the end of the first quarter of this century amid late stage capitalism, wars, polarized speech, internet warfare, and disinformation campaigns. Tools that make realistic fake content easy to produce only add fuel to this fire.

All that said, I expect AI to remain a part in our world for the foreseeable future. Right now I treat it as a sparring partner for: structural skeletons, starter ideas and hints that help me polish my writing. My hope is to rely on it less and less, and I have no intention of ever letting it generate a piece from nothing. In the end, the responsibility lies with us. We must decide when a tool serves our creative intent and when it replaces it, and guard the space where genuine human imagination and creativity can still thrive. And if you have nothing to say - it's ok - the world needs a little bit of a breathing room if you ask me!