r/antiai

Today, I'm launching my Kickstarter campaign for my upcoming book, Recovering After Gen AI:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kimcrawley/recovering-after-gen-ai

My previous book, Technofascism Survival Guide, had a very successful Kickstarter campaign, I raised $ 12,928 Canadian out of my $2,700 Canadian goal. I finished writing that book recently, and all my backers got their eBooks and other campaign rewards fulfilled, as of July 1st.

Unfortunately, due to the immense damage Gen AI has done to my career, at the moment my Kickstarter funded books are pretty much my only source of income. I know a lot of people are hypocrites, so I must reiterate that I take pride in doing 100% of my own writing, and I do research the way research has always been done prior to 2020. It would disgust me to use Gen AI in any way whatsoever. The cover art for Recovering After Gen AI was also 100% human made, by my friend Cory Gerard.

My thesis is that Gen AI will end, soon. Soon, as in, probably not beyond 2027. It cannot keep going, because:

- The financial bubble will pop.

- The Gen AI datacentre boom is unsustainable according to the laws of physics. I cite Harvard Science Review, MIT, and a United Nations report in my Kickstarter campaign page to back that up.

- Model collapse, a computer science phenomenon where Gen AI or machine learning data gets corrupted when feeding upon other Gen AI vomited data, is another reason why Gen AI is unsustainable in the long term. And my campaign has scientific citations for that, too.

So my book is about dealing with the aftermath of Gen AI. Because even though it can't keep going for much longer, it's causing so much harm to people's psyches, livelihoods, and the planet. And there will be a ton of damage that we'll need to recover from.

Please share my Kickstarter around. Also, if you have insight that could be useful for my book, I'd love to interview you for it.

If its very functioning relies on the information it’s fed, can it be defined as intelligent? If any response from an ai requires it to first scan every available source, is that original thought or just a retrieval engine that can rephrase existing information?

If you isolated an LLM and trained it solely on disturbing dark web content, it wouldn’t be a pleasure to talk to, and wouldn’t have any nice ideas. You can argue we humans are the exact same, and our intelligence and personality is only based on what we have been taught. Our brains being fed data.

But here’s a thought experiment that would challenge that: if you dropped a human with zero context onto an island, they would have instinct on what to do. You wouldn’t have to provide them with the definition of what “shelter” is, for them to go and find it.

But if you dropped an ai robot on an island, with only the information on how to move, and no other training data? What would happen? At best it would walk in circles like a brain dead human.

“But our instinct is still based on evolutionary data”
Okay, sure. But we possess the ability to evolve. An AI can’t even begin that process.

Human biology managed to go from a few cells to 8 billion humans and a society on its own. An ai requires a data centre, which requires an electrical impulse. An electrical impulse cannot evolve into a data centre without the helping hand of a human.

If ai must be trained on data then I don’t see how without that initial step it can become “super intelligence”. The very fact AI lacks the ability to hold a steadfast and independent opinion is indicative of the fact that it cannot ever become “super intelligent”.

It’s a bubble that will burst.

You cannot sell AI if you don’t invent the myth of its uncapped potential.

I answered a random phone call today and ended up talking for a few minutes before I realized the person on the other end wasn't actually a person—it was an AI. The voice sounded completely natural, and the conversation felt normal enough that I never questioned it at first. It wasn't until a few minutes in that something felt a little off, and then it finally clicked.

That honestly freaked me out more than I expected. I knew AI voices were getting good, but I didn't think they were this convincing already. It makes me wonder how many people could be tricked, especially if someone uses it for scams or impersonation. AI is advancing way faster than I thought, and it's honestly a little scary.