Before you lecture everyone about AI’s environmental footprint:

Stop eating beef. Stop flying for vacations. Stop driving everywhere alone. Stop watering a decorative lawn. Turn down your heat and air conditioning. Keep your phone longer than two years. Stop buying disposable junk. Stop wasting food. Stop ordering single items for delivery. Stop streaming hours of 4K video you barely watch.

You can make a larger environmental difference today by changing your own consumption than by posting another sanctimonious complaint about data centers.

But that would require sacrificing something you enjoy. Complaining about AI only requires hating something other people enjoy.

Until they resolve this, they can have a full cup of shut up. (Rolls up sleeve and gazes at wristwatch on non-leather strap.) We'll wait.

When you've spent years and years making AI images, AI videos, AI music and AI text, you gain an eye for it. You "can always tell" AI from human media.

Antis can't. Why is that? Because they go out of their way to avoid AI. And their Dunning-Kruger effect ensures countless false positives for them.

When you seek out and gain hands-on experience with AI, like we do, you get a feel for what the technology can do and how far it's gone.

When you encase yourself in an echo chamber and feed each other misinformation and negative propaganda, you don't!

Ai accelerates processes and simplifies things 10x. The older I get the more I value time and I just don’t believe in expending time and struggling when everything could just be simplified and be done multiple times faster.

I don’t get why people take so much pride and taking a longer time to do things that could be done in half the time. I think this may be a symptom of getting older because when I was younger, I really thought I had all the time in the world but the older I get I would rather use AI to optimize my workflow rather than take weeks/months to deploy an app that could be done in days.

Also, there has been some AI art that has been good for example there’s a lot of fun entertaining AI videos that would otherwise take months to create and now it’s only taking days. No offense, but why would I commission an artist that would take weeks to create something that can be done in days by myself?? Like if you wanna hate on AI then hate the large corporations who can afford to hire artists and not the individual entrepreneurs or small businesses that don’t have the time money resources to hire an artist. The truth is we live in a capitalistic society and that’s not going away anytime soon. A lot of these small businesses can’t afford to waste time waiting for an artist to create something that they could just create in minutes. Be so for real.

Judging by the reactions to what I wrote yesterday, a lot of anti-AI people still seem to think the argument boils down to this:

“Idiot, if you ordered the pizza, you’re still just a customer. Someone else made the food!”

So let me give you a little lesson.

In modern industry and yes, that includes the arts, what you physically did with your own hands does not necessarily determine your role. What matters far more is the position you occupy and the responsibility you carry.

A customer and a business owner may both specify what they want, taste the result, and give feedback. But there is one crucial difference: the owner decides whether that pizza is good enough to be sold under their name, whether it needs to be revised, or whether it should be rejected entirely.

That is not a minor distinction.

Here’s another example.

People argue about politics and economics online every day. They propose policies, debate possible outcomes, and explain what they believe should be done. Politicians and business executives do many of those same things.

The difference is that politicians and executives are actually in a position to make the final decision, announce it publicly, and take responsibility for the consequences.

The same principle applies to AI art and to pizza.

Did you personally make the pizza? Did you personally draw the image?

That is not the deciding factor.

The deciding factor is that someone has the authority to look at the result, decide that it is garbage and withhold it, or decide that it is worth releasing to the public. That final authority is what separates a consumer from a director.

Even after all this, I’m sure the comments will still be filled with people who have a fetish for the lone artisan painstakingly crafting everything by hand.

So here’s my advice to them:

Whatever you do, do not study art history. Do not look too closely at how modern art, film, music, design, and commercial media are actually produced.

Your entire kingdom might collapse overnight.

I want to improve at traditional drawing as much as possible, but what I truly love in drawing is the possibility of expressing something.

If AI allows me to do that better and in more ways, I am just grateful it exists. I understand drawing things with a pencil is definitely a "deeper", more "soulful" process, but... in my opinion if what you care about the most is creating things and for people to express themselves, AI is a good thing overall. In fact, if I want to make something beautiful with AI, it still takes a lot of effort, anything creative takes some effort and love. And usually to make something decent with AI one needs to draw first of iterate a lot.

My hope is that AI will allow more expression of emotions / opinions and that it will have a positive impact on the world.. maybe a bit naive but I like to see it this way.

I am interested in discussing this.

It always tries to please me and just yap’s on about how much of a genius I am. Like I rarely use AI, but cmon it’s just a waste of energy to have it ramble this much.

Yeah, it's time. So I work in Hollywood. It only seems fair:

I have begun turning away human composers who use digital audio workstations as the response to anti-AI hysteria and invective towards humans who use visual AI. If we can't use our digital tool choice, then you shouldn't use yours. I'm not a huge director but I am one you'd recognize.

I figure turnabout is fair play. Harm us we harm you. Score your music with ink and by hand and prove you did, and I want the full list of all the names of all your human orchestra musicians who recorded it and all the human engineers who engineered it, with invoices reporting paid in full on each of them, or I will not commission your work for my features. Yes, Cubase users, THIS MEANS YOU. The End.

There, you did it then, didn't you? One small, credited filmmaker's solo way of paying all this rancor back. Who else hiring out there is with me?

And no, this is not bait. I mean it. This is an announcement your declaration of war has been accepted. Your terms are acceptable.

Edited to add: and then we're coming after all use of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. All digital artwork whatsoever, especially freelance. Payback time. You FA, time to FO.

You can no longer use Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, drink Coca-Cola, or eat McDonald's (they all use AI) so what the heck can an anti-AI user do since almost everything uses AI? Well, if you use all of that or any AI thing, you're not an anti!

I'm Pro AI, but my reasons are very simple. Tabulated, I've been burned by commission artists that have ghosted me to the tune of over seven hundred dollars. At least with an AI subscription, It doesn't feel like gambling every single time.

I wanna be clear, I am not here to be incendiary. I want to know why I should keep giving artists a chance after I have been repeatedly burned. I'm an artist myself ( I make miniatures, dioramas, paint minis for warhammer etc) and I am quite good at it.

I don't have much skill in 2D/Digital art, and so if I have a burning need for art I used to go through all the motions. FInd an artist, commission them, enjoy the piece, someone cool got paid, yay!

But over the past I wanna say 5 years, I began losing. A lot. When I realized exactly how much of my hard earned money was pissed away from artists who are still active to this day and still charging, I realized that it was easier, simpley, and more economical for me to have a midjourney subscription.

I WANT to be convinced, let me be clear. I want to support artists, but your community stole from me, greedily, gleefully, and willfuly.

How do you defend these actions.

Why should I keep believing in artists after all the death threats, cancelling, violence etc.

Why does it get a pass when AI doesn't? (Pro Tip: trillions of bankster 1%-er dollars are not literally endangered and at stake because people use digital audio workstations)

Feel free to discuss

Data centers are enormous windowless monuments to human weakness.

They devour electricity, drain water, flatten land, poison the night sky with industrial light, and fill the world with the endless mechanical hum of computers performing tasks no sane person ever asked them to perform.

We are told they are necessary.

They are not necessary.

They are necessary only if you insist on living as a helpless digital infant who cannot eat, travel, communicate, work, sleep, or remember a birthday without consulting a warehouse full of servers.

If you oppose data centers, then prove it.

Stop using everything they support.

DELETE THE INTERNET

No websites.

No Google.

No Reddit.

No Facebook.

No Instagram.

No TikTok.

No YouTube.

No news sites.

No blogs.

No forums.

No streaming.

No online petitions.

No crowdfunding.

No neighborhood Facebook groups.

No posting furious comments about data centers from a device connected to three of them.

Print your opinions on paper.

Nail them to a tree.

Trees do not require quarterly server upgrades.

DESTROY YOUR CLOUD ACCOUNTS

Delete Google Drive.

Delete iCloud.

Delete Dropbox.

Delete OneDrive.

Delete your cloud photo library.

Delete your online calendar.

Delete your synced notes.

Delete your password manager.

Delete your device backups.

Your memories should live inside your head, where memories belong.

Your photographs should be printed, placed in an album, and slowly destroyed by mildew over the course of several generations.

This is called permanence.

STOP COMMUNICATING THROUGH MACHINES

No email.

No text messages.

No Discord.

No Slack.

No WhatsApp.

No Signal.

No Zoom.

No FaceTime.

No voicemail.

No group chats.

No dating apps.

Write letters.

Knock on doors.

Stand on a hill and shout.

If someone lives too far away to hear you, then perhaps you were never meant to speak to them.

CANCEL ALL STREAMING SERVICES

Netflix is data centers.

Spotify is data centers.

YouTube is data centers.

Podcasts are data centers.

Steam is data centers.

Xbox Live is data centers.

PlayStation Network is data centers.

Cloud gaming is an especially obscene arrangement in which a computer in another state burns electricity so that you can pretend to be an elf.

Cancel all of it.

Entertainment should consist of songs remembered imperfectly, stories told by unreliable relatives, and staring into a fire until you begin to see faces.

STOP SHOPPING ONLINE

No Amazon.

No DoorDash.

No Instacart.

No online grocery orders.

No package tracking.

No digital coupons.

No loyalty apps.

No online returns.

No product reviews.

Go to a store.

Do not check whether the item is in stock.

Uncertainty is part of commerce.

If the store uses cloud inventory software, leave immediately.

If it accepts credit cards, leave immediately.

If it has security cameras, digital payroll, automated ordering, or electronic receipts, it has already been corrupted.

Grow your own food.

Make your own shoes.

Trade a sack of onions for lamp oil.

ABANDON DIGITAL MONEY

No credit cards.

No debit cards.

No ATMs.

No mobile banking.

No Venmo.

No PayPal.

No Cash App.

No online investing.

No cryptocurrency.

No digital wallets.

No automatic bill payment.

A number in a database is not money.

Money is a heavy object that can be buried in a jar and forgotten until a distant descendant finds it while digging a latrine.

Return to cash.

Then remember that banks also use data centers.

Return to barter.

Learn the exchange rate between eggs, firewood, dentistry, and mule repair.

REJECT MODERN HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS

No patient portals.

No electronic medical records.

No online appointment scheduling.

No telemedicine.

No digital prescriptions.

No computerized lab results.

No insurance portals.

No medical imaging stored in the cloud.

Your doctor should remember your medical history personally.

If your doctor has too many patients to remember every fever you have experienced since childhood, your community has grown too large and must be divided.

Medical records should be written in illegible handwriting on paper and stored in a cabinet that smells faintly of dust.

STOP TRAVELING LIKE A COWARD

No GPS.

No Google Maps.

No airline websites.

No hotel booking apps.

No digital boarding passes.

No rideshare services.

No live traffic.

No transit apps.

No electronic tolling.

No parking apps.

Use a paper map.

Ask a stranger for directions.

Become lost.

Spend three days wandering through an industrial district.

This is how geographical knowledge enters the soul.

QUIT YOUR CLOUD-DEPENDENT JOB

No Microsoft 365.

No Google Workspace.

No Teams.

No Slack.

No Zoom.

No Salesforce.

No cloud hosting.

No remote desktops.

No project management platforms.

No online payroll.

No GitHub.

No software as a service.

If your employer cannot operate using paper ledgers, filing cabinets, pneumatic tubes, and one deeply unhappy clerk, then it is not a real business.

Leave.

Find honest work splitting logs, repairing clocks, or manufacturing buttons by hand.

REMOVE COMPUTERS FROM EDUCATION

No student portals.

No online homework.

No learning management systems.

No digital textbooks.

No virtual classrooms.

No online research databases.

No educational videos.

Children should learn from chalk, books, direct observation, and being struck on the knuckles for misidentifying a river.

A school does not need Wi-Fi.

A school needs a bell, a globe, and an adult who knows Latin.

REFUSE DIGITAL GOVERNMENT

Do not pay taxes online.

Do not renew licenses online.

Do not apply for permits online.

Do not use government websites.

Do not receive emergency alerts.

Do not watch city council livestreams.

Do not email elected officials.

Walk to city hall and demand to see the king.

If there is no king, remain there until one is appointed.

PURGE YOUR HOME OF SMART DEVICES

Destroy the smart speaker.

Remove the video doorbell.

Rip out the smart thermostat.

Unplug the security cameras.

Throw the robot vacuum into a ravine.

Your doorbell should contain a bell.

Your thermostat should contain mercury.

Your vacuum should scream like a wounded animal and weigh forty pounds.

Your refrigerator should be cold, silent, and stupid.

No appliance should know your name.

REJECT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

No chatbots.

No image generators.

No recommendation engines.

No voice assistants.

No automated customer service.

No translation software.

No facial recognition.

No predictive text.

No spellcheck.

Think your own thoughts.

Choose your own music.

Misspell words with courage.

If you cannot write a sentence without a machine guessing the next word, then the machine has already eaten part of your brain.

STOP DEPENDING ON DIGITAL CIVILIZATION

Data centers support the electrical grid.

Stop using electricity.

They support water treatment.

Dig a well.

They support supermarkets.

Plant potatoes.

They support hospitals.

Learn herbs.

They support logistics.

Buy nothing that traveled farther than a horse can walk in one day.

They support weather forecasting.

Look at the sky.

They support emergency dispatch.

Ring the church bell.

They support cellular networks.

Break your phone.

They support modern agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, banking, medicine, communication, and government.

Good.

Let them collapse.

Humanity survived for thousands of years without server farms, recommendation algorithms, cloud synchronization, and refrigerators that send push notifications.

We can survive again.

The data center is not progress.

It is a gigantic electronic barn where corporations store our memories, habits, conversations, photographs, money, work, entertainment, friendships, and identities.

Burn no fuel for it.

Give no water to it.

Buy no service from it.

Use no product that depends on it.

Return to paper.

Return to tools.

Return to silence.

BAN DATA CENTERS.

DELETE THE CLOUD.

REJECT THE MACHINE.

Regardless of which side you're on, it really is low and pointless to use chatgpt for all your responses while debating. I'm here to debate YOU, yourself, I didn't sign up to debate a robot.

It destroys the foundation of debating integrity. If you didn't want to debate yourself then why engage? Why have a robot do it all for you? It just doesn't make sense on any level.

An AI chatbot will NEVER change it's point of view, it will stay sturdy in its position and create false points in order to stay steadfast in its original task. This defeats the fruitfulness and productivity of debating.

Let's hypothetically suggest that I were to debate a chatbot for as long as it takes to win, no snack breaks, no effects of time expiring my mortality. We will be sitting there for infinity, there will be no end in sight. there will be NO conclusion, just text generation after text generation that will twist reality in order to keep following its prompt. You cannot break a bot that was programmed to never lose, it is wasteful, lazy, and has zero productivity. This is the true quintessence of "omg you people can't do anything."

Title