Reading the St’ahel article gave me a new sense of worry about the production and investment of Generative AI. If the alternative option to using scarce resources is digital technology that has the potential to deepen climate change, then we were doomed from the start. This reminds me of the film Shorts (2009), one of my favorites to watch as a kid. In the film, the antagonist, Mr. Carbon Black, is the CEO of a company that produces the Black Box, a multipurpose device that everyone in town uses. It isn’t until a magic wishing rock falls from the sky that the town goes ballistic. In the end of the film, Mr. Black goes “green,” creating a more sustainable alternative to the Black Box. Between the government’s interest in AI and the possibility of exploiting the public’s emotions, I can’t help but feel scared that we are heading in that dystopian direction.

I wanted to bring to attention something that really freaked me out on YouTube. An ad keeps popping up of this AI robot talking to you about building websites or whatever. I find it eerie every time because there is no music; it’s just this AI-generated robot speaking in a very low, AI-generated voice trying to convince you that AI is the future. I can’t quite find the ad itself or remember what the advertiser even was, but it seemed like something right out of a dystopian world.

After reading the article, my fears about a government that uses unsustainable AI have somewhat increased. If the overuse of AI is clearly bad for the environment, the government either does not care or is trying poorly to work around it. I find it fascinating to think about the fact that it’s general knowledge that AI consumes our clean water, and yet we humans are being exploited, controlled and monitored.

This leads me to the short film, “Frames.” It’s crazy to think that it was published in 2019, because we seem to be inching towards that kind of society portrayed in the film. The short film has zero dialogue, and every human character is scanned and monitored by AI surveillance footage. There’s no cash used in this world, which is kind of what’s starting to happen now in the real world. I’m not quite sure what the purpose was of following this one woman who was silently generous to others (a $5,000 tip is crazy work), then accidentally falls into a frozen stream. It does interest me, however, that the AI surveillance only seems to get generally stats about her as well as her relation to others. AI cannot know who a person truly is on the inside. It can, however, consume information about a person.

It’s scary the way AI consumes not only information, but our resources as well. In an AI-run world, no human wins.