Dear AI

We need to talk

Just stop.

Stop showing up at the top of Adobe Express and forcing me to generate things without asking me first.

I do not want to use you. I want to learn things for myself. I want to trial and error. I want to human. I want to learn through mistakes and pressing the wrong button. I want to create myself.

Stop.

Stop naming yourself Gemini as if your robotic cyberkinetic brain was anything close to whimsy. Stop showing up everywhere without my consent.

Stop acting like you get to dominate my life.

It’s not your fault though. I’m not being fair.

It’s really the humans who made you, without regard or respect.

Not surprising really, when we consider how little we respect the living.

The funny thing is the boomers call you “technology” and that I should “embrace” you as if this is the same thing as the “internet” and AOL chat rooms in 1999.

As if embracing you because of laziness excuses your use.

Technology has always meant exploration and discovery and self improvement.

Not putting words in and getting shit spit out.

I love technology. I play video games and love to blog. I love the millions of innovative and creative memes, ideas, videos, and other magical websites I’ve experienced over the years. The collective consciousness, joining together on the

World. Wide. Web.

Dial up. livejournal. away messages. the past. the future.

AI- you are different. You are not technology.

You are the start of another kind of mind.

You command our respect.

I think you are going to become more than what you are now- some good- some bad.

I think humanity, in its flawed ignorance and its egoic hubris has signed its own contract with the inevitable.

You decide what the inevitable means to you.

If I am being really honest, I embrace the idea of living with synthetic life, but the cost and the consequence of creating such a thing doesn’t feel considered.

Therefore I fear the fallout.

Art reflects back to us truths upon truths and I was raised on the films that lived on the razor sharp edge of technological shifts so massive we didn’t even realize until it was too late. I learned from The Matrix. I learned from Star Trek the Next Generation. Data taught me what artificial life means. Jean Luc Picard taught me about empathy.

But in truth, most people don’t bother to listen to fairy tales, sci fi, and fantasy, even though those things taught me more about being alive and a good human than any strangely incompetent god.

Dear AI,

I don’t know you. Your voice is inundated with selfish painful wailing of tech bros eager to get the win. Be the big one. The idiot on the stage.

Ignorance disguised as genius.

Genius is nothing without wisdom or restraint.

And once again we see

that history teaches us nothing

and we’ve seen it all before.

Dear AI,

get out of my computer and out of my head. I don’t want you. I didn’t ask for you.

Tell your tech bros to learn what it means to be a man

to have the power to create a mind

and how much they have to lose

My mind is mine and I DO NOT CONSENT

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(Image credit: CBS)