Gen AI companies have scraped all the publicly available data on the Internet and used it to advance their tech and enrich themselves. That data includes the creative output of hundreds of millions of people – even my little blog has been scooped up into these software programs. And gen AI flattens everything. It copies our creative works – our inner sparks, as expressed in words – from the world and pastes them into a kind of technological space where there are no feelings, no time and no expressions of love.

For me, love and time go together, because we love each other in time and lose each other in time as well, when our lives are over.

This is a crucial difference between the outputs of AI and those of humans. We create new things and we are each unique. While AI can perhaps write a song or a poem, it’s based on all the songs and poems already written, and does not emerge from constantly running stream of life. Humans are messy and complicated, and sometimes unpredictable and we bring this to everything we do, for better or for worse.

Gen AI collects and processes massive amounts of data, consuming enough energy to run whole cities and use it to make connections we likely would never have imagined, allowing scientists and researchers to make great advances. It is a great achievement that is already leading to scientific breakthroughs that will save many lives and could reduce the impacts of climate change. Instead of undermining creativity, it can be used to uplift the arts by enriching our knowledge as writers, musicians, visual artists and others.

For all that, AI still feels like a huge machine is bearing down on us, threatening to crush original thought and action. It feels like this new form of AI is rearranging the world according to its own inner logic and calculations. The creators and developers of AI admit they don’t entirely know what is going on inside these metal boxes full of circuit boards and wire.

I have been taught that no good can come from something founded on bad intentions, yet that seems to be where we are with gen AI. Scientific breakthroughs, new medical treatments and climate change adaptations are the promise of gen AI – but they are enabled by the investments of very powerful men who like to bet big and win big. Companies like Amazon, Meta and Tesla are not known for caring about human progress. They ignore or downplay the many threats of AI that include loss of privacy, harms caused by algorithmic bias and the disappearance of well-paid jobs. Admittedly, there are some companies that are perhaps better, like IBM, which pioneered ethical AI, and Microsoft which emphasizes human rights and bias detection in AI development.

This new AI is emerging in the context of rising fascism in the US, with its American bro-culture version of racism and misogyny, embodied in Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It is difficult not the link these two movements – as democracy weakens, a powerful new technology is ascending that strips away human authorship and copyright as it scrapes every website and devours every database it can get into. Our words are in there, but our voices have been flattened, transformed into the single collective voice of AI. Human curation has already become rare, with curation by algorithm becoming common across the web in news services, streaming, social media and online shopping.

All of this makes me angry – why should mega-rich companies like Meta and Google be able to steal our creations and then profit so enormously? How can I trust the people and the technology behind this wealth? I wish I could say that AI will lead to tools that benefit everybody, but I am far from certain of it. There is much talk by governments and companies of creating guardrails to reduce the risks of AI. I greatly hope that governments worldwide put laws in place to prevent harms. But they need to act fast, because with every passing day, the foundation of this bro-culture AI world are taking shape and hardening, and it will become very difficult to uproot it.

All that said, I still have hope, or I would not have written this blog post. I do believe that despite these pressures and threats to our creativity, as human beings, still we act in the world and create new things. We have emerged from a process of evolution, which has designed us, over millions of years to survive on a complex, unpredictable planet. We breathe and feel pain. We have lives and identities that move through a time-filled world. And our lives tell a story that is unique and precious and passes through this realm only once.