“REAL NOT RENDERED” – Anti-AI Tees for AI Ethics awareness

In a pushback against AI Art, and Artificial Intelligence in general, I have decided to spend some time in the Anti-AI camp, and have released some Anti-AI t-shirts (tees).

However, AI Ethics are complicated. We are well past the point of being able to reject AI now. Pandoras box has been officially opened. If we choose not to use it, then other’s in the AI arms race will utilise it, and then we will (most probably) be subjugated by an AI weaponised nation. It’s horrible to think in this way, but we unfortunately must.

So, with AI here to stay, how will the future develop? This is hard to say obviously, but I believe we will have a spectrum develop on AI usage, with some nations utilising it more than others. WHat it will come down to, I expect, is belief in AI over human output. What do I mean by this? Well, within our education and employment sections, how much are we going to yield to the machine? Can a computer truly be creative? Will it become truly creative? Because at the moment what we have is a machine that very clearly needs to be overseen. The real creative decisions are still coming from the human overseers. But is this enough?

We have to consider the dramatic impact on the development on the brain from AI, as well from other virtual sources (social media). It’s possible that with social media, the powers that be are happy, in a sense, to be able to manipulate the public from a central position, keep things stable. Of course, stability is very important. But humans are often very much short terminists – they are happy with their immediate short term futures. Even those that think farther ahead are happy as long as their lifetimes are covered. With AI, we are not just manipulating what people consume, in the form of the small sensationalist , dopamine releasing, reels or headlines, but we are also now affecting their ability to create content to consume. And so we are potentially left with a society spiralling into a devolution of sorts, with the content surely becoming ever more addictive whilst at the same time lacking in depth.

However…what if one country decides to retract from AI in some imperceivable way… What is this country bets on humans? What if they believe in humans , whilst accepting a potential loss in stability, by bringing humans to the forefront through an education system that doesn’t have chatgpt writing all their essays, that teaches them to create art by hand, which doesn’t alter their brain structures through small, sensationalist social media content. Won’t this country or countries eventually triumph long term?

Humans can also restrain themselves from AI usage manually, but it is so much harder when availability is so high. Also, I am not saying that minimal use of AI is not helpful. In a world where jobs are decreasing through, you guessed it, it may be that we need multiple arrows to our quivers. We may need to adapt to a world of massive acceleration, where occupations are no longer lifelong, instead becoming irrelevant fast as the next technology arrives. In this setting, having brains that are highly adaptable would be perhaps the advantage, and with speed being relevant, then having AI perform a series of small tasks combining into something larger, something that the human is overseering, could be the answer. But humans must be at the forefront, must be the leaders, must exercise their brains.

Maintaining an Anti-AI stance, then, is not necessarily about resisting Pandoras Box. Instead, it relates to a philosophical question:

Can the machine surpass the human to the point of making the human irrelevant?

We can now position Anti-AI as positing the answer “No” to this question, and the Pro-AI camp posting “Yes”. It’s not a question of whether or not to use technology that already exists, but instead about what our belief structures are around it.

So, T-Shirts then. Ha. Seems a little silly. Truth is I like photography, I like art, and I like it when human’s do both. I think the internet has caused mass saturation of these sphere’s, which I talk about here and here, to the point where no-one really cares about freestanding art. It now needs to come with some form of function. And so wearable art seems logical. In this sense, we can at least feel that our art is being used in some way, utilised in a positive sense. In the case of “REAL NOT RENDERED”, the photography is mine, although perhaps for future releases I could use photography/art from other people.

The logo was a mini project using real materials. I had experimented with graphic logos, but in the end, they just didn’t marry well with the photographic subject matter. So in the end I ended up setting up a photography shoot for the logo, adding text into the image towards the end of the process. I’m quite pleased with how, to my eye at least, it marries with the photography on show.

After the logo, the decision was what photography to use with it. For this set, I have chosen urban structures. Firstly, the sublimation process lends itself well to obvious structure, and lends itself less well to fine details, and so an urban setting suits this well. I also like that urban structures are man made, and example of what the human mind can achieve. And finally, I like how the the images contrast with the logo.

So, T-Shirts released, Anti-AI article written. For today, I am reasonably happy. But it’s the future I’m concerned about.

Want to support human-made art?
Check out the REAL NOT RENDERED collection here: KalimetricShop

Or share this post with someone who still believes in the human touch.