No, You Can't Use AI

Think about the best cheeseburger you ever had. If you don't eat cheeseburgers for personal, dietary, or religious reasons, substitute your favorite type of food for the sake of the analogy.

- ROB HART

My favorite is the French onion soup burger from Le Rivage in Manhattan. A grilled beef patty is covered with caramelized onions and Emmental cheese, then draped in a béchamel sauce and served on an English muffin. Decadent is too pedestrian a word for this culinary masterpiece. If I was on Death Row, it would be my last meal.

Now think about a McDonald's burger (or an equivalent fast-food knock-off of your favorite thing)ingredients hastily crammed into a paper wrapper and tossed at you through a drive-through window.

If you're lucky, it might be hot, but more likely, it's room temperature.

Objectively, they're both burgers. They contain, roughly, similar ingredients.

But subjectively? The gulf in quality between these two things is enormous.

The reason for that is because one was developed with care and precision by someone who respected a craft, whereas the McDonald's burger was created through an assembly-line process. The point is the savings, the sameness, the lack of imaginationand, therefore, the lack of risk.

One is trying to fulfill the bare minimum standards of what a thing needs to be, while the other is an attempt to elevate the standard-to profoundly change and alter what you think is possible.

Because a French onion soup burger sounds ridiculous, until it's not.

All this it to say: Artificial intelligence is fast food. Quick, cheap, and easy; functional, but not remarkable.

The only difference is that, every now and again, I will eat a McDonald's cheeseburger. It does its job, and for a short time after, I am no longer hungry.

But artificial intelligence doesn't even have that much going for it. It's destructive to the environment, it's completely unethical, and frankly, if you use it, then you have no right to call yourself an artist.

Yeah, I said what I said..

Let's start with the environmental impact, because that's easy to quantify.