“The Birds Don’t Sing, They Screech In Pain”
Dear reader,
I invite you to read a collection of my thoughts and meditations, all relating to my own use of GenAI. The tone of this article is definitely different from my previous one, and I apologise in advance for that. With all that being said, I still hope that some of you may relate to what is written here today.
Foundations of Fear
I would be lying if I said that the past few years were not a complete nightmare for me. My lifelong aspirations of being a creative had never felt so threatened.
First it was the rise of image generators like Midjourney, which generate images while being trained on millions of artists’ stolen works (Goetze, 2024). It was an injustice which I had witnessed firsthand. I was scared, and it felt like something that I wanted to do for years was suddenly taken away from me.
But hey, maybe it would only be visual arts right? They would surely never come for music and video…
It was a truly naïve moment for me, as later other programs would arise that would be able to generate both music and video. Now did I particularly like or find merit in what was generated? No absolutely not, most of the music made on programs like Suno sounded abhorrent. Videos made by Stable Diffusion lacked any of the vision which someone like Denis Villeneuve could have. But that was my opinion, the general public seemed to think otherwise.
In any case, I was not too happy with the emergence of GenAI.
A Puppet on A String
Because of the views that I had previously held, it would come to no-one’s surprise that when I actually seriously had to use GenAI I was practically forced to.
I remember that day very clearly. It was during my second year at Erasmus in my BA bachelor. We had a course on Entrepreneurship, and had to use these resources to help us make a business. It seemed innocent enough, right? But I couldn’t help but feel horrible with every prompt I was typing.
I will be the first to say that when it comes to group work, I have no intention of pulling my group down because of my disdain towards GenAI. I understand that many students use it, and I will not push back. These are just the values that I hold.
And so, I fell into the trap that many students do: I kept on using ChatGPT, DeepSeek etc. I used it to summarise my articles, but never really to brainstorm on my own. Sometimes, I used it to see what grade I would get for an assignment, though the accuracy varied. In the Digital Business course that we followed in year 3, we had to write an entire Essay with AI.
I’ll be the first to say that I did not enjoy the process and I find that AI cannot write in the same way that I do. Even when I had fed the AI with essays and other writings of mine in the past it just really couldn’t compare. I do not know if I was just lucky or uncritical, but I do know that my grade for the essay that I wrote myself was higher than the AI-written one.
Still, I often ask myself if we are entering an era where critical cognitive skills are being eroded due to the overreliance on AI (Zhai et al., 2024). How are we going to move forward when we are unable to detect misinformation and just accept everything that a machine gives us?
Moreover, how am I supposed to not feel guilt for using such a technology? It is not only actively consuming major amounts of energy, but also causing me and my peers to have a harder time in the future job market due to entry-level positions declining (Jockims, 2025).
A Deal with The Devil
For a time, I became quite apathetic to it all as a bachelor’s in business tends to do that to you. So I decided to use GenAI for personal reasons too.
My first experience with this was when I used an AI beauty app to get rid of some acne on my forehead. My partner wanted to post a picture of me in a cat café on their story, but there was some visible acne on my forehead. I then had the “brilliant” idea to use an app to get rid of the Acne, and hey it worked. We were both happy, I got to look good, and they got to post.
I then tried to incorporate GenAI into my writing as my apathy had reached the point of “If you can’t beat them, join them”.
I wrote down lines, and tried to continue sharing ideas with ChatGPT. But still something was missing.
It wasn’t really the story that I wanted to tell. The story I wanted to tell was a lot softer, and more human. It was laced with quiet moments and thoughtful conversations about characters living in a Cyberpunk world. (Ironic I know)
What ChatGPT gave me was…closer to a Marvel movie or a rip-off of Blade Runner. It was instant gratification, and a story with no substance. Why would it be one? It was a story that no human had bothered to write before. Just an amalgamation of the average.
Don’t Let AI Steal Your Daydream
I obviously do not know all of you, but I do urge you to think more critically about your GenAI use and the impact you have by using it.
I know for myself that by using it, I am actively contributing to injustice. Every prompt and sentence will make the models better and with the massive network effects that platforms like ChatGPT have experienced, this trend will continue.
To be able to forgive myself, I first had to admit that what I did wasn’t aligned with my values.
Not all is lost though, as the section’s title suggests we should still be hopeful. When it comes to art, humans still tend to prefer human made art, when they know that something is made by AI according to Millet et al. (2023). They later also say that preserving art is important as it is one of the last beacons of human uniqueness.
I feel like this sentiment extends beyond just art though. All of your ideas are worth something and is part of what makes you human. I have also noticed that in the age of hyper-polished, well, ,everything (movies, music & artwork). I’ve become more drawn to the rawness and imperfection which can be found in a lot of older works. I remember not being able to listen to In Utero by Nirvana for a long time, but now I find myself appreciating the album’s rough edges.
I do not intend to say that I have a moral high ground. In fact, I am also extremely flawed. All of the times that I used GenAI on my own accord was to cope with some form of insecurity that I had. My appearance. my writing ability and even my grades. It was an instant fix for a problem, but it did not fix the underlying issues.
As a subtle form of rebellion, I decided to teach myself guitar. Yes, the process is hard but also gratifying. If I ever want to get on stage, I’ll have to work for it. There’s no instant fix. But that’s the thing, you can’t instantly become Kurt Cobain. It takes hours, days, years of hard work. And you know what? I find that to be beautiful.
I hope that we can take back some form of power. That we can live in a world where we are allowed to have and chase our daydreams. A world where our ideas do not serve as a means for profit to some megacorporation. I hope that I made you think about how our actions are impacting the people around us. I ask you not to be a revolutionary, but I do ask you to contribute to a world that is fairer towards all.
To you, dear reader, I ask the following questions: Do you think that I am overreacting or do you harbour similar feelings? Did your fears around GenAI cause you to change major life plans you had? (I know that it caused me to choose this master!) And finally, are you willing to sacrifice the instant gratification of AI in order to preserve our sense of being human?
References:
Goetze, T. S. (2024). AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation: Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks. 2022 ACM Conference On Fairness, Accountability, And Transparency, 89, 186–196. https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3658898
Jockims, T. L. (2025, 7 september). AI is not just ending entry-level jobs. It’s the end of the career ladder as we know it. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/07/ai-entry-level-jobs-hiring-careers.html
Millet, K., Buehler, F., Du, G., & Kokkoris, M. D. (2023). Defending humankind: Anthropocentric bias in the appreciation of AI art. Computers in Human Behavior, 143, 107707. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107707
Zhai, C., Wibowo, S., & Li, L. D. (2024). The effects of over-reliance on AI dialogue systems on students’ cognitive abilities: a systematic review. Smart Learning Environments, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-024-00316-7
Though I didn’t use it, I find these ones important too, they deal with the environmental aspects:
De Vries, A. (2023). The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence. Joule, 7(10), 2191–2194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.09.004
Shukla, N. (2025, 19 augustus). Generative AI Is Exhausting the Power Grid. Earth.Org. https://earth.org/generative-ai-is-exhausting-the-power-grid/
