Hari Kumar wants to make one thing very clear: He thinks AI is a bubble about to burst, a false idol, and outright fraudulent in its very name.
“I think the biggest misconception, the biggest myth around AI is just in the ‘I’ in AI: Intelligence," Kumar told WAMC. "These things are not really artificially intelligent. They are simulations of artificial intelligence.”
A former engineer who worked in language modeling and automatic speech recognition systems, Kumar lives in Williamstown and runs a communication training company called Convivo.
Kumar said he thinks reliance on generative AI – especially for basic communication between people – plays a dangerous game with the foundational tools that hold society together.
“When we see words, we imagine that there's a function behind those words, there's intention behind those words, there's a conscious mind behind those words," he explained. "And what these things are, they are really good at mimicking form- They actually cannot perform the function. And so, we are so fooled by the form of intelligence, these plausibly intelligent outputs, but these things actually can't perform the function to produce intelligent outputs. They're really good at convincing us that these outputs are intelligent, but they're not.”
These concerns, combined with more tangible threats – including the environmental cost of running data centers and the massive amount of private equity pouring in to develop the technology – are part of the motivation behind the ‘Artists Against Generative AI’ event in North Adams tonight.
Kumar, the gathering’s facilitator, says generative AI is also a pox on art itself, replacing human intent with a random word generator.
“A person prompting an AI system is not the same as a person using Photoshop to use algorithmic art," he said. "The prompt is not an expression of art. The prompt is really just a guidance to a stochastic random token generator machine, and what comes out of that is really just an algorithmic output. It's not actually the artist's output. It's not the artist's expression that's coming out of that.”
Jessica Sweeney is the founder of Common Folk Artist Collective, which is hosting ‘Artists Against Generative AI’ in its headquarters at 165 E. Main Street. She says the group’s members are facing the consequences of generative AI in the Berkshires.
“We're already seeing so many people using AI to generate posters, and I know a lot of people in the marketing world who used to make posters and are now choosing to have to pivot their career because AI is incredibly hard to compete with," she told WAMC. "So generally speaking, there was a lot of support in having programming that is talking about this because there's direct impact on the very people that we serve.”
In addition to her fears about the lack of understanding around the long-term impacts AI could have on young people, Sweeney said she thinks the situation for Berkshire artists could only get worse as the tech continues to proliferate.
“In North Adams, where MASS MoCA is in our backyard, we are in a community that is home to many, many, many, many, many artists, artists who are trying to make a living here, and I hope that we are being cognizant to understand that, like, these tools impact their ability to work and be artists,” she said.
Kumar fears that especially in rural Western Mass communities – communities where technology serves as the only reliable path to connection with the wider world – isolated people are turning to AI and the hollow art it generates as being better than nothing for companionship.
“There are so many folks in Berkshire County, especially the elderly, but also people who are vulnerable and precarious populations who are building a dependency on these products, and we may not know just how severe that dependency is until it's too late,” he said.
Despite it all, Kumar wants to stress that the gathering is at its core about joy, connection, and finding a way forward as a community.
“The first and foremost thing is that it's going to be a celebration of local art, celebration of human art, and human talent, and a celebration of the ways that it's when the most complex kinds of dangers that we have faced as civilization, we look to artists to express what do we do about this," Kumar told WAMC. "There's a reason why fascism, for example, goes after art and artists first. It's to squelch any form of creative expression of dissent. And so that's one of the first things we're going to do, is celebrate artistic forms of dissent and expression against AI.”
