Alfonso “AI” Intellegence
Tags: #ai #computers #morals #art
Written 2026-08-16
We are so often pressured into a morality by those we are close to. A morality based on their complicated views and past rather, than on the real world.
This is a cold way to make such a statement and implies it to be an issue, which is not the case. These baseless moralities I have personally been infected by cause me to interact with all humans with kindness and respect, no matter their situation or temperament. While that is countably significant use of personal effort and energy without evidence to suggest any return, it has been pressed into me that it is moral.
If forced to abstain from that countably significant personal effort usage, I would experience pain and disappointment.
It is not that I have made this choice myself, in fact I would likely have gone the other way. Were one to run the numbers, it would benefit to ignore such people. Going further, being rude would likely increase ROI and timelines of interactions.
But to do so would be spitting on the legacy of those before me, and tearing down the respect of those near me.
Does this mean I am being forced into a mode of operation? Yes. Is that wrong? No. In fact, were it more common, the world might become noticeably better.
So why do I feel bad when I use AI?
Childhood and Early Years
Tim: Yeah, okay, what do you want?
Rodney: I'd like to see Mr. Bigweld. I'm an inventor.
- Robots (2005)
From the day I knew what computers were, I have been hooked.
There is untold magic in knowing not only that a rock may think, but how it does so, and even how to make it better.
But as a kid, that magic is more pure. It is without knowledge. It is without bias or politics. I did not care where the chips were made, what government funded the program, or who’s bread this promoted. I cared that I was at Disneyland, and I just saw a robot walk. 1
Being a child at the time, I cannot speak much to the societal viewpoint and wide reaching impact of this era. But I can say computers were cool. Real cool. So cool in fact, that a computer held the top place on every birthday and Christmas list until senior year of high school.
Throughout this time, there was a growing movement. It was not underground by any means, but talking to a layperson would have returned a blank face or change of topic. For this was the era of The Cloud.
The Cloud was not like anything before. It was a magical service where each and every person could connect and have everything they wanted where they wanted, when they wanted. This was the boom that would upset giants like Microsoft Office. Why would I pay for a half measure when I can get both the software and the storage for free on The Cloud. All it takes is a quick signup, a few drops of personal info, and you are golden.
“The Cloud is just someone else’s computer”
Yeah, of course it is. At least, I could rationalize that this was the case. After all, the data has to be somewhere. But these are not computers as we know them. No. Computers us mortals might use cost all our summer job money and hardly run Portal 2. The demi-gods at Google would swap out whole racks when a single drive went down.
It was the perfect future. They had been given the knowledge, the means, and the insight to make this, and in return gave it out for free*.
With this came the infrastructure. I lived about 20 minutes from a data center, a very tempting fact for a kid like me. Once I had a license, I made the journey out.
I do not know what I had hoped, but was met with a gate and barbed wire fence guarding a near empty parking lot. Beyond that was a rectangle disguised as a building. Only notable by the robust HVAC system on the roof.
Somehow this did not dissuade me. The greatest books always have the mundane covers. I just had to know what was inside.
A mix of books and the internet would supplement where budget lacked, but those dreams stayed alive.
As with all reasonably bright middle schoolers, this clearly lead to heated debates over recess.
“They have microphones listening in!”
“No! They just have well trained predictive models from their massive user base!”
“Yeah, right, like a computer could do that”
“Of course they can, it is just machine learning”
“So they just have skynet?”
“No, that’s not possible yet. It’ll be decades before we can even pass the Turing test”
Notable Works
Captain tell the people to move back farther
I’m at the finish line and there ain’t no drill
It’s so far behind that it don’t got the brains to quit it
When she blows up she’ll scatter cross the hills Lord, Lord
When she blows up she’ll scatter cross the hills
- John Henry by Johnny Cash
It feels like such a foreign idea writing it now. Turing test.
At the time it was the great barrier to entry. An unthinkable feat. To make a computer so able, so intricate, that a human could not distinguish it from a peer.
For years it was heralded as the divide between fancy learning algorithms, and something bigger. Something that had only been seen in movies and books. Artificial Intelligence.
But those geniuses would not stop trying.
First they beat Kasparov. 2 No small feat, so impressive that even in my day “Deep Blue” was still a well known name (among the nerds). But it was just processing power, it is not at all human.
Then came “Cleverbot”.3 It was such a step up from anything I had seen before. So good, in fact, that more than one of my peers was convinced it was just an elaborate prank with a human responding. But it was just pattern matching, it is not very human.
Soon after came the icon of “IBM Watson”. 4 Such a masterpiece of engineering people thought it might beat the great Ken Jennings. Wait, it did beat Ken Jennings!? But that was just extensive records and fast response times, it is not quite human.
Quickly thereafter came the biggest news yet. The Turing test had been beat. “Eugene Goostman” had managed to get people to deem it human by acting like a kid from Ukraine with limited English ability. 5 But that was just playing to the crowd, it is not really human.
Along came the likes of Google again with “AlphaGo”.6 They had managed to take one of the hardest games known, and get a computer to teach itself to play. No pre-structured knowledge of what humanity had done, not copying off our homework, no smoke nor mirrors. This was a bit of software that could do our thing better than us. But that is just a game, it is not human.
Career Beginning
Much later, when I realized this, I went back over our conversations in my memory, to see if I could translate them into some other meaning. But it was too late. They are what they are. They meant what they meant, and I know I misremember some of them anyway - and that pains me.
- Borne by Jeff Vandermeer
And that was it. Overnight the fight was lost. As to which night it was, should be left to historians, but it seemed to be the onset of the 2020s.
There was no more talk of the turning test. Machine learning had gone the way of the floppy. This was AI.
ChatGPT was the first big one to make headlines. I tried GPT 3.5 with shockingly good results. It was no longer a goofy trick, it was a tool.
I managed to spend my free credits fine tuning a bot that could handle texts like I would. Showing it off to friends brought some oohs and ahhs. It could not capture the full reality of me, but we got a laugh at it constantly asking to FaceTime (an activity I generally avoid). Overall it was a fun project to try out the toy and explore the limits.
More than that though, it was actually useful. I found I could use it to point out the bugs in code at 4am when I could not be bothered. I still had to fix the bugs, but it got me asleep by 5 instead of 5:30.
Not only that, but there was image generation. As someone with the drawing skills of a third grader, this opened up so many options. I could make additions to my photography. Things that would have taken hours to source were now a command away.
And don’t even get me started on the photo editing tools. Object detection, color matching, denoising. For a quick mock up it let me edit dozens of photos in a sitting to see which might be worth the full process.
But I still had to go in and do it myself.
I have been doing this work since I can remember. No program on someone else’s computer can match my skill, let alone express my vision. The things it fixed were only 80%, and the things it made were just hints of a final product.
Like any great advancement, this helped massively and saved hours, days, maybe even weeks of effort.
But why do I feel bad about it?
Kitten Stomping Incident
“Should it be what they claim of it,” said Harmony 9-2642, “then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles. The Candle is a great boon to mankind, as approved by all men. Therefore it cannot be destroyed by the whim of one.”
- Anthem by Ayn Rand
I often recall a discussion over lunch in high school. A friend had posed the idea that the railing along the stairwell was art.
"It meets all the criteria," he said, "mounted on the wall, created with aesthetics in mind, and covered in paint."
As I have a tendency to do, I disagreed. It was not art, because [insert criteria made up in the moment]. Being teenagers with egos to back, this went on for a while. I went to class having won the argument, and he did the same, but that idea stuck with me.
Why wasn’t it art?
See, it was not a centerpiece or standout item, in fact it matched the countless other railings throughout the school. But this one was special. This one was next to where we sat each day for lunch. This one was the railing I leaned on during “bathroom breaks” when I had class and others were at lunch. This one had the uncleanable marks of our food covered hands grabbing it to stand up. This one had been deemed “art”.
Day after day I stared at that infuriating railing and noticed the welds, laid by an anonymous master hand. I saw how the invisible designer had put the supports perfectly so they would hold to years of abuse, but be almost invisible when walking by. In a fit of rage I even found that the forgotten installer placed it at the exact height of all other railings in the school. So exact that the unlabeled ticks on my tape measure could not tell them apart.
Was this enough? Was the thoughts of two high schoolers able to make art from existence?
I have since learned the controversial art of a “premade”. An item that is taken from ordinary life and turned into art merely by the fact that it is.
A urinal, a vacuum, a railing. Art.
But along comes “prompt artists”.
I made is a term used by many for their projects. Be it the I or the made, it is hard to agree when the result is randomly generated by a computer.
There is no meaning, there is no life, there is just pretty.
Art in itself should never be categorized in a boolean manner. Any restrictions placed on it can be broken by definition.
If a minimal painter gets told her work is not art, revealing an untouched canvas would constitute art. It is all meaning and story.
The closest I feel I have come to defining art is “An inevitable byproduct of sentient existence”
Computers though, do not have sentience. They do not have feeling nor thoughts. There is no sense of self. Their ancestors did not pass a story down, and no story will be built for the future. They just are.
But does this bar them from Art? Where should that line be drawn?
If I ask a computer to make me an app and give exact descriptions of each part, I have made a program. Should those descriptions be more generic, the computer has generated a program.
To the average algorithm fan, we see it all as just a convoluted math equation. Written in such a way that computers can work it out pretty fast, and the correct answer is a friendly email to that annoying customer. But much as the average algorithm fan sees consistent sleeping hours, the layperson sees AI.
It has become so close to human, so good at mimicry, that it goes beyond just a program or equation. We now have to stop a video and ask ourselves, “Did the human that caused this to be created even watch it?”.
Worse yet, we have seen this bring out the more concerning questions, “If I can’t tell the difference, then why make anything myself?” and even “If AI can make art, write programs, and do math already, how long until it learns what I do?”.
And these worries are not without reason. Tens of thousands have lost jobs. True information has become neigh impossible to find. Lives have been lost.
Later Years
If I were engaged in any high undertaking or design, fraught with extensive utility to my fellow creatures, then could I live to fulfil it. But such is not my destiny; I must pursue and destroy the being to whom I gave existence; then my lot on earth will be fulfilled and I may die.
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
No monster is borne of malice just as no child is birthed evil. For these ideas are prescribed rather than inherent.
We can not know with certainty what happened in the mind of Oppenheimer, we can only count the dead made possible by his hand. Should that be the act of a criminal or hero is beyond fact.
I cannot say using AI is right. It has tangible negative effects. But moreso, I can’t for the life of me escape the morality of those I love.
We are the keepers of our creation, and those in power have abandoned duty to favor personal gain. I tell myself I would be different, but history disagrees.
We seem to live in an era with more knowledge than ability. I have numbers that prove my commute to work is doing damage that will not be fixed in my lifetime. But more urgently I have a budget which proves not commuting would shorten that lifetime considerably. As with many others, I am allowing the default, excusable sin to continue, rather than the choose a pious destitution.
I do use AI. I will continue to do so. The personal gains outweigh the societal downside so incredibly that it seems foolish to make this stand.
I will use it to help accelerate programming outside of my field. I will use it to find a vaguely remembered book that Kagi can’t. I will use it to introduce to me the words of a new body of information, so I may be ready to meet its contributors in their language.
I will however do so within reason. This is just a tool, and as such can never be considered independent. It cannot be used as a substitute for taste nor vision. No sentient being should be shown ”art” with no artist. My words are my own, my art is made of blood sweat and tears, and my engineering is from within.
Energy efficiency is a key product of evolution, but with humanity we also gained the desire to create. Few situations put those at such odds as AI, but I firmly believe the humanity will win.
Though terra incognita may now be absent on maps, it only means we must leave our map at home. Turn off the guidance, silence the perfection, allow the joy of your solution to outshine the correct solution.