A competition on the video game Warframe was the final straw for Bella. <\/p>\n
Everyone in her gaming team had been given just three days to submit their own artwork. Nervous about the tight deadline, she remained undeterred – until the contest accepted a piece of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated art. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf AI hadn’t been accepted into the contest, maybe I would have tried to compete, but this time it seemed like a humiliation to me: competing with a person who hadn’t put a single drop of effort into this image,\u201d the 21-year-old from the Czech Republic told Euronews Next. <\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the reasons I stopped using generative AI is that it’s morally wrong. If I, as an artist, continued to use it, it would be a kind of betrayal. Like, I spent years learning and improving my skills myself, and here I am using something that steals the results of the work of others like me\u201d.<\/p>\n
Bella is one of a growing number of \u2018AI vegans\u2019, a new name for those choosing to abstain from all generative AI, systems that are trained on vast data sets to create text, images, music and more. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s a movement that has been steadily growing since the launch of OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT in 2022, with the anti-AI community on Reddit amassing more than 71,000 members. <\/p>\n
Similar to veganism, the reasoning is mostly ethical and environmental. <\/p>\n
Even a short conversation with ChatGPT can guzzle the equivalent of a bottle of water, according to a 2023 study<\/a>. The technology\u2019s scraping of creative works has led to famous artists, authors, filmmakers and musicians uniting in protest<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201c[Generative AI] constantly steals without consent from absolutely everything, violates privacy, and obtains money from it,\u201d Marc, a 23-year-old AI abstainer based in Spain , told Euronews Next. <\/p>\n \u201cIt’s a tool of capitalism to maintain worker exploitation or even bring it up to the next level\u201d.<\/p>\n Alongside these concerns lurks a deeper fear of how AI could be harming our mental health and cognitive development, creating a dependence on fast solutions that rob us of critical thinking. <\/p>\n A recent, small-scale study<\/a>by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) backs this up, reporting that its participants who used ChatGPT to write essays recorded lower brain engagement than those who did not use the tool. <\/p>\n The ChatGPT users also struggled to quote from what they had just created, and showed underperformance at \u201cneural, linguistic, and behavioural levels,” the study found.<\/p>\n This could have larger implications on learning, confidence, and how humans utilise AI in important settings, according to Nataliya Kosmyna, co-author of the study and research scientist at MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group. <\/p>\n \u201cIf a person doesn\u2019t really remember what they just wrote, they do not feel ownership, so it ultimately means that they don’t really care about it. So, what if this is not just a lab experiment? What if it is a real situation, like, you know, a life and death situation? Some jobs require that\u201d. <\/p>\n For Lucy, a 22-year-old \u2018AI vegan\u2019 from Spain, her concerns centre around certain chatbots\u2019 tendencies towards sycophancy, which can lead to the validation of delusional – and sometimes dangerous<\/a> – ideas. <\/p>\n \u201cI feel like the digital era already brought about a lot of stupidity simply because people misuse the internet and phones, instead of using them to learn stuff. But having people be dumb while the chatbots tell them how right and brilliant they are? That’s worrying,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n The difficulties of AI abstinence<\/p>\n