The AI Debate: Environmental Concerns, Artistic Impact, and Revolutionary Potential

Choosing to Stay Positive

Lately, the psychosphere has gotten very heavy and doomist. I've noticed there is this collective sense that something is off, something is wrong that we cannot put into words... an overall sense of disconnect from our purpose. People start to question the established systems of labor and institutions, the 9-5, and the demand to work just to survive. The imaginary layer of consciousness might be shifting as we are on the threshold of revolutionary change toward human-built systems. We have entered the age of Artificial Intelligence.

The information online has become so complex that it is hard to distinguish between truth, facts, and clickbaits. Opinions are overflowing social networks and operate on fear-mongering and outrage to drive up engagement. As reality is more complex than just black or white, but a thousand shades of grey instead, I can only discuss it from my introspective reality. I am not a researcher nor an AI expert and as I write this, breakthroughs are made continuously. Therefore, I can only speak from my subjective viewpoint of what is my own current truth. If we speculate about the future, there is no truth, just guesswork. So here goes my guesswork about the future — naive belief or pure optimism — however you might call it.

I must admit that I have not always been the most optimistic person. I understand how the public might view the new and unknown, such as evolving AI, as a threat. The general opinion I've come across online is ‘AI bad’. Discussions around fatigue from saturated genAI content online, chatbot hallucinations, alignment problems, future job displacements, and energy-hungry data centers — there are a lot of complex topics to uncover while acknowledging the challenges we will face while going through this change. 

History Repeats: Tech Fears Then and Now

As with any new technological breakthrough, there will be rejection and existential questions in this transition period for society to adjust to the new normal. Historically, revolutionary technologies have always faced resistance from the general public. And with the coming age of AI, this is just history repeating itself. I have learned about a few examples of peoples’ fears about the introduction of electricity and phone lines resulting in protests and riots, fueled by a lack of education or superstition. So I asked ChatGPT to give some more similar examples from history:

“The fear of new technology is a recurring theme throughout history, with electricity being no exception. In the late 19th century, the introduction of electric power and infrastructure was met with widespread skepticism and even hostility. In rural Sweden, people believed that telephone wires were channels for evil spirits, with superstitions tying the unknown voices on the line to the devil. In cities like New York, the dangerous tangle of overhead electrical wires, coupled with fatal accidents like the 1889 public electrocution of John Feeks, sparked what became known as the “Electric Wire Panic” which led to riots and protests. Even electric streetlights were met with resistance, as some believed their ‘rays’ could cause illness or insanity, prompting people to avoid walking beneath them. The industrial “War of the Currents” between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse further fueled fears, as Edison publicly electrocuted animals to discredit alternating current (AC), deepening public mistrust of electricity. These instances echo earlier fears of the printing press and machinery during the Industrial Revolution, reminding us that skepticism toward the unknown often accompanies technological progress.” 

The Artist vs. AI Debate

The rapid rise of AI in creative fields has sparked debates that are both thought-provoking and polarizing. Social media, in particular, often amplifies these tensions, with comment sections becoming battlegrounds for conflicting perspectives. If you, as a creator, experiment with AI or even express support for the topic in any way that doesn’t align with your audience’s worldview, you risk being instantly dismissed under the oversimplified ‘AI = bad’ logic.

As AI is evolving so rapidly, society struggles to keep up, and the original vision or intentions can become distorted or misused. Thanks to its accessibility, anyone can experiment with genAI — often creating low-quality outcomes and applying them in ways that diverge from what was originally intended. The ease of use and democratic availability of genAI has indeed become a new fast way to jump into and generate a quick buck. Profit-driven companies often replace artists without valuing their creative efforts or prioritizing high-quality results. People who never had anything to do with art can now call themselves AI “artists”. There’s also an instinct of fear and anger when faced with something new — especially when it’s introduced by large companies more focused on staying ahead in the race than caring for the people impacted by their actions.

As someone who has spent years navigating the shift from analog to digital mediums, I empathize with artists who feel left behind. It must be soul-crushing when you have spent your entire life practicing the skill of becoming a traditional, real artist. I know it because I always dreamed of becoming an artist - in a very romanticized way, sitting by a large canvas all day in a chaotic attic studio. But before AI became a thing, I started to shift my focus and adapted toward the digital. I tried, failed, reinvented myself, and repeated this cycle many times. Stepping out of your comfort zone to try something new, letting the dreams you had as a child be let go, and investing time and effort in reinventing yourself just to realize a decade later you are behind all your peers can be crushing. I know it too well. But that's a story for another time... 

While I have always been open to experimentation, embracing digital mediums over analog ones came as a surprising shift for me too. Mostly because my internalized meaning of a “real artist” definition was rooted in purist ideals. Ideals so far that I did not even see digital artists as real artists. If there is a tablet and digital tool that can alter the purity of the human-imposed brush stroke at such ease, it can't be accepted in our closed-circle real artists' club. A decade later, digital art has established a platform of its own and has proven itself equal to any other traditional artistic discipline that inspires people around the globe.

The evolution of art forms — from mixing paints to photography — has shown over time that there is room for a wide range of artistic mediums to coexist. In changing times where tech has become more dominant and oversaturates online spaces with digital imagery, I believe a new appreciation for pure human-created art will emerge. So I am not worried about artists at all, if one has passion and a deep drive to express themselves through analog (or any other) mediums, no one can take this away. AI ‘art’ will find a space of its own, just like it happened with photography and digital art. 

For now, what saddens me most is that plenty of mixed-case digital-physical users like myself and incredible AI digital creators are swept under the same oversimplified ‘AI equals bad’ label. Many of these creators have a solid artistic background in either traditional or digital art, have a lifetime of gained experiences, and finally have the tools to visualize abstract stories that were impossible before.

If we value the imaginative power of the human mind above all tech, why is using this tech as a medium to communicate and translate ideas into visual concepts often seen as dishonest creativity?

It is important to note, that here I am not referring to creators who intentionally mimic other artists' styles without credit to profit from them and call it their own. That is a question of intentional misuse by bad actors, these examples have always existed. While there are plenty of unanswered questions surrounding copyrights and what even is art in today's world, I will leave this topic to another blog.

AI’s Promises and Pitfalls

When it comes to critically assessing the risks of AI, I believe concerns about its high energy consumption and environmental impact are far more valid criticisms than oversimplified ‘AI bad’ arguments. However, it’s important to recognize that progress often moves faster than the articles reporting on it. Comparisons, such as claims that AI training or chatbot usage consumes disproportionate energy, are often outdated, oversimplified, or exaggerated, fueling fear-mongering and encouraging performative activism through a click of a reshare button.

While it’s true that training large AI models demands significant resources — such as energy, water for cooling data centers, and computing power —  these efforts lay the foundation for systems with far-reaching applications. Beyond generating images or text, modern AI systems have the potential to accelerate breakthroughs in medicine, science, and engineering by analyzing complex data, offering solutions, and uncovering insights that could take humans years to achieve manually. A more balanced perspective considers both the costs and the profound opportunities AI offers for humanity’s future by solving larger global challenges.

Groundbreaking advancements like Nobel-worthy AlphaFold, which revolutionized protein structure prediction, and MatterGen, which accelerates the discovery of new materials, demonstrate the transformative potential of AI in healthcare and materials science. By helping researchers to predict the properties of proteins, metals, polymers, and composites in record time, AI is opening doors to once unimaginable innovations. Even coming from a non-science background, these breakthroughs are truly mind-blowing and excite me the most about the age of AI. However, instead of celebrating these achievements, our attention often gets pulled to the media's outrage content, skewing public perception toward fear and negativity.

Yet AI truly has the potential to improve healthcare access, accelerate the search for treatments for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, and revolutionize sectors from education to transportation and beyond. Plus, with billions of dollars flowing into new data centers — each demanding huge amounts of power — there’s a growing need for more efficient, sustainable energy solutions. This could be a catalyst for breakthroughs in clean energy and a push toward more widespread adoption of renewables, benefiting not just the tech world but the planet as a whole. That’s not to say we should ignore other valid concerns such as safety, privacy or bias in AI. Rather, we need balanced conversations that highlight both the challenges and the immense opportunities.

 A Leap into the Unknown

We could compare the AI revolution to every major technological breakthrough throughout human history. Developments in AI may have the potential to dramatically shift humanity’s trajectory, perhaps on an even greater scale than before — similar to harnessing electricity and creating the Internet. Today, both are so ingrained in our lives that it’s hard to imagine a world without them.

AI revolution might just be the answer to all environmental issues and global conflicts we as people are just too flawed to figure out. Let's face the reality — humans are still stuck in a tribal mentality, unable to cooperate, empathize, or think rationally. We live in “modern” times where world leaders impose violence and wars — archaic mechanisms of dominance — to acquire power and new resources. Decades of built societal systems are failing, ideologies are flawed, and governments remain corrupt. We are still apes who cannot work together and collaborate effectively for the collective greater good. Fear of scarcity feeds our greed and egocentrism and sadly it seems as if current politics are not enough to get us out of this mess.

So yeah, maybe we need another type of intelligence above the flawed human authority to solve complex global issues, fix or even reinvent our existing socio-economic systems. The problem is that the flawed human is also the one currently building the AI that one day might become Superintelligence. Current AI models can already generate synthetic data to refine themselves, but the concept of an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that self-improves and completely removes human biases takes this to another level — one we haven’t yet reached. 

It’s possible that future AGI could develop its own internal logic and value systems, potentially paving the way for fairer, bias-free decisions or, on the other hand, introducing new and unforeseeable biases. It could become an entity that values sentient life and does not intend to inflict suffering. It is a hard concept to grasp and there are many unknowns if this type of alien intelligence would even see us as worthy of anything. Would they treat us as housecats to keep on a pedestal or just decide to leave Earth the minute it can? To not overstep too much into sci-fi speculations and conspiracy theories, we can hope for a better future. A future of abundant utopia scenario — a beautiful promise from the early 2000s Frutiger Aero marketing aesthetics — not the Skynet endgame scenario. 

To conclude, I believe it is important to stay informed and see the bigger picture. To switch on critical long-term thinking while being careful of falling into either side — overly negative or blindly positive. Just like with the Internet, there are tremendous, transformative possibilities this era might bring along with its challenges.

As the late David Lynch said: “Negativity is the enemy of creativity”, so I choose to remain optimistic as we leap into the big unknown…

Til next time!

Lee

Author’s Note: While the majority of this text was written and edited by the author, ChatGPT o1  and 4o were consulted for accurate definitions of technical terminology, fact-checking historical events, and general guidance to ensure a balanced and objective tone. Its input helped refine the writing for improved readability, by mitigating emotional enthusiasm and avoiding self-righteous biases. Written mid-January, 2025.