Is Your Brain Rooting?

AI is the ultimate technology when it comes to facilitating our lives, but what's the cost of our daily use? 

via Maya Fuhr: Garbage Girls © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.

Let’s play never have I ever? I’ll start: Never have I ever used Chat GPT. You can’t see me on the other side of the screen but I am blushing as I take a sip of my coffee because, unfortunately, I have used it before. 

Never have I ever felt that at the end of the day, the only thing my mind feels able to handle is scrolling for hours straight. Ok, this was too specific. I’ll stop now and take another guilty sip.

I know we are all tired from the non-stop work tasks and overstimulation. I also know that many times this leads us to turn to AI. Who would decline such help to make things easier? We feel as if we can’t think any more, so we ask our computer to think for us. Are we not so slowly landing into cognitive decline? 

I always thought the future would look like waking up to a robot asking what you want for breakfast, doing it, washing the dishes later and keeping the house nice and clean. We all would have time for making art, reading books, going to the movies or simply staring at the ceiling while we do nothing.

Ok, we do have machines that help us with those tasks, but who would expect that instead of having more time for those nice and fun activities those machines would actually make art and read books in our place?

Speaking of art, I fear we are ditching artists for programs. Whenever I see any institution post something that was clearly AI made, I run to the commentary search to check if people feel just as mad about it as I do. With AI, I feel like instead of praising new artists and designers, we just jump from trend to trend and the feed gets crowded with the same images with slight differences. 

Seeing my entire feed studio ghibilified made me wonder if all those people like the productions too or if they were just hopping in a cute trend that would drive Hayao Miyazaki crazy. The co-founder of the famous Japanese animation house, has once said that the use of AI to make art can be “an insult to life itself”. Ouch. If art is how we connect to our own humanity, what happens when we outsource it?

And it’s not just killing creativity but also also destroying our planet even faster. How? A research led by members of UC Riverside pointed out that about 700,000 litres of fresh water could have been used to cool off GPT-3 training at Microsoft. Quick girl math: that’s how much water you would consume in 13 years. 

Ok, that was just training, but to help draft your simple e-mais it consumes over half a million kilowatts-hours of electricity per day. Want more girl math? The same amount of energy spent a day combining 180,000 houses in the U.S. 

But the damage isn’t just ecological, it’s existential. AI isn’t just thinking for us. It’s becoming us. When it comes to fashion, we already have AI influencers, such as Lil Miquela advertising for huge brands like Chanel, Prada and Calvin Klein. We have seen clothing that only exists in the online world, whether it’s an NFT or the digital-only collection made by a Scandinavian brand that, believe me or not, sold out. Why would you buy a puffer jacket that you will never be able to wear or even touch? 

It gets more bizarre: H&M is working with agencies to create “digital-twins” of models and use them for ads and social media. Imagine not getting casted because digital Bella Hadid was available? If most brands stopped working with real models, how many professionals of the fashion industry would lose job opportunities? 

By the end of the day, I always feel like my brain is melting, and apparently, I’m not alone. I have discovered that there is a special term for that: brain rot. It was originated in 1854, by Henry David Thoreau, as a critique of society 's decline in mental and intellectual effort. Poor man, he would hate to see this coming: fast forward to 2024, and we have it declared as the word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary. What’s the main cause? Yes, social media. Is that why Anxiety by Doechii is trending?

This isn’t just about aesthetics or nostalgia for the pre-AI era. It’s about the erosion of our cognitive (and literal) landscape. When we stop engaging our minds, when we let screens decide what we think, wear, and even feel, that rot sets in quietly. And soon enough, we feel incapable of imagining something new, on our own.

And here is where we should learn how to swim against the tide. We are losing not just attention spans, but attention itself, the very thing that makes reflection, creativity, and original thought possible. Now, it’s urgent to protect our precious planet and brains. Little time exercising and a lot of time staring at screens can lead us to that current feeling of brain fog, or that it's easy to forget things. Our brain has muscles too and they need to be trained. We are creative beings, and a healthy life needs art, thinking, memorizing, and of course: creating. 

I’m not a hypocrite and I know, especially as an immigrant, how ChatGPT can help check grammar mistakes, for example, but we must be mindful of the impact of our daily actions on our planet and health. We must consume art made by humans, support brands that support humans, think for ourselves and keep using our critical judgement. It’s challenging, but we have been doing it for way longer than AI.