The Dark Side of AI - Innovating With Intelligence

Welcome to the fourth installment of Innovating with Intelligence, a series where I do a deep dive into AI tools and how they’re affecting the daily the lives of creatives, developers, and entrepreneurs — both good and bad.

Up until now, I’ve spent most of this series talking about how AI can help you as a creative. However, there is an alter ego to this seemingly helpful piece of tech. Just as a coin has two sides, there is a dark side to AI, and it will be up to the human race to decide how to achieve balance between dark and light.

To understand the light, we must also venture into the dark side of the force. So today, we’re going to look at the negative implications of AI and how this humble developer thinks we can overcome some of these problems.

Full disclaimer: I don’t have all of the answers 😂, but I do have a ton of experience working alongside AI, building AI tools, and experienced a few things along the way.

Side note— Darth Vader is my favorite. Who is your favorite Star Wars character? Let me know in the comments.

Copilot, not Counterpart

I started using AI tools in my work when GPT-3 came out. Not gonna lie, it was a blessing, especially considering I was leading a small team with two devs and a data analyst at the time. Although the code it generated was literal dog sht, AI helped me hammer in foundational concepts of programming and understand Typescript syntax a lot more. This lead to increased productivity, and, ironically enough, better code.

As the models got better and AI worked it’s way deeper into my workflow, I noticed an interesting phenomenon…

I was developing a dependency on AI and my critical thinking skills were suffering.

I was spending less time reading documentation & stack overflow forums, but spending more time perfecting my prompts, and sometimes even wasting time when I could’ve found the answer simply by reading documentation.

This is the paradox of creating with AI. On one hand, you have a world of knowledge at a moment’s grasp, but yet you aren’t truly learning anything.

Since becoming aware of this phenomenon, I practice awareness when using AI and remind myself that it is a tool — not a solution. Unlike devs reaching for Cursor or Windsurf and deeply integrating AI into their projects, I keep my AI tools separate from my development environments. I use them in tandem to 10x my output, but this allows me to critically think like a developer, not a prompt engineer. I’m here to create solutions, not simply to write code.

Don’t use AI as a crutch for skill issues. Remember, you can’t polish a turd. 💩

Creative Tool or Copyright Thief?

As you can imagine, I have a lot of creative friends. That being said, this is the number one argument against mainstream AI usage that I hear — and for good reason.

Many of the tech companies building or using LLM’s are NOT working with your best interest in mind. There are countless headlines about these LLM’s being trained with copyrighted material. Adobe, Suno, OpenAI, Llama, and many others.

Data mining is nothing new. Every major tech company has carefully crafted their algorithms and programs to capture as much of your data as they “legally” can so that our late stage capitalistic oligarchs can get you to buy their sht.

Phew, I’ll stop there before I really go off on a tangent. Ok, back to the copyright stuff.

The gripe that I personally have is sneaky companies purposefully being inexplicit about the fact that your private data is being used to train their LLM’s. For example, Adobe has a clause in their terms and conditions stating this. How would you feel if you’re a graphic designer and Creative Cloud is feeding your unreleased work to Adobe’s LLM to better train it for generative AI?

Now unfortunately, you and I aren’t going to stop this from happening. Remember, we have a choice in the tools that we use. And if that weren’t enough, I’ll leave you with this — AI only knows what has already been created. Even the best reasoning models cannot create new concepts or ideas, but rather their solutions are amalgamations of ideas that already exist. Humans still have the upper hand, and will continue to do so.

Nvidia…ope, sorry…Nvironmentally Friendly

All jokes aside, it takes an immense amount of resources to run America’s latest and greatest reasoning models. The economic and environmental impacts are already making themselves apparent. With the current circus — I mean — administration pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into Project Stargate, it seems like there is blatant disregard for these implications. Meanwhile, GPU prices are skyrocketing, and Jensen Huang and Nvidia are laughing all the way to the bank.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for technological advancement. But at what point does the advancement become an obsessive hype game that only the world’s wealthiest can play?

There is hope. With China’s Deepseek R1 reasoning model being released (and maliciously attacked…hmmmm 👀), free and open source, and running on a mere fraction of the hardware that the American tech bros have, we may start seeing some good change in the world of AI.

I’m a firm believer that the nerds will always win. For every Zuck, Musk, and Altman, there are tons of talented developers ready to challenge the system and provide much needed competition. Deepseek is claimed to be a side-project. Bluesky is thriving. Tech geeks like us are clearly looking for change, and as technology changes, so does human perception and tolerance. We will adapt and overcome.

There you have it — the dark side of Artificial Intelligence. Overall, I think that AI is and will be revolutionary to society, but it’s going to take some extra effort, critical thinking, and adjustment on our part as the developers and users in order to see good, ethical change and put an end to this overhyped nonsense.

Think Critically. Challenge Norms. Drink Colombian Coffee. It’s the punk rock thing to do.

Paps.

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