AI is a wonderful tool, with a great many exciting applications to explore. But when it's used in person-to-person communication, for example in a forum setting such as this, I feel it is more of a barrier than a benefit. I think my issue is one of homogenisation. Like AI art, which faces a huge backlash from physical creatives and consumers alike, AI text and AI comments have an all-too apparent "AI-ness" about them, a quality that gives me the ick. If you look at, say, an event poster created by an AI prompt, it looks AI-created through and through. And because such things are ubiquitous, all you SEE is AI Event Poster followed by AI Event Poster, turtles all the way down. These days, I'd rather see an event poster with a bunch of crappy looking stick figures over yet another smiling identikit cartoon caricature with wide eyes and a rictus grin hollering about their upcoming yard sale. Even AI "enhancements" of existing photographs apply a telling saccharine sheen that signposts the electronic intervention. And in an RMRS context, such manipulations feel at odds with the message, one step down from claiming I'm upping my style game by photoshopping my face onto a picture of Steve McQueen. But aside from AI visuals, it's the posts, and the comments, that are obviously AI which I feel do us all a disservice. Initially this disservice is done in how they are delivered, with a polished soulless positivity that feels vaguely alien and insincere. AI posts and comments feel akin to the much derided Corporate-Speak of the Nineties, or the Clickbait Headline format of the 2010s. And maybe "AI-Speak" will go the same way, into that Uncanny Valley, mocked and ultimately rejected by the collective. But more insidiously, I think the REAL disservice comes not in the AI words themselves, but in the fact that their over-use and abuse seems wholly at odds with the RMRS message. A tenet here is that one should comport themselves with intention, be it in how they dress or how they act; just throwing a prompt into an engine and cut-n-pasting the result in order to receive a participation trophy isn't particularly intentional, and definitely isn't stylish. REAL men, REAL style, right?

You don't always see it… ...But you matter. The world wouldn't be the same without what you bring to it. I know it can feel heavy. I know it feels like you're behind. I know it feels like nobody notices. ...But the truth? Everything you're going through is shaping you into exactly who you need to be. ...And one day you'll look back at this time and realize it was building you all along. It's just another test to pass. Keep going. The world needs your story. ~ Andy Frisella