Artificial Intelligence (AI) or any of its internal models and the content it generates cannot exist without theft, a tale as old as time, as we continue to watch our earth get pillaged for resources by colonization and exploitation. This colonization of the internet and the theft of intellectual property is done by a few massive corporations, raking in billions. Meanwhile, we humans struggle and fail to make ends meet and feed our families.
The people responsible for this monster of AI are the ones in their protected bunkers who can survive the days when AI turns against us, steals our jobs, ruins our planet and rips away everything that makes being human a worthwhile venture. But those living on the frontlines of AI’s havoc cannot escape the terror that it will reign, only to be the ones broken by the true horrors of the technology.
The technology has hijacked the California State University (CSU) system and worked its way into use by students, and even the very people I work with.
The CSU is struggling to stay afloat and has decades worth of backlogged maintenance issues across the 22-campus system. That includes us right here at Cal State LA! But the bizarre and stupid decision by someone at the top to pay OpenAI $17 million for everyone’s access to ChatGPT is further pushing AI down our throats and saying that “if we don’t use it,” students will be left behind.
The school has also allegedly not paid their fair share of contracts and is shortcutting both faculty and staff, even after taking the $144 million loan from the state to pay faculty and staff one time, versus fulfilling future obligations and paying employees of the CSU system what they deserve.
Cal State LA and the CSU as a whole could lead the anti-AI revolution and reject the technology, demanding that everyone deserves their dignity and the chance at a future without AI.
But, AI might just be too stuffed up their rear ends to actually expel it from our minds and ways of life across the Cal State system, especially after The New York Times published a story in late October titled “Big Tech Makes Cal State Its A.I. Training Ground.”
Just wonderful, isn’t it?
But wait, there’s more! Just look at the subhead for that same New York Times story: “Spurred by titans like Amazon and OpenAI, California State wants to become the nation’s largest A.I.-Empowered university.”
There’s no coming back from that. If that’s their mission, then students who do not want to be involved with AI are basically being told to take their education elsewhere to a university or university system that cares for the future of all students and not just the ones who decide to pursue AI nonsense.
We are at a school that will be the first to face the very real impacts AI is creating beyond the metaphysical world. The amount of students coming from diverse backgrounds, i.e. non-white, is about 95% of the school’s student body, as of fall 2025 according to Cal State LA data.
They will be, and have been, the first people continually impacted by the air pollution of AI, its overconsumption of electricity and the noise that’s literally keeping communities awake, its data centers are producing 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, all so someone can ask ChatGPT: How do I change a lightbulb?
The areas that these data centers are in are almost always in places where lower-income and minority groups live. On top of the terrible environmental impacts, AI is one of the biggest reasons that people have seen higher power bills, as these AI plants are creating strains and impacts on grids meant for humans and not powering computers that steal our livelihoods, our work and intellectual property.
These AI data centers are also sucking our water sources dry in these communities as well. But, because these corporations have a chokehold on the economy, it’s extremely difficult to hold any influence over what companies like OpenAI do.
But, this is just the beginning of these impacts as AI continues to build its influence over our society and how we operate on a day-to-day basis.
The amount of support out there for this tech is sickening, and it is so hard to get AI regulated on a large scale. However, California did pass a bill, SB53, in September, that said “The law introduces protections for whistleblowers inside AI labs, mandatory reporting of certain safety incidents, and requirements that large developers publish so-called frontier AI frameworks to explain how they plan to mitigate catastrophic risks,” according to an overview of the legislation by the Carnegie Endowment.
This is far from perfect and should expand so that AI cannot steal, plagiarize, or take jobs that are slowly being outsourced to robots and AI. Laws establishing limits and strict use cases for AI should happen now in education, the film industry and journalism.
I’ve seen with my very own eyes how AI dumbs down our minds. In my brief use of the programs for trial purposes, I have seen how AI spends all its time just fawning over every little thing I do and always telling me that what I gave it was perfect, when I purposefully presented it with shitty writing to correct.
Don’t even get me started with the hallucinations and the useless fact-checking features. I tried that once, and asked ChatGPT and Gemini to check something for me, but neither did their research. Everything they said or attributed to was either The Onion, a satirical news website, or something that could be easily debunked with a quick Google search.
How about we don’t burn down jungles, invade even more for our stupid little questions and use search engines like we used to before this stupid tech came into our lives. Or is it just further feeding into the instant gratification baloney that was rushed along by the growing number of people consumed by TikToks and Instagram Reels, unable to read an article more than two seconds long without it having a riveting line or image?
I hope AI crashes and burns bigger than the destruction of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTS) a while back, or with more grandeur than watching Elon Musk’s space ships implode. And while we’re at it, just take Crypto out in the same blow.
