AI: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

AI is poised to make huge changes to outdoor culture, and we’re in for a wild ride. But there’s also opportunity to redefine how we value wild places, says Alex Roddie

After decades of AI being mainly confined to sci-fi and academic papers, it’s everywhere. And, depending on your point of view, it is either terrifying or the dawn of a new turbo-powered age of productivity. I believe that, before the end of the decade, AI could lead to fundamental shifts in how we experience and think about the great outdoors. But alongside great risk I also foresee great opportunity.

AI in 2024 doesn’t mean computers that can think, and sci-fi-style superintelligent AI isn’t going to happen any time soon, despite the breathy predictions of billionaire tech bros. The programs making headlines are just that, programs – software designed to predict word choices or images based on training data. For example, Stable Diffusion will sample a vast array of pictures on the web in order to make imitation art that can appear original and creative. ChatGPT can read every blog post on hillwalking ever written and churn out a listicle about hiking in the Peak District.

Alex Roddie is editor of Sidetracked magazine, a tri-annual adventure journal, and a regular contributor to The Great Outdoors. He has written several books on long-distance backpacking. Website: www.alexroddie.com Substack: https://substack.com/@alexroddie 

Only a few months ago, these programs were generating content that still looked obviously fake, landing in the uncanny valley. But in early 2023 massive leaps began to be taken. What these programs can’t do is have ideas of their own, or be creative in any genuine sense – even if they might seem that way. It’s just a remix of words and pictures that already exist. A churn of mediocre content slop. Some might argue that all creativity follows similar principles, in the end, but I think that is an anti-human point of view.

And here lies the great danger. Not with the tools themselves, which do have legitimate uses in automating tedious or time-consuming tasks if used with wisdom and restraint. The danger is that we mistake imitation and efficiency for humanity – and that as more of our world becomes virtual our drive to connect with nature becomes diluted. AI-generated fakery will be glossy and attractive in a way that nature rarely is.

No more getting muddy and tired to look at views that aren’t quite as good as the pictures you’ve been enjoying on Instagram; in the AI world everything is perfect, and there is never any risk of failure or getting things wrong or learning a valuable lesson. Everything will be fake – and will fall apart at close scrutiny – but fewer people will care with every passing year. We’ll be spoonfed perfectly bland experience after perfectly bland experience and we’ll know nothing better. Humanity will become just a bit less human.

Of course, we go into the hills for much more than this – there are countless reasons. But a constant message that humans are inferior to machines, that AI can do it better so why bother at all, could take the shine off a lot of things for many people. And what could be more human than the physical, embodied experience of hillwalking? Will the messy, organic, imperfect world out there come to be seen as ideologically inferior? We can already see the seeds of this idea beginning to sprout.

As time goes on, I think there is a risk that, as a society, we begin to lose the curiosity that drives us into the wild places. And will we lose the ability to make hard decisions for ourselves? As search engines transform into AI chatbots, radically changing the way the web works, we will no longer have the opportunity to select the most reliable source of information or apply critical reasoning. We’ll simply become used to being told what to do, what to think, what to feel – at all times.

How will we cope with the messy and very physical world out there in the mountains? When everything is fake, what meaning will reality even hold? What emotions will we feel on the summit, and will they even be our emotions any more?

We already live in a world in which giant tech companies such as Meta expertly manipulate our emotions, consumerist impulses, and relationships. It’s such a tiny step from that world to the next, in which our thoughts and emotions are entirely fabricated. And we won’t even know it. Tech companies have become very good at deep yet silent manipulation.

But here’s the thing: it won’t all be bad. With upheaval and a crisis of meaning come an opportunity to ask ourselves what it’s all really about. In a world where nothing is real, where the human and imperfect and analogue are seen as less valuable by mainstream society, where our interactions and work and hobbies are almost entirely virtual, perhaps time in nature will take on a new significance. We have an opportunity to redefine ourselves. Will we declare the hills a space where the vast oceanic surge of AI can’t reach us? Will there be a countercultural rejection of digital tech in the outdoors as we feel the urge to commune with our fragile and embattled sense of humanity?

I see the beginnings of this now. I see it in the enthusiastic re-adoption of analogue film cameras by a broad range of outdoor photographers (I am editor of Sidetracked magazine, and we are now publishing analogue photos in pretty much every issue). I see it in backpackers and hillwalkers who intentionally keep the mountains as an Instagram-free zone. People already crave authenticity. But it could go much further.

Just as real human writing, thought and art are being cast in new light by the rise of AI fakery, given a new and more solid substance, I think that embodied human experience – walking, running, climbing, wild camping – will shine. But only if we embrace change on our own terms.

What practical steps can we take? I think we all have to consider our personal red lines. Completely avoiding AI is already difficult, and in the future it will be impossible. But is there an ideological difference between using Lightroom’s automatic sky masking and generating an entire article in ChatGPT? Both are marketed as AI, but only the latter entirely removes human agency. So take some time to work out what your values are. I would urge you to view human agency and creativity as sacrosanct – but that AI tools can potentially save time in some of the admin drudgery or other non-creative tasks. My view: automate your own creativity and you’re a turkey voting for Christmas.

Next: switch off your computer, switch off your phone, take off your virtual reality goggles, unplug whatever brain implant Mark Zuckerberg will try to sell you in the next decade or so, unfold a paper map, and get out into the fresh air. Don’t switch on anything electronic until you get back home. You don’t have to do things this way every time – I navigate with phone apps too – but a little reset every now and again might be all we need to keep ourselves grounded and centred. Give yourself a little space to remember what you truly think and believe. AI can’t automate the feeling of freezing feet after sinking into a bog, can it?

Normalise being on a hill without experience being mediated by a screen. It’s such a simple thing, but maybe it will prove to be a vital defence mechanism. So let’s not forget the imperfect and glorious reality of our mountain spaces, the importance of failure, the dull days that give meaning to the blue-sky ones. Let’s not allow ourselves to be told how to feel.

The square images were created by Stable Diffusion, and are not real images of real mountain experiences. The other images were captured on 35mm film and subsequently scanned.