Thought experiment of the week: Why should we cling to anti-AI sentiment when the industry has changed several times before and pretends it will never change?
SASKTODAY.ca — This is the first in a series of summer thought experiments prepared by the SASKTODAY.ca writers for your reading pleasure. Check out the following articles every Sunday from July to August. We aim to get you interested in a variety of thought experiments, some deeper than others. This week Miguel Fenrich ponders his one of today’s biggest game changers: generative artificial intelligence.
Since artificial intelligence software entered the mainstream in late 2022 and early 2023, people have continued to suggest that an apocalypse and soon-to-be AI dominance is looming over writers and artists.
A Twitter post by @Gabino_Iglesias reads, “I’m vigilant like AI writer shit.”
“…if ‘writers’ need AI to write stories, they aren’t writers,” wrote another post by @Black_Kettle.
“If you need an AI to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a lazy crook stealing other people’s work,” says @AWolfeful.
Humanity has always found ways to improve itself. Some examples include electricity, water, and internet. As a writer, someone who doesn’t run screaming with his hair on fire, I certainly appreciate the constant march of progress. But I think some people get caught up in the idea that tradition must be honored to the end, because the unknown is often frightening and forces us to change our current ways of doing things.
This brings me to my main topic. The writer shouldn’t fear or hate AI, he should support it with a hoarded passion for killers and weird strangers who upset you on the internet.
“What will happen to the author?” Writers of horror, like their predecessors clinging to their typewriters, their predecessors clinging to their diaries, and their predecessors clinging to a world without a printing press, are laptops. Or clench your fist over a Word document and scream.
But why are writers so afraid of what AI presents? Why are there movements and demands that try to control how we act within? I thought George Orwell would keep us from a future where governments have a say in what people can create.
To steal or not to steal, that is the question
When budding writers desperately trying to learn the art of storytelling and the written word ask, “How do I learn?” what are people’s first suggestions? Read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read greats, read weirdos, read poets, short story writers, dystopias, classics, utopias, romances, westerns, literature, science fiction. Read until you get tired, then read some more.
why?
No, seriously, think about it.
Writers aren’t born ready to write the next Governor’s Award-winning novel. We gather information from the world around us to feed our writing. It’s true that all artists steal, but not in the sense of copying famous works paragraph by paragraph. There is no such thing as an original idea.
Is Rose and Jack’s forbidden romance in “Titanic” plagiarized from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”? Is the dystopian world of 1984 a rip-off of its predecessor Brave New World? Are Star Wars and Star Trek “shavings” of the bloated fan of the great Dune?
When humans do it, we don’t call it stealing. Humans certainly have feelings, lived experiences, and thoughts outside of the great “omniscient” machines, but the Internet is perhaps the largest collection of that human experience. Remember when your mother/teacher/boss said nothing can be completely removed from the Internet?
But perhaps the idea that AI is stealing the efforts of “real” artists comes largely from a misunderstanding of how AI generates text. Running your AI-generated text through a plagiarism checker won’t give you the verification you’re looking for.
AI does not copy text directly from the internet. We use a dataset (pre-2021 internet for ChatGPT), analyze the information, consider requests and write new ones from there. If we want to regulate textual rewriting and propose that copyright extends to ideas, writings and thoughts (as some netizens are asking), then if you inadvertently write a Harvard paper I think I would be happy if I was sued for writing a sentence similar to. Since 1997.
Hey, you want this, not me.
Goodbye Literary Freedom
But if it’s not theft, they say, it’s a police crackdown, it’s a scam, it’s a way for lazy people to learn to write and destroy whatever the writing claims .
“Why can’t young people carve poetry on clay tablets like we did when we were kids? All this new functionality is destroying children’s brains these days.” , probably attributed to the words a Mesopotamian parent shook his fist at the invention of paper 3,000 years ago.
“It’s lazy, it’s dumbing people down, it’s blocking human communication,” the writers yelled into the echo chamber on Twitter. They consist of thousands of anti-AI friends who nod in unison and keep their mouths shut.
A short history lesson. In the 19th century, new inventions convinced many artists that art was dead. The talent of “real” artists will be lost as scammers and lazy people will have access to what can only be gained through years of practice and hard work. Who will survive when this “art” floods the market? What invention was it?
camera.
So was the demise of VHS when streaming services came along, the era of black-and-white movies when Technicolor came along, or even fewer cashiers at Walmart with the advent of cash machines. When the Internet really explodes, what will happen to newspaper employees who have lost their jobs?
If AI is to be monitored, so are laptops, the internet, and everything else we use to make our lives easier. You’re not a true writer unless you carve your story into a stone on a cliff. You are just rough and lazy. Seriously, why should writers think they have the authority to say who is and who is not? If you don’t write your own paper, you’re just copying the original author who bought it from the store.
The lawsuit is expected to be filed within 5-7 business days.
And what if it was a police search, who should care? So what if we could write novels faster? What if the market floods and you have to fight harder to stay above the crowd? If you want to make a living writing, motivate yourself with your own efforts and write.
Change is here. you can use that. Let AI write summaries, brainstorm, and give you ideas for Tiktok posts. Or, if you’re so inclined, you can have the app write your entire book and make a few bucks on Amazon.
Why should someone tell another writer what “real” writing is?
yield to the rulers of big government
And if it’s not stealing, it’s not a gift to lazy writers, they say it’s illegal.
When he pointed out that writers like Elizabeth Ann West were using AI in their writing, hundreds of people jumped to their keyboards and voiced the darkest thoughts plaguing the writing world today.
“Perhaps you should have kept this a secret. In the future, other authors will come forward to scrutinize the evidence that your published work was used without informed consent or compensation, and to proceed with legal proceedings.” Congratulations,” @drjoelshulkin told her.
@AndrewChungo wrote that she had “no integrity at all. The bar is already low for Amazon publishers, but you managed to lower it even further. Congratulations.”
Others, in an attempt to discredit her, regurgitated her work, calling it fan fiction and everything else in the open, after her post was viewed more than three million times. , she was forced to block comments.
Folks, we live in the Old West. Until the government makes a decision to crack down on who is a writer, we can do whatever we want. Have you gotten your “author” ID from the federal government yet? So much for anti-censorship.
Gatekeepers: The Ugly Side of the Publishing Industry Revealed
Besides, isn’t writing about breaking the rules? Would you like to break free from the traditional chains? Nothing screams anti-censorship like @SeraphIRenn, scared of industry change and calling on the industry’s biggest gatekeepers to change it. This is Gatekeep Publishing. Please, take a clear stance against AI “assisted” writing and keep AI out of our books. ”
And, as @Andrew Chungo pointed out, the bar for Amazon writers is already low, with dark and dangerous thoughts oozing out of the mouths of publishers: Thoughts are usually kept secret and only whispered at symposiums. and a conference.
And today, hundreds of submissions are apparently being received by many publishers and agents who are closing submissions until they can ‘solve’ the AI ’problem’ or the writing will die. receiving things. AI writing never shows the human mind, but it also cannot tell whether a submission was written by a human.
Hmm.
And these gatekeepers, who are designated to monitor authors who come to solicit for scraps of publication, are terrified. Because if anyone can write, how can anyone be an elitist? Don’t talk about AI checker ideas. The technology that gave me the sentences for “Catcher in the Rye” said that 12 percent of the poems were AI-generated, and only 6 percent of the poems were AI-generated.
Remember, writers are mythical creatures, living in the dark depths, loathing themselves and every word they write, finding solace only at the bottom of their whiskey bottles. The room was filled with cigar smoke as they labored, penniless and destined for success only to die on the street. .
What does it mean if someone can write it? Writers don’t write because they like to string together words to tell stories and such, of course. When someone succeeds in a “don’t do” place, there’s always someone who raises their fists to the sky.
If you don’t like AI writing, don’t use it. If the market is flooding, write better and stand out from the AI. Your writing is better than AI, remember? And if you can’t tell the difference, who cares?
AI is not a thief like other writers in the world, it is not illegal like it is to read and “learn”, i.e. “steal”, great authors, it is not “William Shakespeare or what we implore.” It’s not as illegal as being “inspired by other greats”. to read. The fear about AI is actually a little bit more thought, rather than listening to the desperate cries of his Twitter collective that he might not be able to put a little pen into his career. Accepted.
I imagine that art will be preserved and evolved as ever, despite the internet’s clamor, but only if writers start embracing AI instead of running away from it. Let’s put the fun into words. Be an artist, not a fighter.
