firecat

The Nanowrimo peeps shouldn’t have referenced ableism, classism, and privilege in their recent post about AI.

But I don’t understand why a person would be categorically opposed to all uses of whatever-is-being-called-AI-this month in a creative pursuit.

(The majority of my use of AI has been getting suggestions for cat names, so that tells you how much you should pay for this opinion.)

There are ways to use AI, for example as a prompt or name generator, that are not “getting it to write your whole novel.” Why would someone object to such uses?

The Nanowrimo posts everyone is piling on already say that using AI to do the actual writing misses the point.
It’s a problem for creators that so far no copyright law covers what AIs can consume, but that’s a separate issue from whether they have legitimate uses.

I seem to be at variance with most of my opinion bubble about this issue. Feel free to tell me what I’m missing.

Context: https://www.404media.co/email/3d9698b2-8c2b-41e7-bea4-7a1ac6916159/

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shanaqui

All of that, and my specific objection to NaNoWriMo is the coopting of social justice language to position people who have objections based on those valid concerns (about copyright, plagiarism, unpaid/poorly paid labour, the environment and others) as being ableist, classist, etc. It's a calculated move that speaks extremely poorly of everyone involved in crafting that statement.

I do know people who use (so-called) AI to help with their disabilities and I don't judge them for that, if it helps them, because better, more ethical tools may not exist or may not be available to them. But they're individuals, and they don't try to sweep the issues with AI under the rug as NaNoWriMo initially attempted to do. (My understanding is that they've now attempted to qualify their statement and acknowledge there are some issues.)

NaNoWriMo doesn't need to have a stance on people using AI for stuff like generating character names or prompts. Characters name generators, prompt generators, and various other non-AI tools to help people plan and write novels already exist. They've existed for a long time. NaNoWriMo didn't need to write a statement about whether people can use AI to replicate that kind of function, so (while I cannot read minds) To me it seems that NaNoWriMo is referring to much broader possible use of AI, where the AI output is expected to be a large proportion of the result.

There are ways to say "look, we don't police the tools people use, if they say they've written something, we believe them", which would have been a valid thing to say... this was not that.