no subject

[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/

Comments

[sabotabby]

Other people have covered it well.

AI is a tool for stealing art from mostly poor artists and funnelling it to the ultra-wealthy who are already trying to burn the world to death. It uses ungodly amounts of water. It's bad at doing the thing that it does, but it's just good enough to put humans out of work.

And also, it makes bad art. It makes art worse. There will be a whole generation of kids who think that this is the proper way to write and the proper way images should look, and the writers and artists that come out of this generation will be objectively worse. Not only does it have a self-devouring problem (AI trends towards mediocrity and feeds on itself, so the more AI content is out there, the worse AI content becomes) but people who lean on it begin to sound like it. It makes people sloppier thinkers. It's like someone has invented a tool for those Reddit guys who say "I have a great idea for a novel but I don't want to write, so if you ghostwrite it for me, we can split the profits 50-50."

Whatever good use cases exist for it, they are far outweighed by the ecological damage alone.

[firecat]

Thanks for sharing your views!

I agree AI’s output is worse than that of humans, even humans with only a modicum of talent.

I don’t agree that it’s going to make humanity, or any particular generation of humans, stupider or less creative, although it will have that effect on some individuals. Those claims have been made about every new invention since we first began banging rocks together, and what usually happens instead is that people don’t stop being creative but use them to express creativity in new ways.