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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From:

firecat

Thanks for your views!

I have heard about the mushroom guides. AI doesn’t know what truth or facts are, and that’s a good reason not to use AI for anything professional or anything where truth and facts matter. I don’t think using AI for personal stuff like a first draft of a novel is in that category though.

From:

minoanmiss

Hmm. In which layer of writing do you work on character voice? I know from happy experience you're excellent at it.

Another thing AI fiction can't deliver, from what I've seen, is distinct character voice. This is one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of writing for me because how we say things influences what gets said and what doesn't, so I have to start with it in my first draft. I don't think I could go back and weave it into an AI-written first draft.

From:

firecat

Thank you! I work on it in my first and second drafts usually.

Yes, AI would not be able to help with character voice beyond the most basic tropes (I assume it could do a reasonable hard boiled PI or Victorian gentleman, but haven’t tested that).

I don’t use AI for writing — I don’t need to because I had writing ability installed at a very early age. But I’m shit at drawing/painting and also don’t like to do it (even after I took a course and got a little better). So I’ve used AI to generate images for personal use. So I can imagine someone who wants to tell a story but isn’t happy with their level of skill in description, e.g., using AI to help with that. If they leaned too heavily on AI for that they wouldn’t get better at it. But maybe they don’t particularly want to.