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see-arcane · 1 year

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I Am Livid.

Bile below

Well, in a fit of paranoia, I’ve gone through all my Ao3 stories and set them to Viewable by Registered Ao3 Users Only. Not because of the Musk blurb. I looked into the ‘Elon Musk using bots to mine Ao3 for writing’ thing and didn’t find anything but a lot of repeat accusations without any examples.

But you know what I did find?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/2/23435258/google-ai-writing-wordcraft-lamda

https://www.metastellar.com/nonfiction/on-writing/12-artificial-intelligence-tools-to-write-your-novel-for-you/

https://www.bkacontent.com/everything-about-ai-writing/

In all of these, there’s this struggling, sweating assurance that AI writing is meant to be a collaborative tool. An assisting tool. Used in tandem with human writers. To anyone who sincerely believes this, I admire your optimism and I apologize.

Because this is some next level bullshit.

Just like the immediate leap of AI art from ‘ooh look at this cool-silly trick we can get this program to do!’ to Let’s Use This to Steal From Hardworking Talented Artists and Pretend the End Product is Original Because the Program (and the Person Who Did the Hard Work of Pushing a Button!) Put It Through Their Filter and Slapped Their Name On It! is bullshit.

“AI writing saves time for you!”

You who? The person whose whole background and career is in writing? No, of course not. Actual writers know what they’re doing. They practiced out of passion. Maybe they got degrees in it, maybe they just worked at it, maybe they aren’t even doing it for a profit (nice as it’d be!), and decide to put what they scribble out in the world for free. No, no, AI writing programs aren’t for them. The suckers.

You’re the person who would normally have to pay someone else to write something for them.

You’re the person who’d like to hit a button, put other authors’ work through the AI blender, and vomit up another cookie cutter book series in their flavor and get a check for it.

Which is the exact same way it’s going with the people getting screwed and robbed by AI art programs. We all know this example by now:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html

But even beyond the competitive sphere, we have the more worrisome reality of professional artists getting gutted out of their careers, on top of hobby artists--artists who do what they do and share what they share With No Guarantee of Getting Paid--having their creations harvested and then turned around for someone else’s profit.

https://nanpa.org/2022/09/20/the-wild-west-of-ai-images-and-artists-rights/

And it enrages me past the point of words--maybe I could use an AI program to do that for me!!!--that anyone.

Any fucking one.

Is in favor of this load of thieving, art-killing, utterly inexcusable horseshit. Don’t come out here with your Asimov daydreams and your fucking I, Robot GIFs. This isn’t a movie. This isn’t the heartwarming rise of the Artistically Creative Robot.

The people behind this shit are people. People who want all the accolades and money with none of the work. Sorry, none of their own work.

Actual creatives, already a demographic living on an economic edge, are in more and more danger of losing either their livelihoods or--aren’t these artists and writers sooo dramatic?--their passion for sharing what they create with the world, simply for the craft and joy of it, when they see someone use a predatory program to steal their hard work, stamp their label on it, and sell it back to an audience who never even gets to know the robbed party’s name.

I hate AI writing. I hate AI art. I. Hate. It.

And I personally want to slap every bullshitting thinkpiecer and salesman who tries to pitch it as anything other than an as-yet-not-illegalized ‘get out of effort/paying creatives machine’ with a hardcover copy of Marx until their teeth fly out.

Are these programs perfected yet? No.

But the potential in them is too great for people with deep pockets who want them even deeper not to be investing to make them better* (*at stealing, blending, and puking up actual people’s work.) This is just where it starts.

I genuinely hope the legal brakes get hit on these things. I hope there are actual consequences going forward. I hope all this shit gets banned back and back and back until it’s made defunct by the inescapable fact that NO ARTIST OR WRITER IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD CONSENT TO THESE THINGS STEALING OUR SHIT and the right kind of lawyers make a case for us that unfucks the whole mess.

I really do.

But I won’t hold my breath.

#I hate it here*#*late stage capitalism with all its ugly offshoots #AI art #AI writing #rant #honestly tempted to go back through my blog and delete the Tumblr versions of all my fics too #but it feels hollow #it all feels so fucking hollow

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