My A.I. 180 (Why I Won't Be Using It)
Last month I wrote here about using AI (ChatGPT in particular) to help brainstorm a project, and I want to state here in the opening paragraph that I won't be using it anymore and that I have scrapped the story I used it with.
I waded into the AI waters ignorant of just how they worked, but after further research and the wider publicization of issues on just how these language models are trained (including the wide-scale scraping of content from the internet, largely without the consent of the authors) and other issues raised due to the ongoing WGA writer's strike, I can no longer in good conscience make use of any of these tools in their current form. If I don't want my work fed into these models, I can't turn around and use them when many other authors who already had their work... let's say 'inputted', for legal reasons, feel the same way. These tools are/were new and exciting, and advocated by leading voices in the self-publishing community, and I was vulnerable to a seemingly-easy way to climb out of the writing rut I was stuck in. It was easy. Too easy. But no more.
Things are changing so fast right now it's easy to get swept up in the hype and promises of quick and easy (almost magical) solutions, and that's what happened to me. There are so many issues swirling around AI in every field it touches, and there are no real laws or firm ethical boundaries set up yet. We are each having to find our own right now. Ethics, copyright and just what it means to be creative (and what is creative) are all swirling around in this together, and it's unsettling. Even scary. What goes into these models is largely a black box full of proprietary technology and algorithms that seem, to me, to fall directly in line with Ian Malcolm's (Jeff Goldblum) line from Jurassic Park: "You were so obsessed over whether you could, you didn't stop to think if you should."
I have stopped, and decided I shouldn't. It's cost me a story I was starting to really like, but luckily only one, and it was still in the outlining stage. C'est la vie. It was a brief, flawed dalliance, but I learned from it, and can publish my future books with the same pride (and clear conscience) that I've published all the others with.
What others do is up to them. We are all going to have to stop and think about could versus should with this stuff, and in some cases it won't be easy. I can't tell you what to do, only what I've done and why as an example. What I will say as advice is this: don't fall for the hype, do your research, decide for yourself and be transparent about what you decide. Just because there are loud voices telling you you have to do this or else you're f*cked doesn't make it true. Everything is up in the air and it's just as likely that they're wrong (and f*cked for publishing robot-tainted books). In my last post I cheekily referred to AI as Ultron. But guess what? Ultron lost in the end.
I want my stories to be unequivocally mine, even if they take longer and don't do everything they 'should' do according to god-knows-what marketing BS. My characters, and their stories, come from my heart, and feeling along with them. Storytelling is as old as humanity, and should come from human hearts. And belong to human hearts.
In times of change there will be mistakes. The most important thing to do when that happens is try to learn from them so they don't become permanent.
I waded into the AI waters ignorant of just how they worked, but after further research and the wider publicization of issues on just how these language models are trained (including the wide-scale scraping of content from the internet, largely without the consent of the authors) and other issues raised due to the ongoing WGA writer's strike, I can no longer in good conscience make use of any of these tools in their current form. If I don't want my work fed into these models, I can't turn around and use them when many other authors who already had their work... let's say 'inputted', for legal reasons, feel the same way. These tools are/were new and exciting, and advocated by leading voices in the self-publishing community, and I was vulnerable to a seemingly-easy way to climb out of the writing rut I was stuck in. It was easy. Too easy. But no more.
Things are changing so fast right now it's easy to get swept up in the hype and promises of quick and easy (almost magical) solutions, and that's what happened to me. There are so many issues swirling around AI in every field it touches, and there are no real laws or firm ethical boundaries set up yet. We are each having to find our own right now. Ethics, copyright and just what it means to be creative (and what is creative) are all swirling around in this together, and it's unsettling. Even scary. What goes into these models is largely a black box full of proprietary technology and algorithms that seem, to me, to fall directly in line with Ian Malcolm's (Jeff Goldblum) line from Jurassic Park: "You were so obsessed over whether you could, you didn't stop to think if you should."
I have stopped, and decided I shouldn't. It's cost me a story I was starting to really like, but luckily only one, and it was still in the outlining stage. C'est la vie. It was a brief, flawed dalliance, but I learned from it, and can publish my future books with the same pride (and clear conscience) that I've published all the others with.
What others do is up to them. We are all going to have to stop and think about could versus should with this stuff, and in some cases it won't be easy. I can't tell you what to do, only what I've done and why as an example. What I will say as advice is this: don't fall for the hype, do your research, decide for yourself and be transparent about what you decide. Just because there are loud voices telling you you have to do this or else you're f*cked doesn't make it true. Everything is up in the air and it's just as likely that they're wrong (and f*cked for publishing robot-tainted books). In my last post I cheekily referred to AI as Ultron. But guess what? Ultron lost in the end.
I want my stories to be unequivocally mine, even if they take longer and don't do everything they 'should' do according to god-knows-what marketing BS. My characters, and their stories, come from my heart, and feeling along with them. Storytelling is as old as humanity, and should come from human hearts. And belong to human hearts.
In times of change there will be mistakes. The most important thing to do when that happens is try to learn from them so they don't become permanent.
No comments have been added yet.
