"Strawberry Mango Forklift", by Catriona

Do you see AI as a blessing or a curse for you as a writer?

I genuinely couldn't think how to illustrate this post, so thank you, S J Rozan, for sharing Ken Chang's Fb post earlier today.

AI is an irrelevance for me as a writer, as far from impinging on my work as drink-driving laws impinge on my commute. (I write at home and I don't drink.)

Two caveats to that, though: I was talking about generative AI trained on large language corpora made up of stolen words, not those algorithms that make bone-headed suggestions about what I might buy; and I was talking about craft only. 

The bigger question - the impact of AI on whether I can make a living as a writer - depends on how much people care about the difference between created work and extruded product. I hope they care enough.

I think they do, some of them. Have you seen those silly photos that pop up on social media, purporting to be amazing landscapes from the far reaches of the world? Or unbelievably (this is a clue) adorable animals doing incredible (this is another one) things? Or X-rated creepy humanoid toddlers that have come pattering up out of Uncanny Valley to haunt our dreams forever, that we're supposed to find cute (but only ever make me wonder what would happen if I used the algorithm to Google "exorcists near me"?)

You know how it goes. The original poster gushes about how wonderful the world is. Someone in the comments points out that the image is AI-generated. OP, stung, says "So what?" Someone else in the comments points out that faked images don't show how wonderful the world is. OP, really annoyed now, says the reality-based commenters are spoiling everyone's harmless fun. And then a photographer pops in to talk about how much fun it is to pay their rent and OP blocks everyone and goes off to fume until a photo of a rainbow-coloured mountain appears on their feed and soothes them.

No judgement.

That was a lie.

So, like I said, our future as writers depends on readers. And, speaking as a reader, which every writer also is, I think we're going to be okay. How could someone care enough about justice and humanity to read crime fiction but be fine with the grubby business of LLM AI?

It's the output cheating, as well as the input theft, that devalues it all for me. The dishonesty. I was never very impressed with the Turing Test - where a human interacts linguistically with a hidden entity and tries to guess whether it's another human or a machine. The machine wins if the human gets it wrong and the human wins if they spot the fake. I always thought the TT would only be interesting if the machine had acquired its language after five years' exposure to babytalk, Sesame Street and seventeen different accents of five different languages from Grandma to the bus driver. Otherwise it's about as relevant as a Vaudeville horse that reads its trainer's cues and fakes arithmetic, about as meaningful as a psychic who cold-reads a customer, as soon as the money's changed hands. I mean, even Alan Turing himself called it "the imitation game" and knew it was unrelated to the question of machines thinking. 

Similarly, I think the grim, capitalistic emptiness of generative AI product makes it uninteresting, even if it gets so good at the imitation game that it tricks people. It's porn in place of sex. It's flavouring pretending to be flavour, colouring rather than vibrancy, preservatives mimicking freshness. It produces the same feelings in me as the fact that farmers grow food and instead of people eating it, big corporations buy it, strip it down, use some of the parts to make food-like substances and sell that to consumers who gobble it up along with antacids and laxative pills. (One argument in favour of industrial food is that it's cheap. My response is: not as cheap as it would be if the major shareholders could struggle by with just the one beach-house each; and also, cheap food so people can stay poor isn't a great argument; not to mention that it's not cheap in a society where you need a GoFundMe to cover your insulin.)

In conclusion, my question about generative AI in the arts is "Who, if anyone, is making the money?". It's no kind of surprise ending to reveal that I think it should be the artists.

Cx