I do understand why so many people, especially creative folks, are worried about AI and how it’s used. The future is quite unknown, and things are changing very rapidly, at a pace that can feel out…
So THIS is the article that has all those writers on Bluesky ranting.
For me, I don’t see HOW this is a useful tool at all. It’s… a word counter. It counts the number of times you use a word. Someone had a screencap of his “vividness” rankings on words, and it had placed “wintery” at a higher score than “permafrost.” Why? How does it know that one word is more vivid than the other? what’s the standard here? This sort of thing is very subjective.
And he starts with Vonnegut’s shape of stories, but an LLM can’t recognize rising and falling action so how could it do such a comparison?
Honestly, the WHOLE thing sounds like he’s trying to create a formula for good writing, and you can’t pin down good writing like that.
This is not a useful tool. It’s a tool that will get people caught in the weeds like they do with narrative outlines like the Hero’s Journey and lists of tropes. It will churn out a bunch of writers people don’t like who can’t understand why they don’t catch on when they are following all the rules.
A tool called Shaxpir creates a score sheet of literature, and many authors don’t like that.
Saved you a click.
Also, down-vote click bait so it doesn’t trend on Lemmy, please.
How many people have even heard of Shaxpir? If that had been in the title instead of “useful AI tool” I probably wouldn’t have cared as I’d never heard of it.
AI people just love to disingenuously claim that anybody who criticizes AI “fears” the technology. This is their way of dismissing all critics or skeptics as luddites, and is usefully based entirely on their desire to profit somehow off of the trend.
Artists don’t “fear” AI… They simply want big tech billionaires to stop stealing their copyrighted art works or other intellectual property in the hopes of generating infinite junk “content”.
If you want artists to embrace AI, then you’d better be willing to stay paying them to license their artwork for AI training.
AI made creating art accessible for the masses. What these artists are doing now is going to limit it’s creation to corporations. Great.
Art is already accessible to the masses. It was accessible to cavemen. It’s called picking up a pencil, rock, mud, paper, paint, macaroni, feathers, literally anything in your world and making something of it. Everyone has the ability to be an artist. What the AI bros are complaining about is that they want an easy and instant way to replace years and lifetimes of perfecting one’s craft, while piggybacking off of and stealing said labor to profit from it.
I think you’re being dramatic and playing right into the hands of corporations who wants to control generated art.
Stealing people’s hard work to spit out pale copies isn’t making art “accessible for the masses.” Artists worked hard to be able to produce the art AI spits out.
There are also financial incentives to oppose the adoption of content generating AI. As the spinning jenny replaced hand spinning and electric trolleys replaced horse drawn streetcars, there was always strong financially motivated opposition. How is it different this time?
How is it different this time?
Mechanical inventions of the past were invented, designed and implemented by people who had a unique idea for how to better accomplish some task. If part(s) of their invention was already patented by someone else, then they would be required to either license that patent or find another novel approach.
Machine learning AI doesn’t work that way. In order to produce any result (let alone a good one) it must be “trained” on a dataset of other people’s works, or peoples faces, or whatever (depending on the desired result). All i ask is that people (artists, writers, musicians, etc) are fairly and regularly compensated when their copyrighted work is used to train AI.
Anything else is exploitation on an industrial scale.
Because at some point we will automate people completely out of jobs, and then they will have nowhere to go. Our system isn’t set up to handle that.
People are already struggling to find jobs with a liveable wage.
Still waiting on that copyright infringement evidence all of the anti-ai people claim is out there.
My brother in Christ, if I steal all of your writings and art when you’re not looking, chop them up, eat them, and shit them out, they are still your creations-- just now covered in shit, garbled up, and without your original thoughts and intentions put behind them. If I then sell the pile of shit to someone, I am profiting from your labor.
I would be less inclined to hate this if I got some form of royalty or even some form of compensation for the hours and hours I’ve spent planning, creating, editing, and studying to make my things.
My brother in Christ, if you can prove you have ever had an original thought in your life, one that hasn’t been influenced by something that someone said before, I’ll eat all the shit. All of it. Every piece of undigested corn. I’m confident in saying that because I know you can’t. We are all products of our environment, and we can all attribute every thought we’ve had to some experience that we’ve had in our life that involved others. You aren’t as unique as you think you are. All the people that told you that were only trying to protect your ego. You are a combination of events that all lead up to this moment, and all of those events are open source. You don’t own anything. No words. No brush strokes. No ideas. All of them come into your mind because you have experienced aspects of this world. Sure, your own combination of experiences may be unique to you, but no more than the data used to train AI. The idea that humans have some monopoly on original thought is pure hubris. We’ve been stealing IP since we learned to draw on cave walls.
Yeah, but that’s not what this tool was? It analyzed writing styles, not copied them.
That’s also what art AI does. It analyzes art styles, then creates unique works based on its “inspiration”
This doesn’t make anything from it, though. It gives you word counts, like how much passive voice was used and how many -ly adverbs. There’s nothing unique created from it.
That’s honestly the issue being pointed out here - people see “AI” and have knee jerk reactions, without seeing how is being used here. I’m completely against AI being used to make “art” or do writing, but that’s not what what this tool did at all. But folks assumed it did.
Yeah I’m totally with you.
I would even go as far as saying: an AI that trains on released books and can write new texts shouldn’t be seen as bad either. Yes there is a lingering question about compensating writers in some way, but looking at how these tools work basically makes you realize, it will never generate a text as good as an original writer on its own. It can only ever be less than all the median of all the works collected. And it will not store the original works, it only learns the style they are written in.
And I’m kind of scared as well. If we don’t make AI happen and figure out the right monetization systems for it, another country will, and they might give zero fucks and start crawling the works anyway. We’ll just lose the upper hand on the development.
And I am saying that as someone who will be on the other end too, soon. I am a music producer, developer and I do 3d compositions. I am a bit scared of what’s about to change but mostly just stoked to see what different aspects of my work will become more and less important.
I still believe change is good. And I always will.
