Twitter is destructive to my brain

[dragovianknight]

And I know it, but I keep going back.

The current outrage in my corner of the twittersphere is over Clarkesworld closing submissions due to a glut of AI generated submissions. And while I have no doubt the Clarkesworld situation is caused by people doing the "push button, generate crap, submit" cycle over and over (possibly right down to automating submissions), the level of vitriol - and the refusal to conceive of any nuance between "generate crap" and "lovingly pen every word with blood taken from the author's own veins" - is giving me an undue amount of stress.

And honestly, it's less because of the people arguing that AI is unethical, and more the ones falling back on arguments about "human connection" and "art and writing need to have meaning that only a human can create." I guarantee I'm not here to do more than (hopefully) be entertaining for a few hours, and I don't want the burden of meaningful literature pushed on me.

I don't need more stress on top of my depression, thanks.

Comments

[darthneko]

UGH, yes. omg, I spent an 8 hour car ride with my dad once arguing that with him - he was absolutely insistent that "art" (visual or written) had to contain "meaning" and theme and be some existential missing piece of the puzzle to human existence or it wasn't art. This from a man who reads comic books, ffs!

(I dragged him to see the Avengers the next day to make my point. He walked out of the theater 2 hours later and admitted that yes, sometimes art is just there to be entertaining, and that's all it needs to do.)

SMH for the stark black and white crowd where everything has to have "meaning" and "connection". The things I love best when I'm consuming entertainment very rarely have "meaning" - they're just fun. That's what I aspire to create, something that someone reads and says "that was fun" or "that hit my id kink" and remembers fondly later and maybe even re-reads on occasion. I don't want to be the next damned bookclub sensation.

[dragovianknight]

Exactly. And I'm not knocking things with themes and meanings, that's just not what I aspire to write.

[cmcmck]

As a poet, I suppose meaning usually comes with the territory but it can also be fun.

[konsectatrix]

I think "fun" is an important and meaningful part of human experience. AI (not even really AI it's just a glorified cross between autofill and a chatbot), cannot engage in play.

So yeah, that thing you imagined and pulled out of your butt in a half an hour is a tiny miracle that AI cannot replicate. Your brain is being mean to you and I object.

[dragovianknight]

Yeah, but it's not the AI I feel bad about. I've played with ChatGPT, thinking it could help with outlines; it comes up with the most trite garbage imaginable, a combination of "I've taken your summary and Mad Libs'd it into an outline format" and glorious insights like "they face many obstacles that strengthen their love".

What's upsetting me right now are the people who are so afraid of AI producing an entertaining story (it can't) that they're decrying simple entertainment and insisting on human insight and meaning.

This is just another instance of my objection to every plotting book that wants me to decide my Theme and Character Wound at the start, really. Don't fucking tell me I have to write deeper than "these things happened, they're hopefully entertaining things."

[queenoftheskies]

Most of the people I've seen discussing AI art and writing are opposed because AI is trained on the work of others and steals from that work. So many people have found pieces of their own original artwork and fiction embedded in AI work. One artist found most of a piece of hers in AI art and even highlighted the area where her signature was stricken out.

[msstacy13]

Yeah, it's mostly just high-tech plagiarism...

[dragovianknight]

And that's a totally different argument from the ones I'm seeing, which are more about how art is about fundamental human interaction and not just the end product, to the point where I've seen people talking about ghost writing as another "invalid" way to produce books.

Though spending any amount of time with generative text AIs will show that they can't maintain a coherent narrative for more than a few hundred words, if that. It's fancy predictive text.

[ladyjax]

I read the Clarkesworld thread and totally sympathize with the fact that on the submissions side, suddenly getting a bunch of AI generated work screwed up the process. What I found interesting was how many people were suggesting "AI to fight AI" and you could tell Neil Clarke was kind of pissed and overwhelmed while still trying to be gracious. I think he was trying to communicate to people that they already had a process and it made things harder with this new thing, which a lot of folks were missing while they were rhaspsodizing about meaning and the like.

And I'm not gonna lie, I really like things that entertain me just by existing. Hence the reason why I am taking myself to see Cocaine Bear at some point. I don't need it to be art, I need what it says on the tin: cocaine and a bear.

[dragovianknight]

I also sympathize with Clarkesworld, because sorting submissions for a magazine like that is already a thankless job. And I'm sure it's more difficult when you can't look at the lack of grammar and punctuation on page one for a rejection, and instead have to read far enough to realize the story isn't just going off the rails, it has no rails because the AI is just predicting the next token, rather than understanding what it's writing.

I certainly sympathize with the fear that AI will take all our jobs, because such is the nature of our capitalist society.

On the other hand, I'm already lagging behind the people who can write fast, the people using ghost writers, the people who can churn out whatever the latest formulaic "hot thing" is because they don't need a connection to what they write, their brains are just wired to churn out words according to a by-the-numbers plot. I also remember when the 3D art artists use to mock-up scenes so they don't have to work out difficult perspectives was "cheating" and "not real art". I remember "is digital art real art"? I remember when "real" published authors were complaining about indie publishing and how the peasants were going to flood the market with crap and nobody would be able to sell books...and a lot of people did flood the market with crap, nobody read the crap, and the crap sank to to the bottom of Amazon's virtual book pile.

I saw someone ask "but what if the AI actually produced a good story?" and get dogpiled with "that doesn't matter because the AI doesn't have a SOUL" type replies. That's what really got my back up, because "does this entertain me?" is EXACTLY what I want from my entertainment, no existential crises required.

[white_aster]

I was just thinking of this, because I'm still over on Tumblr, and both the art and writing Tumblrsphere are losing their kneejerky minds over AI. I can see the ethical "you used my art to train something that then takes over my niche, and that is unethical/super rude" argument, but the people who start going on about how dare we use these tools because anything they touch will be crap because art is a sacred human touched sparkly unicorn...I'm like, "I'm sorry, have you LOOKED at any fanfic site ever?" Please to not be getting all hoity toity over Capital-A-Art when we're mostly using it for "more of this but different, please" entertainment.

[dragovianknight]

This. So much this. (And really, it's not just fanfic; most commercial genres are precisely "more of this, but different", particularly romance.)

And I'm willing to bet most of them have not sullied their purity to actually test these tools, because if they had they'd know exactly how far from "press button, get novel" ChatGPT and its ilk are.