How does somebody generating an AI story take away any of the personal satisfaction you derive from putting in the work to write something? If I play a video game on easy mode and you played it on hard, does that make the game less enjoyable for you because I played it on easy?
Those mass produced Air Jordans are really spitting on every cobbler.
You can go buy an entire manufactured box of nails at the hardware store. But what about the blacksmiths who put in the hours of work to craft nails in their forge?
You are so missing the point.
Gaming is a bad example to try to convince me. I'm a gamer and belong to multiple gaming forums. Several of my ongoing NaNo projects are fanfic based on games. My first NaNo win was a novelization of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook
Caverns of the Snow Witch. No, I didn't create most of the characters, nor did I create the setting. But I took the stats I rolled up and created a character from that and went beyond how most people play FF. For me it's part of a much larger world than even Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone intended. Am I violating their copyright? They're certainly entitled to think so, but the fact is that I've never actually posted that story anywhere. It was written in November 2016 and to this day it's remained on my computer. But I had the immense satisfaction of finally succeeding - after 9 years of trying and failing - at passing that 50,000-word mark (the story is actually a bit over 60,000 words).
One of my current projects is based on the computer game
King's Heir: Rise to the Throne. That's the one I worked on in 2018, that ended up with my having that 8000+-word marathon on the last day, and on December 1 when most NaNo participants just rest, I kept going. I've kept going ever since then, expanding the setting, creating new characters, and doing a massive amount of worldbuilding.
The game devs could have done that if they'd wanted to, but I suppose the game wasn't profitable enough. No matter; as with any fandom that inspires fanfic, what TPTB don't provide, fans will. There were a few details in that game that would have made a hell of a good sequel and even a prequel. The devs may have thought of using them if the sales had warranted additional games, or maybe to them it was a throwaway detail they overlooked. For me, it's a goldmine of ideas to work with, and I daresay that my version of this story is probably very different from how another person would approach it.
As
Cr0sis21 points out, writers bring their own emotions and experiences to a story. I've had life experiences that mean I approach historical fantasy in different ways than a lot of other people would approach it. But the point is that it's how
I approach it. Not some computer program pretending to be human.
Put it this way. One of my favorite TOS tie-in authors is
Greg Cox. I want to read the books
he writes, not what some AI spits out when attempting to mimic his style.
My issue comes down to the chunks. Like, how far down the rabbit hole does copyright actually cover? Years back, some people tried to copyright individual music notes but were denied. The notes arranged into a unique, new song can be.
Trying to copyright individual musical notes is like trying to copyright individual letters of the alphabet.
And speaking of copyright and songs... the first time I heard the melody that Picard plays on his Ressikan flute in the TNG episodes where it's referenced, I nearly fell off my chair laughing. That melody is such an obvious ripoff of "The Skye Boat Song" that it isn't remotely plausible that whoever came up with the idea for that episode could have composed it from scratch. They got away with it because that song is in the public domain in the U.S. Note that I'm not saying it's an unpleasant melody; it's quite lovely. But it's also not original enough to convince me that it wasn't heavily "borrowed."
If an AI grabs a couple of words from an existing work, is that enough to qualify as copyright? And even then... if it DOES... then we already have laws to take care of that.
If you don't like AI writing and don't want to use it, that's awesome. If you like AI writing and want to use it, also awesome. There's no reason those two things can't coexist.
So far we've been talking about fiction. But suppose someone has an AI spit out a medical textbook that for some reason latches onto some of the wacky "remedies" that some very ignorant people dreamed up to cure or prevent Covid? Suppose someone buys that AI-generated book and believes some of the misinformation and acts on it (doesn't have to be Covid specifically; any medical issue that is subject to having misinformation spread about it)? Now you're getting into the realm of putting people's lives at risk. Even just the widespread nonsense spread by anti-vaxxers is enough to put lives at risk, and there's probably a lot of it being peddled on Amazon as I type.
This loops me back to an earlier argument. How is that any different than my human brain reading your work, "training" my mind, and then writing something similar? It seems to me it's not better or worse for an AI to do exactly that.
We are ALL "trained" by existing works, unless you meant to tell me that you have lived in a vacuum and every single thought you put into writing is 100% original and has had absolutely no influence from another work? And if you say that, you're lying.
One difference is that you know you're not supposed to copy other people's work and pass it off as your own. An AI doesn't know this, and doesn't care. And I daresay the programmers don't care either.
I'm a hobbyist writer myself. Nothing serious, and very little even posted anywhere. I do it for fun. I love AI tools. Now on my own preference, I don't have it generate a whole work from prompts, but I do use it as something of a "writers room" to spitball ideas at. It's been immensely useful in that application.
Prompts are one thing. There are a lot of them on Pinterest, and I've jotted a few of them down because they sounded interesting. I have no idea if a human came up with them or if an AI did. But the fact is that if I use them, the story will have been written by ME. Not an AI. My own interpretations and life experiences will be going into them. An AI has none of that.
And circling back to music for a moment... do you take some of your inspiration from music? My go-to for inspiration includes Enya, Will Millar, and some of the music in the games I've played have inspired scenes and chapters and even character creation just because the music makes me envision people dancing, and then individual dancers, and those individuals need names and next thing you know, a new character is born. And that came from a medieval-era jig in a solitaire game.
I got into a conversation with one of the people who create the Jewel Match Solitaire/Match-3 games. They had some general questions about what we (on that particular gaming forum) liked about the games. I told them that the castles that we build with the gems earned by solving the puzzles inspire me to write stories. Specifically, stories that take place in another gaming company's setting.
And y'know what? They weren't upset. They were pleased that their games inspired me, because it's a good indicator that I'm going to keep buying their games because there can never be enough castles. I keep asking them to please have a space setting for one of their games, because I want to see castles on exotic planets or in orbit in space with cute little owls wearing space suits (they have a lot of owl sounds as part of the ambience). No luck so far. But I keep hoping the idea will strike someone there as a doable one.
I think it also helps that I'm always upfront about where my inspiration comes from. A few years ago I ran part of a first draft past a friend to get some feedback. She said it reminded her of Game of Thrones, and I thought, omg, I hope she doesn't think I plagiarized it - the fact is, I've never watched GoT, nor have I read the novels. And now that I know that an idea or two of mine resemble one or two of GRRM's ideas, I can never watch that show or read the books even if I should want to. I value my story too much to risk anything sneaking into it, either deliberately or subconsciously (she did play the game this is based on and said that wasn't what reminded her of GoT).
Do we, as a species, really want to farm out our creativity to AI?
Absolutely not, or at least we shouldn't. Creativity is a huge part of our evolution as a species, and if we give that up, we're screwed.
I'm reminded of an old argument on my Civilization forum about cursive writing. I'm old enough that some of the people on that forum could be my grandchildren if I'd ever had any, and it's
ingly frustrating to be confronted with people who don't see any point in learning how to pick up a pen and actually
write. They can't fathom a world where it's a necessary skill because they were born in a time when computers were everywhere, having no electricity is a temporary inconvenience, and batteries are so plentiful that they seem to grow on trees. And if they don't learn to write it, they also won't learn to read it. There's an immense amount of information that only exists in handwritten form. Our current society seems to be deliberately giving up the ability to deal with it because it's "hard" or "inconvenient."
I've done some of my NaNo sessions in longhand, on looseleaf. It takes four times as long to physically write 1667 words/day as it does to type those words, and yes, it's physically painful (thanks, arthritis and fibromyalgia). But I've been in a situation where I nearly lost my ability to write due to medical issues, and when faced with the possibility of not being able to write, I suddenly felt that I would only be semi-literate if I couldn't write. So I picked up a pencil and an old crossword puzzle book and retrained myself to print. It took months and hurt, and there are still bad days when even my printing resembles something a 6-year-old would turn out, but the creative abilities I worked hard to learn are not going to be given up. Same with writing and music (I play the organ and recorder and have composed) and needlework (3-D needlepoint and cross stitch). When I sew, it's by hand, not by machine. If I color a picture, I dig out my pencil crayons, pens, or wax crayons.
AI need not apply.
It's like asking an artist to do a work "for free" because we don't value the art or the process. To a consumer, there is little thought behind the actual process of making art. The words on the page don't automatically reflect what is done to get there. My favorite authors are ones that also write up their research and process and show me the process. I've seen my wife write and research and work to make her stories make sense for their world.
AI, ultimately, doesn't think. But, sadly, I don't know if consumers will respect that process.
This lack of respect is why I've never published my original needlepoint patterns. People don't see the hours, days, and weeks taken to figure this stuff out, stitch samples, rip it out when things go wrong, figure out how to make it come out right, and try again and again.
I used to have a home crafting business, and took commissions. People would ask for some item and we'd talk about what their ideas were and I'd tell them what I could realistically do with the materials I had available to work with and if I had the tools to make it work, and we'd get things sorted out. I'd start with a sketch, and then move to graph paper. To this day there are things I've made where the only pattern in existence is a piece of graph paper and the pattern is in pencil. And over the years I developed my own stitching style so I can tell the difference between something I made and something someone else made even if we used the same commercial pattern.
It was rather funny one day when a friend of my grandmother showed me a coaster someone had given her. She said, "I thought this was nice and maybe you could copy the pattern for your sales."
I took one look at it and started to laugh - I don't know how she got that coaster, but can only assume that someone bought a set from me at the craft fair a few months previously and gave one to each of several friends. I told her that I didn't have to copy that pattern - I'd created it.
