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.
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.
“The Fear of AI killed Shaxpir” is fewer characters, explains concisely the who and what of the article, and any idiot can infer that Shaxpir is some sort of AI related tool from context. Moreover, my ignorance about what exactly Shaxpir is would spur my interest in the article, instead of driving me away with a click ait title.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Won’t someone think of the poor scribes that the printing press will put out of a job?
Look, I get the arguments, but they are wrong. Even “stealing content” is completely wrong. It’s taken down, shuffled around, and recombined. It works pretty much the same way as human learning, just with fewer layers. The people who oppose AI are afraid of it, because they don’t truly understand how it works. Case in point: OP, in this thread.
Let’s say your borrow a bunch of books from the local library and read them in order to refine your writing skills. Later, you’ll write a book that is more or less inspired by all of the books you’ve previously read. Do you owe something to the hundreds of authors you got inspired by? Even if you bought those books, do you think the other authors would could still demand something extra because clearly those books weren’t really used for mere entertainment. Instead, they were used to train a new writer.
If it hasn’t happened already, I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a lawsuit about this sort of thing. Then the judge would need to figure out if there’s a difference between a human reading a book for entertainment and training to become a writer.
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.
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.
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.
As someone who has been obsessed with learning about art, technology, and business my entire life, your attitude reflects the dollar-seeking and exploitative behaviors in upper corporate America I have seen and dealt with many times. It’s one of the reasons why I left it.
It’s not hard to be an artist. Every human being with the ability to express themselves in some way is an artist. You are cheaply wanting to skip the steps of either developing your own skills or hiring someone else to create art for you. You are contributing to a world where artists are learning that they should not openly share their creations because it’ll be taken from them, ripped into pieces, and used for profit while they get nothing. These discussions are happening right now.
Your comment doesn’t appear to apply to this article at all. It explicitly states that this tool was neither stealing copyrighted art nor a billionaire funded venture.
In this case it really was the unfounded fear of AI that killed a useful tool via misplaced outrage.
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.
This is sad but understandable. Authors, most of whom don’t make enough money to call it a career, are being kicked from every side. In just the last handful of years, you have AI companies training on their works, companies demonstrating they’re open to replacing writers with AI, the Internet Archive giving their books away for free, states trying to ban more and more books, etc. When you’re kicked enough, everything looks like a threat.
Similar to music, I imagine there’s going to need to be some shift in the industry but I don’t think we’ve seen what that is yet. Patreon, physical merch, and live performances just don’t seem to work as well for authors as they do for musicians.
That being said, this particular site is clearly fair use and I’m surprised AI was even mentioned anywhere in the conversation.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but it’s not the industries that needs to change, but rather the paradigm of our economic system. Advanced technologies are not going anywhere, are only going to get more advanced, and are only going to be regulated in ways to continue funneling money to the wealthy. Anybody who says technology will never be able to do {x} is fighting a losing battle.
@jrburkh Thing is, you can't just tell a guy who's trying to scrape together enough for food that "We need to change the paradigm of our economic system." That's not a thing that can be done quickly or effectively right now, and writers need to protect their income NOW. The only thing that can be done is for them to aggressively protect their rights while lobbying the governments so they don't die while waiting for reform.
I don't really understand the tool itself especially as I am not a writer, but if you’re going to make this argument, you have to actually make the much harder argument that after a decade of the gig economy we should trust these tech bros to not lobby against mitigating the downside, or to trust institutions to disregard their lobbying
The tool is kinda bad for writers, rather than good, but it was totally done right. It didn’t do anything to republish or redistribute at all. The complaints are akin to someone objecting to a critic rating their book by objective means.
Shit, if anyone gave a shit about my books, I’d godmother volunteer them for the guy to use.
darn, this is kinda sad. This is like research on existing works, rather than generating new ones and potentially exploiting them without attribution. It’s like another way of consuming and interpreting the content, much like how we read/watch books/movies and interpret them. We really are moving too quickly and it’s hard to have these conversations in a meaningful way.
It’s like watching the MPAA try to oppose Napster at all costs instead of realizing that’s where things are inevitably headed and building something better that they have a piece of.
Except now instead of a multi billion dollar trade organization ceding the future to others it’s a bunch of individuals who generally don’t understand the technology beyond their fear of it (in many cases as a result of their own efforts in writing fearful things about it for decades before it arrived) shooting themselves in the foot while organizing their outrage on social media, and ironically in so doing ensuring that they will not have their own place in the future.
From board room mistakes to bored zoomer mistakes.
Statistical analysis of existing literary works is certainly not the same sort of thing as generating new literary works based on models trained on old ones.
Almost all of the people who are fearful that AI is going to plagiarize their work don’t know the difference between statistical analysis and generative artificial intelligence. They’re both AI, and unfortunately in those circles it seems anything even AI-related is automatically bad without any further thought.
I wouldn’t characterize statistical analysis as “AI”, but sadly I do see people (like those authors) totally missing the differences.
I’m generally hesitant about AI stuff (particularly with the constant “full steam ahead, ‘disrupt’ everything!” mindset that is far too prevalent in certain tech spheres), but what I saw described in this article looks really, really cool. The one bit I’m hesitant about is where actual pages are presented (since that is actually presenting a segment of the text), but other than that it’s really sad to see this project killed by a massive misunderstanding.
There’s a subset of artificial intelligence called unsupervised learning which is a form of statistical analysis in which you let an agent find patterns in data for you, as opposed to trying to drive the agent to a desired outcome. I’m not 100% sure that is what the website author was using, but it sounded pretty close to it. It’s extremely powerful and not anything like the generative LLMs most people now think of when the words AI are thrown around.
I agree though, it sucks project got killed it seemed super interesting and insightful.
And yet it was attacked. The reality is content creators have only contempt for the concept of fair use. Another example is copyright strikes on unfavorable reviews.
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