(P)AI in the Sky...

Here we go again, another day/week/month/year (delete as appropriate), another drama in the writing community for people to get their collective knickers in a twist over.

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

Unless you've been in some sort of hibernation for the last couple of weeks, or maybe your refrigerator toppled over onto you while you were reaching for the cheese, crushing the air out of your lungs and making it impossible to reach your phone, you can't have failed to notice the latest outcry: HWA INVOLVED IN ESSAY DEFENDING GENERATIVE AI SHOCK! On the other hand, perhaps you're just not really that interested, one of the seemingly few people on social media who didn't fly into paroxysms of rage.

The whole thing was triggered by an article, written by genre author Sephera Giron and published in a recent HWA newsletter, the title of which was Gatekeepers. If that isn't enough to give the game away, here's the short version: AI is here to stay people, and if you're one of those folk who insist that it has no place in the arts then you're nothing short of a Luddite, one of the titular Gatekeepers.

O-kayyyy...

Look, let's be clear on one thing; I'm not about to join in any dogpile and disparage Sephera Giron. I've never made her acquaintance, I'm not familiar with her writing, and she's been showing up for this whole writing gig for a lot longer than I have. But disparaging someone and disagreeing with their opinion are not the same thing, as difficult as that might be to believe in this modern era of social media rage baiting.

The excuse usually trotted out by most so-called progressives is that AI is ubiquitous, and it's here to stay. That's great, so are crab lice, genital herpes, and pineapple on pizza at least for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't want them either though. Another is that it removes what could once have been considered blocks, allowing people with dyslexia to write perfect prose, or people without hands to wield the digital equivalent of a paintbrush. When you consider the amount of people with just such conditions who have overcome them on their own terms to produce outstanding, beautiful works, such an argument becomes not only ridiculous, but offensive. 

I've seen a few people lately, trying to defend the use of generative AI in writing, and art in general, the most common lame-ass excuse being that previous generations balked at things such as the electric guitar, radio, or television. It's modern tech, you know, let's embrace it to our warm, welcoming collective bosom. Let's be under no illusions here, that's a pretty piss-weak comparison at best.

Television and radio don't create content from scratch, they're relays for media, used to broadcast human-made content; writers, producers, directors, actors. You know, the real people who pour their blood, sweat and tears into their art. The electric guitar doesn't create content, it takes the music created by an artist and makes it louder, something to be heard by a bigger audience. When Bob Dylan walked onstage with an amped-up electric six-string for the first time, people were up in arms, sure. But the only difference was that it made his protest songs louder, it didn't change or dilute the message. 

The best/worst (again, delete as appropriate) view that I saw during the whole debacle was that of a writer who asserted anyone who has a vehemently anti-AI stance is probably a woke leftie. I won't name and shame here because, let's face it, it's a stupid claim that makes the person in question come across as little more than an ill-informed twat who shits out weak jibes first thing after breakfast. Then again, I guess some people really will try to jam their asinine political views into anything. 

The main issue, and one that I feel like a lot of people have missed is that, yes, AI is pretty much ubiquitous at this point in time. It's being shoehorned into everything at the moment, perceived as a major selling point by people who should really know better, some new panacea that's going to make life easier for everyone, as well as make a few extra bucks for Zuck and his ilk. It's here, it's there, it's motherfucking everywhere, so buckle up kiddos, you'd better get used to it. Strike up the chorus of RESISTANCE IS FUTILE! like angry Daleks, while the rest of us tut to ourselves bemoaning the good old days, when it felt like iPhone owners had reached the technological nadir when that U2 album was forced upon them.

Except that isn't true, not really.

In reality, the fact is that, just because a thing exists doesn't mean that it should be used for every last single thing. 

I'm going to be clear here; AI has some valid uses, and no, I'm not even going to mention those dodgy your new best friend apps designed for lonely incels to crack one off to. It's particularly useful in scientific fields, the development of new medicines, the recognition of new cancers, the rapid computation of calculations that would take a mere mortal decades to complete. The detrimental environmental impact is a whole other argument that I'm not going to touch upon here, these are potentially valid uses for the technology, ways to make life easier and safer. 

Art, or the replication of art, is not a valid use for AI. 

There, I've set my stall out, and I'll say it louder if you want: GENERATIVE AI HAS NO PLACE IN ARTISTIC EXPRESSION. IT'S USE DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MAKE YOU AN ARTIST. It's really fucking demoralising to see someone refer to themselves as an author, only to bemoan the fact that they've only managed to release twenty books this month. It's even more galling to see a so-called author (rightly) dragged left, right and centre across social media because they've been caught plagiarising multiple indie authors word for word, slapping an AI-generated cover with their own pen name on the result and proclaiming it their own. It's astounding to witness as someone feeds a work like Van Gogh's Starry Night into an AI bot, then crows that we have the technology to interpret something to finally show it as the artist intended. I mean, seriously? 

It seems like gen AI has been fully embraced by the same crowd who would gleefully shit into a bowl, chuck a handful of sugar sprinkles on it and try to convince potential customers that it's chocolate ice cream. 

I dare say that a great many people were deriding of the printing press back in the days of Gutenberg, venting their outrage that it would give a voice to the uneducated masses. But the printing press didn't spew out words, they had to be put there by someone who thought them up first, who took the time to write, to dream, before their vision could be shared.

Generative AI doesn't work like that. It's trained unethically, via the illegitimate procuring of human work. It takes that work, the words, the poetry, the art that so many talented, gifted people have created. It ingests them, it learns from them and then it shits them out in a rearranged, bastardised form at the touch of a button.

You're probably an adult and I can't tell you what to do. Indeed I wouldn't want to, because free choice and all that. Use it if you want to, that's your choice, but don't for a second go kidding yourself; typing a couple of sentences into an AI bot doesn't make you an artist, it just makes you someone willing to plagiarise the work of real artists, to produce something soulless, spat out by a machine. It makes you the kind of dickwad who would gleefully knock out twenty 80,000-word novels in a day and try to convince other people - along with yourself - that you're a bestselling author. You're not, you're a hack, a confidence trickster, a lazy grifter pissing on the hard work of others in search for a quick buck. 

Perhaps worst of all, you're a willing participant, a witness to the slow, agonising death of art and expression.

That's what I think, anyway. Until next time, look after yourselves. Eat well, drink well, sleep well, and read more books. Real books. Especially books written by indie authors. 

'Bye for now. 

- L