This is a quick post. If you’re a writer or writer adjacent, you’ve likely heard about NaNoWriMo’s recent stance on AI contributions. Stephen Blackmoore has some key thoughts as his books were outright stolen to train the Generative AI now sponsoring Nano.
What are my thoughts on AI? First, it’s not really what most folks are calling AI is not, really, AI- it’s an advanced mockigbird system designed to take in information and extrapolate it in expansive ways. There are other writers with more expertise on this, but it’s algorithmic learning taken a step further. Where does that step go? I’m going to paraphrase my friend Charles here: When it helps me make a fill in or select a mask that would take me hours to do by hand, it’s helpful. When it steals my work just so managers can fire and replace people like me, fuck that.
And I can’t say I haven’t used Adobe’s AI tools. The smart masking on Lightroom? The ability to have it select the sky and be right 90% of the time? Saved me hours of work. But I’m still the one making the creative decisions. I can decide the AI’s completely misread the scene and use the ole paintbrush and select tools as needed. But I’ve not used the ‘hey, make a picture for me‘ feature.
The current crop of AI – like companies sponsoring NaNoWriMo – are all centered around the “That Guy” principle. Imagine you’re a rich techbro investor who sees art as a product, and nothing more. You go to your writer friend and say, “Hey, I have a great idea for a book. You write it, and se can split the profits.” When the writer – who’s struggling and can’t fail upward like a rich techbro investor in America can – says “No” – the techbro gets angry. He creates a company and tells his folks, “I don’t care how you do it, but I want to put in a prompt and have it write a novel.”
Congrats. You’ve got the current form of AI. To get to this point, though, you need data centers doing massive environmental damage, gigs of stolen copyrighted content, and people who love the idea of finally having a company that is nothing but a C-Suite getting exec level stock bonuses while typing, “Generate Content” into a keyboard. Philosophy Tube has a great episode on the ethics of AI (Though, if you can afford it, watch the version not censored by YT on Nebula). And it’s the exact opposite of what NaNoWriMo was intended to do.
Back in the day, I was really proud I’d ‘won’ NaNoWriMo. It showed I could dig in and really write. I proudly displayed my winner sticker – and still have it here. I found a bunch of writing partners thanks to this (Pandemic did a number on that writing group but, still…) This gave me a lot of confidence. This helped me realize what worked, and what didn’t work, when trying to really get my wordcount up. Now, with everything that went wrong over the last few years, any ‘winners’ will have asterisks by their names. Which is a shame, and sickening, and a sign of the world we’ve let people build around us.
I hope, one day, this means something again.
Biomechanoid Blues 