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This time, I’m not posting late. As I mentioned at my Facebook page, I'm switching from posting on weekends to during the weekdays. As of now, I’ll be posting Mondays. Google Analytics has been showing me that it's a time many of you prefer and so I want to make the timing as convenient for you as possible. Now for today’s post . . .
Back in December, the admin of a Facebook writers' group I belong to announced a new rule for the group: no posting of anything done by an AI writer or AI artist. She gave several reasons why. Reasons I mostly agree with, including the jeopardising of writers’ and artists’ careers. Since around that same time, there's been a lot of online controversy over AI content creators which include both writer software and artist software. You'd think most writers and artists (digital and freehand) would be hella angry over this new technology that, basically, does your work for you. Well, I don’t know about most but I can say that many are angry, myself included.
Yes, there are some writers and artists who actually embrace AI content creator software. Some of them really annoy me, making me feel like they’re selling us out. For instance, according to an article at “The Verge”, one indie author, Jennifer Lepp, uses AI writer software to write her novels and she seems to take it all too lightly, saying her work is “just words . . . So what if a computer wrote them?” My answer: if a computer wrote them then you didn’t write the book! Yet, elsewhere in the article, she talks about how the software can basically doom writers when it advances in the future!
Sure, like with just about any technology, an AI writer can perhaps have some things that can help a human writer without taking over their whole job. But relying totally on it, as we’ve already done with too much computer technology, is suicidal to our careers. The content made by this software has been selling and publishing both via the indie route as well as the traditional publishing one. However, it’s not only destroying our careers and value as writers. It’s also destroying the relationship between us human writers and readers.
The most popular AI writer software right now is ChatGPT by the tech research company, OpenAI. According to AI analyst Alberto Romero, ChatGPT is the most intelligent, most human-like, chatbot to date, one that can write your content for you. And, of course, many big businesses will, if they haven’t already, take advantage of it. They’re always looking to save money and make bigger profits all at human beings' expenses, including human content creators’.
It's obvious that, as with almost any other technology going as far back as the Industrial Revolution, AI creator software can put human creators out of work. But it does much more than that. For one, it takes away human creators' meaning in life. Creativity is what many of us artists and writers were born with and meant to use. We were meant to distribute our work (including selling it) to society, to our fellow human beings. When AI writing and art are chosen over those by human beings, it's wasting those human beings’ creative skills and talents causing the two to stagnate, to get put and locked away in the closet, if you will. AI creator software does this because it makes the content it puts out too easy to access and so a lot cheaper. The majority of people are going to go for the cheapest art and literature they can get.
Another thing AI creator software does, and perhaps even more significantly, is cut off the connection between human creator and human audience. When a person purchases an AI-produced work, an anti-social attitude in the consumption of that work develops. The work only fulfills that person's desires who has no concern for the one who created it because the creator is a machine, a non-living entity. So, that person has no sense of a fellow human having produced the work.
So, what do we human creators do during this time of AI apocalypse, or AIpocalypse? We do what every group of people whose rights have been violated do: campaign for human writer and artists' rights. We boycott computer produced art and we support our human creators by consuming their work. Or we go underground. What I mean by that is that if the majority won't buy our creations, we buy each other’s creations as well as sell them to those people who appreciate our work for being made by human beings like themselves.
Maybe the dawn of the AIpocalypse can't be stopped. But we human creators, no matter how small in number on this technology infested planet, can still support each other in our work either monetarily or with encouragement.
Are you bothered by AI writer or artist software?
Until next time . . .
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