I am so profoundly disappointed by how pillars of the writing community have chosen to become ringleaders for pitchfork wielding mobs, unthinkingly screaming “theft!” & “plagiarism!” against anything with the slightest whiff of AI near it.
You’re making writers look ridiculous.
It’s harder to say “this algorithm was trained on data collected unethically” than “thief! plagiarism!”
It’s also less likely to rile people up into a hate mob.
So the real question is whether people care more about being accurate or about scaring those who disagree with them.
One of the biggest problems I see in the writing community when it comes to AI is that every conversation is immediately shut down by objections to how LLMs were trained.
Okay. So, maybe that’s a problem worth discussing.
But also, LLMs are here. People use them.
If you won’t have any conversation about LLMs other than that you’re angry about how they came to be, then you’re going to cut yourself out of the changes happening in the world.
And those changes are going to happen. They’re already happening.
If you want to be involved in discussing where LLMs go, how they get used, and the intricacies of the ethics involved, then you need to do better than calling them plagiarism and washing your hands of the issue.
At the very least, lots of people don’t agree with that.
Repeating that LLMs are plagiarism over and over won’t convince anyone who disagrees. You might effectively scare people who disagree out of talking to you. The writing community is doing a pretty good job of that.
But it just means a new shadow community is growing elsewhere.
I’ve basically just jumped ship from a writing community I’ve known for 20 years in order to tell the ML/AI community that not all writers hate AI.
So… that’s a feeling.
I don’t know how bad this is gonna get. I know other writers who dared speak up got death threats.
Human creativity isn’t so fragile that the use of AI tools will break it.
I believe in the power of human imagination more than that.