My spouse (Daniel Lowd) and I know very different corners of the internet. He does machine learning. I’m a writer. (As is often the case, this post is converted from a Twitter thread.)
Yesterday, my corners turned into a pitchfork and torch carrying mob, as they’ve been doing more and more often. Today, his corners noticed it.
If you’re a ML researcher who’s wondering what the hell the deal was with writers turning on a guy for running statistical analysis, the answer is: pillars of the writing community have decided it’s genuinely okay to go around saying all AI is literally theft and plagiarism.
You’d think that people whose lifeblood is words and using them effectively would care more about what a word like “plagiarism” actually means, but no. The writing community on Twitter has been calling AI literal plagiarism for months now.
I’ve watched the conversation and arguments evolve, and as far as I can tell, the writing community here is a lost cause. There are writers who are reasonable about AI and ML, but they mostly won’t talk to you here. They have private groups elsewhere to safely talk to each other.
The writing community that is embracing AI is vibrant and beautiful. People are learning new ways to write, adapting with the changing field, and just really focused on the powerful tool that AI can be for us.
Eventually, that community will spill over, out of the hidden places.
For the moment though, there is a very vocal crowd that will happily scream about AI being evil from one side of their mouth while rhetorically asking, “Why don’t they make it be useful and do [x, which is usually actually something it can do]?” from the other.
Overall, the writing community on Twitter isn’t trying to learn what AI tools are actually like, how they actually work, or what can actually be done with them. They’re trying to scare people into rejecting those tools, hoping the whole field will shrivel and die.
AI won’t shrivel and die. Writing is going to change.
If the current writing communities are going to survive, they’re either going to shrink into something that keeps clinging to the past, a sort of boutique experience.
Or they’re going to end up doing a dizzying about-face.
I really don’t know which will happen. I know I’ll have trouble forgiving the cruelty I’ve been seeing in the writing community if it ever does decide to move along into the future.
I am excited by the new writing communities that I see on the rise though.
For the moment though, as someone who’s never really wanted to hang out hiding in walled gardens, no matter how nice they are, it’s kind of lonely being a writer who loves AI.
So, hey, if any AI and ML people want some fun fiction to read and a writer to talk to, I’m here.