A.I., or LLMs, are probably here to stay and are going to have a massive impact on publishing and most other industries. Tech companies are investing enormous sums of money and once beloved events are putting their feet in it and losing the goodwill of people who once loved them. The technology is advancing at an impressive rate and in a short time, what we have now is going to feel like a child’s toy. So now seems like a good time to have opinions about this stuff.
First off, given the number of generated images on this website, you might assume that I’m all in on A.I. It’s a fair guess given the evidence, and when I did all of it, I probably assumed I would be too. But that turns out not to be the case and one thing I’m going to be doing during my writing challenge is removing all A.I. generated content from my website. So stake in the ground time: I am not in favour of A.I. generated content.
When GPT 4 was released, I tried it out, made some things, and it was fun. I made images of characters I was writing about, made the headers and logos on the website, I even tried using it to write some stories and that was… interesting. It certainly boosted “my” word count to new heights, but it wasn’t fun. Sure, I could look at it and congratulate myself for “writing” so much, but it didn’t feel like writing and that’s a problem when the main reason I have always had for writing is because I enjoy it.
It was easy enough to make that decision for myself and my work: there will be no A.I. because it detracts from my enjoyment of writing. It gets a lot more difficult to draw lines around using it for other things.
A.I. Generated Images
This falls into (at least) two categories:
- Images I generate myself
- Images other people generate
It’s easier to say that I will not generate images myself and instead hire artists to do it. But what if they use A.I. generated images? Am I going to tell an artist what they can and can’t do?
The Quality Conundrum
As things currently stand, it’s relatively simple to point out a piece of writing or artwork that has been generated by A.I. They have a look about them. But we are in the infancy of these new tools and it seems reasonable to expect that one day the content created by A.I. will be indistinguishable from work created by a human. What happens then?
One day I think it will be possible for a reader to go on Amazon and type in things they like in a story and have a unique book generated for them that ticks all those boxes. It will be their ideal book and no human will have been involved. I think they will enjoy that book.
The same will probably be true of films and other mediums.
Trying to prevent that future feels like attempting to stand in front of a tidal wave and barely factors into my decision making now. Apart from the fact I’ve decided that I don’t want to ride that wave. It seems inevitable, but that doesn’t mean I have to contribute to it.
There are a lot of things that I can’t prevent that I choose not to take part in. This is just another one to add to that long list.
What my decision really comes down to is my enjoyment of the writing process. I don’t have any illusions about success. The only thing I am entitled to is the work, and with that in mind, shouldn’t I want to make the work as enjoyable as possible?
What it comes down to
With writing I have decided not to use A.I. because I enjoy the process less when doing so. With other forms of A.I. I have decided not to use it because I have decided I don’t want to contribute to the inevitable future where a shared culture no longer exists.