Reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic

More on AI.

READING: I recently found out about a Harvard student who asked AI to “translate” a book from “Old English” so that it would be “easier to understand” (why was this person at a University at all, let alone such a prestigious one as Harvard? it is clear that they do not possess a brain, or an eagerness or even a willingness to use one if they had it…) The book in question? “A Clockwork Orange”. As a friend put it when they heard of this outrage, “I don’t remember The Droog’s Tale” from my days of studying Chaucer”. Honestly, if anything written before the second half of the twentieth century is now “Old English” and incomprehensible, we’re cooked as a reading species.

WRITING: In current news, the Anthropic class action lawsuit is practically over (bar the shouting); they stole ALL of my books but only the ones “registered” with the Library of Congress for copyright purposes were deemed “eligible (after all the years that writers were told that that circled C in the frontmatter of your books was the copyright statement that mattered and that you didn’t need to “register” it anywhere for it to be a valid claim to your authorship and therefore bloody well eligible for you to claim damages on if that was infringed, which it WAS by Anthropic). Of all of my stolen words, less than a dozen works fell into the “eligible” bucket, and I am (theoretically; I am not holding my breath for this) supposed to get SOME money for this – but as I said in an earlier blog post I’m in two minds about this, it’s really blood money, and also, the wrong lesson has been learned. Not that it was evil for them to do this, but that ho hum it’s not okay, really, but everything has a price and everything can be bought and here’s your thirty pieces of silver you yappy writers and now shut up about it and we’ll find another way to exploit your work without paying before some court drags us for THAT. People are bitter about this, I tell  you. Bitter.

Another WRITING angle – the proliferation of software that claims to be able to “detect” AI writing and sheer amount of STUPID false positives that this software engenders (someone fed it a portion of the AMerican Declaration of Independence, and the idiotic thing declared it (at least partially) AI-created…) There’s a reason that AI can write like me – it was raised on a diet of my own words, and it is very very good at imitating. And now we’re at a point where a genuine living human writer is somehow supposed to PROVE that they aren’t an AI construct, and (a) I *resent* that, from the deepest BONES of me, and (b) just what would “serve” as proof? I don’t keep endless drafts cluttering my hard drive or my office. *I NEVER HAD TO*. And that’s for novel length stuff. When I write a short story I don’t do drafts or notes or any kind of paper trail. I write the goddamn story. So how do I now “prove” its provenance in the face of being tarred with the AI accusation, if it happens? How do I preserve my reputation and my vocation, and why do I have to fight a computer to do it?

And now for the ARITHMETIC part, and it’s sobering enough. In this piece  the author talks about the end of the “working writer” paradigm as we know it. The money quote here is “There is more a general, immediate economic issue that is a lot more concerning to me than the spiritual one. I am less threatened by the presence of bad writing created by robot-equipped dullards than I am by the specter of there being no way to make a living as a writer at all.”

That… may be happening.

And the whole idea that the foundation of who and what I am, something I have built a life and a lifetime on, is currently being rendered obsolete and valueless by machines… is slowly killing me.