What they took

Circling back to what is, for us creatives, one of THE most bloodcurdling and horrifying stories of our times. AI.

Some or even all of you know by now that companies such as Anthropic have used all of the things that all of us ever wrote to “Train” their AI software… how to write. You might have heard about Anthropic itself because of the landmark class action lawsuit, and possibly because it has also been credited with having been used to provide shall we say less than completely accurate information with which to target missile strikes in Iran. Stick a pin in that aforementioned lawsuit for a moment, we’ll circle back to that. Let’s just pause for a moment on the whole training thing and where it has led, and where it is leading.

There are now apps and random pieces of software which you can use to plug a piece of writing into and then receive a percentage probability of how likely that piece is to be AI-generated. Several people I know – several writers – got curious enough to plug something of their own into that app. It returned results that their work was anything between 40% and 90% AI-generated. Some of those pieces were written before AI was a gleam in a programmer’s eye. In a dramatically weird boomerang effect the software-judging software decided that it was the person who wrote like the machine… and not the machine, which was force-fed the person’s original writing and who then regurgitated it resulting in the topsy turvy black-is-white world, which writes like the person. Stories written last millennium, published in the early ‘Oughts, are slammed as being AI, on the say-so of other machines. Writers who have used what is now touted as telltale signs of AI writing – things like em-dashes and the like – long before the frakking AI monster began to make use of such things are now being accused of PLAGIARISING THE AI. Writers like me who have never ever ever used any kind of AI in our writing (for the love of GOD I don’t even KNOW how to use stupid ChatGPT) are all at risk of being accused of AI usage and therefore – and here’s the really burning thing – somehow devalued by it. They used our work to train the machine which they they tasked with writing and then the writing produced by the machine was… not great… and then instead of turning around and respecting human creativity they chose to demean that creativity by somehow making human creators guilty of… of something… so that they could make the AI generated slop more worthy. What are you accusing us of? Plagiarising the machine that plagiarised us?  Plagiarising… ourselves?

AI is creeping into education and AI generated essays are being handed in as students’ “work”, resulting in those students having learned absolutely nothing – not what to think, and certainly not how to think or why to think. We are all being chewed up and masticated into a tasteless and homogeneous pablum.

Information sources scraped for “AI summaries” are basically losing their audiences (who don’t go to the source, they just use the summary, which in turn depletes the sources’ ability to make an income or a living at what they do) which means that less and less original information is being actually provided, or made accessible, on the Internet, for instance.

When does AI start “teaching” itself on AI generated content, completing the circle of ignorance and greed, and leaving the human mind and heart and spirit out of it all completely?

Where does it stop?

Coming back to that class action lawsuit. There’s supposedly a settlement in the offing of maybe $3000 per “infringed” work that you can lay claim to (and trust me I am not holding my breath on that). There are of course caveats. This only applies to works with copyright registered with the Library of Congress in the USA – which means several things, notably that plenty of non-USA-based authors are shit out of luck, and that a great many of the works that appear on the scraped-works lists… never had their copyright OFFICIALLY registered with that august institution by author OR publisher, which means they “don’t count”. (Many of us, myself included, worked under the conviction that if you put “copyright [your name] as a declaration in your book that meant that you, the originator, held that copyright and it was not necessary to “register” it in any way for that to be true. So a great many writers never “registered” their books.) Also, that $3000 per work… doesn’t necessarily go to you. It may need to be split with your publisher. Yes, the same one who may not have registered some of your work to begin with – so you get a smaller slice of the pie and then the people who determined the size of the pie get THEIR slice, too. And quite aside from ALL of that…

…there doesn’t seem to be a conclusion that all of this was wrong, and that it should not and will not happen again. It’s happening again as we speak. And that pocket change that some company like Anthropic is going to shell out to as few people as they can manage under the terms of the class action lawsuit basically does feel like blood money – as in, here, we devoured your children, don’t look at the pile of limbs and bones over there, we ate their hearts and drank their brains like soup, but never mind all that, here’s some money, we’re good now, right? Just sit down and shut up, there’s a good writer now. Nothing to see here.

Here’s the thing, people. When I was just a little bitty thing, I knew I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to write. That is all I ever wanted to do. And I was… dammit, I AM… GOOD AT IT. It’s one of the few things that I actually am unreservedly, without caveat, GOOD AT. That’s all I wanted to do, that’s all I wanted to be.

I never expected to find myself sitting at the metaphorical graveside of my metaphorical children and my life’s work, accepting that blood money like it’s something dirty, a bribe, some sort of payola, as a pitiful recompense for what they took – and they took all of me. They took all of US, all the people like me, all the people who ever wrote stories and drew artwork, all of us who poured our creative core into something that only we could ever do in the manner in which we presented it. Each of us something precious and unique, a nonpareil creative human soul, adding value to humanity in the best way we knew how.

What’s our reward? A couple of thousand dollars per stolen piece of work, and a complete and utter devaluation of our contribution other than something to grind up and feed into the machine. That is not why I wanted to tell stories. That is not why an artist does a painting. That is not the bargain. That is not the world that we were supposed to live in. And the worst of it is that the endgame is a humanity which can no longer tell what was created and offered by a human being, and what was copied and presented by a machine – which renders that human being irrelevant.

They took everything from us. And yes, I am mad – I am mad on my own behalf, on behalf of a lifetime which is pretty much being rendered a waste of oxygen, as well as on the behalf of so many of my colleagues and peers who are in the same leaky boat as I am.

For the record. Anything I write, have ever written, or might still write… is written BY ME. By my own mind. My own heart. My own creative soul. My own fingers typing my own words onto a blank page. ME. Every word I ever touch has been made by a human being. And I resent – deeply, bitterly, existentially resent – the point at which people like myself are now at – the point at which we have to prove a negative (as in, we do not use AI in our work) or where we are accused of using that AI in our work anyway, on the say so of someone (or some machine) using criteria that are completely impossible for us to refute. Careers that have taken years to build can be destroyed in moments by a rash accusation perhaps even deliberately so by someone who might wish to remove a rival from the playing field.

I hate this timeline.

(read another take here)