On "AI"

[rowyn]

I have many friends who use chatbots or other plagiarism-engine apps, so I try not to be a dick about how much I dislike it. But I don't want to hide how much I dislike it, either. I call the stuff "plagiarism engines", as a shorthand, but if I am honest, it's not just the plagiarism that I hate. It's not just that it's setting fire to the planet, or that it's driving up electricity and electronics costs, or that it produces such bad-to-mediocre pap, or that it's making real artists and real authors have to defend their work as Not AI, either.

I hate the idea itself: the notion that you can strip away all human skill and effort from the act of creation. Just press a button, and voila, the thing you wanted now exists. I hate it. You can tell I've always hated the idea, because when I make a setting that has magic, it's never magic that makes art without effort. In Silver Scales, enchanters can make beautiful, interactive, three-dimensional illusions -- but they need skill and training and artistry to do so. A character with tons of magical power but no training in art can make copies and do simple/crude images, but nothing like what artists can do. It's similar in all my settings, because I do not write about dystopian hellscapes, and a world where artistry is meaningless is a dystopian hellscape to me.

You could train an LLM on only public-domain works, and make it run for years on a single AA battery, and have it generate stories that make the heart leap with joy and wonder, and I would hate it just as much. I do not want machines that make art.

I do not want machines that make human creativity irrelevant. There is no ethical way to do that because that is not an ethical thing to do.

Comments

[alltoseek]

I dislike that AI has come to mean only these LLMs and generative plagiarism engines. I encounter so many things in my daily life that are computer red tape - poorly designed programs and websites that could vastly benefit from some AI, but no one is interested in fixing these real problems and inefficiencies. There’s all sorts of improvements that could be made, but the tech capitalists want only shiny new toys and to lay off thousands of people now. Improving lives generally (not just their own) holds zero appeal to them.

[rowyn]

I wrote this little entry while writing up my day, and the paragraph before it (which is still in the daily entry that I finally posted, just now) was about distinguishing "good AI" from the plagiarism engines. Because there is good AI out there!

[tuftears]

I feel that. It's a bit awkward when a certain friend of ours rattles on about being able to code things with AI assistance because, on the one hand, they are taking away from actual programmers, on the other, actual programmers do take a lot longer and are more expensive, at least if you're paying them rather than having them volunteer their time.

But come on, automate away the tedious and unwanted work, folks, not the stuff we *love* doing!

[rowyn]

LLM coding doesn't bug me on the same principle, perhaps because programming is at its root "telling computers what to do". Being able to do that with, say, English instead of C++, doesn't seem like a terrible idea at its root.

Of course, LLM coding doesn't WORK, and is a maintenance nightmare, and automates the least annoying part of coding instead of anything important, and there are plenty of other reasons to dislike it as it exists.

I am skeptical that LLM coding could ever really work, given the inherent ambiguity of English and virtually all natural language. But if a coding LLM ran on a single AA battery and was only trained on open source code, and output elegant, effective code (that would also be open source, given the training data), I would not hate that it existed.

I can see why someone who loved writing code would hate it for existing, tho. But having written a lot of simple code as a large chunk of my paying job for 20-ish years, I'd've been happy to have a tool (that actually worked, etc.) that did it for me.

[xyzzysqrl]

Unfortunately I have felt for several years now that artistic creation has no value to large swathes of the population. So many don't create for any purpose or for self-expression or pleasure, they don't read what others write, they don't want to have to think about TV or movies, games should functionally play themselves to avoid all that nasty learning or systemic mastery required...

AI seems to just be the natural conclusion of that. Art for no one that requires nothing and reflects no ideas. And golly, most people sure love it.
I've been very bitter.

[rowyn]

hughugs

It can get pretty bleak. I persevere and can't really explain why. :/