TechTakes

It's so wild how ChatGPT and this "style" of AI literally didn't exist two years ago yet we're all expected to believe it's this essential, indispensable, irreplaceable tool that people can't live without, and actually you're the meanie for suggesting people do something the exact same way they would have in 2022 instead of using the environmental-disaster spam machine

This fractal sucks because it’s the voices of the underprivileged that need to be amplified. Using gen AI will smother them entirely.

This... sucks.

NaNoWriMo should know more than anyone that AI can't supplement bad writing. It's not ableist to condemn it, it's recognition that writing is a skill that needs to be honed. I know Ao3 doesn't condemn AI either but that kind of just aligns with their 'anything goes' posting rules.

I was actually kind of excited to attempt NaNoWriMo this year, but now I'm not to sure :(

I can at least understand the guys who are using the AI text conveyor belt to make a cheap buck. Do the hustle, get your bag, whatever. We live in a capitalist hellscape and if that's how you choose to survive, then fuck you, but I get it.

I don't understand these guys who think it's actively good that people don't write their own words. It's just a level of misanthropy that doesn't make sense for how inflated their egos are.

Doesn't even mention the one use case I have a moderate amount of respect for, automatically generating image descriptions for blind people.

And even those should always be labeled, since AI is categorically inferior to intentional communication.

They seem focused on the use case "I don't have the ability to communicate with intention, but I want to pretend I do."

There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can't "see" the issues in their writing without help.

If you can't see the issues in your own writing, you're exactly who is most vulnerable to AI's "syntactically valid but complete nonsense" output.

I can entertain the classism argument if they reframe it as a choice, where the alternative is expanding the scope of what is currently considered plagiarism to include the degrees of ghost-authorship privilege buys, since their argument hinges on the assumption that it is acceptable.

The ableism argument is the one I’ve grappled with the most from the standpoint of disability advocacy. Usually we first must ask whether the achievement in question is the proper measurement. In this case it is quite simply creative origin, which might be difficult to deconstruct further without reaching for the terribly abstract. Next comes the more complicated task of determining the threshold beyond which a simple modifier, like a sports handicap, is simply no longer sufficient, i.e. whether such differing abilities merit a separate category with unique standards. In this case, they provide several examples of cohorts with great enough support requirements that AI assistance might be the only option available for participation. Such differing ability would, I think, suggest the formation of a new category with differing standards as a beneficial compromise.

The issue of systemic unfairness is a larger one, I think, than the matter of AI’s use can address. When we are looking for ways to mitigate systemic unfairness, usually it’s preferred to relieve each disadvantage directly and surgically by accounting for the cumulative impedance and ongoing support necessary to give them a fighting chance. What is not preferred is to actually fight their battles for them, however, and that happens to be what the latest LLM’s are capable of: robust human-like authorship with minimal prompting.

Ultimately, I think the real solution to the issue of AI in the liberal arts will be to adapt our notion of what an essentially human achievement entails, given the capacity of current technology. For example, we no longer consider mathematical computation an essential human achievement, but rather the more abstract instrumentation of it. Similarly, handwriting is no longer a skill emphasized for any purpose other than personal note-taking, as with off-hand recall of vocabulary definitions and historical dates. What we will de-emphasize in response to this technology is yet to be seen, but I suspect it will not be creative originality itself.

As an act of protest, in October, I'll be posting a mediocre idea for some work of art, but not make it into an actual work. Why should I even put them into an AI regurgitator when techbros think the idea is the most important part in the arts?

A note for the unawares that Nanowrimo also tried to cover up a scandal when one of their mods was found to be referring minors to an ABDL fetish site. To my knowledge Nanowrimo never tried to own up to it, never even admitted anything was wrong until the FBI got involved, and still blocks any discussion of the situation. https://speak-out.carrd.co/

Reportedly they're now shilling AI hard on their Facebook (I don't have Facebook to check). I consider it 100% likely that, from this year on, everyone who uploads their 50k words to the organisation to prove completion will have their work promptly fed to the hungry algorithms.

At least one writer in the board has already resigned over the AI blog post https://xcancel.com/djolder/status/1830464713110540326

I swear if I hear "being against AI is ableist" one more time I'm gonna lose my shit. Disabled artists have existed for as long as art itself, and the only ableism here is AI-brained fuckwits using disabled people as an escape goat by suggesting they are unable to create things from their own effort and need spicy autocomplete to do so.

I can see this as a method for a starting point. I'd consider that analogous to getting inspiration from reading a book. And while I understand the sentiment behind this, it's not really that simple. This argument makes a lot more sense when you ignore the fact that it's stealing from other people. And not just the works of famous authors and writers, but from everyone. If AI made up everything from thin air and didn't need to steal from everyone to make it work I would 100% be on board. If being against stealing other people's work and passing it off as your own is ableist and classist, by that argument so is being against things like identity theft or stealing someone's credit card.