Comment by soulofmischief
6 days ago
Not everyone shares your same world view, and some people do want to apply machine intelligence to their writing process.
You don't have to participate; ignore AI-generated or AI-assisted content just like you ignore some other thing you don't enjoy that already exists today. But you also don't have to devalue and dismiss the interests of others.
All the people generating AI-assisted writing are all the people that never had enough passion or talent to do it before. If you weren't inclined to write fiction or poetry etc before AI was here to do it for you, you probably shouldn't be doing it now.
That's extremely presumptuous. I've published two novels, and written hundreds of poems over the years (the latter I'm not sure I'll ever publish), and while I will keep writing manually I'd love to have AI tools that'd write all of the things I want to read that doesn't exist, that I don't want to write myself.
I don't get remotely the same things out of reading and writing, so writing those stories myself does not give me the enjoyment I'd want out of reading them.
Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow.
People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and every other disruptive technology. Yet, people found a way to be creative with them even before society accepted their medium.
Truth is, you don't get to decide what someone else's creative journey looks like.
You ARE, however, allowed to decide what constitutes Art - and the determining factor for many comes down to conception and intent.
With the advent of creation by prompting, the conception and intent is abstracted away to a patron/artist interaction as opposed to the tool/artist synergy you contend. Providing only instruction and infrastructure as input means the appropriate analogy is something more akin to Medici/Michelangelo than Mass-Production-Silkscreening/Warhol.
You may not get to decide what someone else's creative journey looks like, but you are more than entitled to critique the extent of its creativity and artistic veracity.
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None of the tools that existed before created entire complete works with tiny amounts of effort.
E.g. "Write an amazing story for kids about a bear". ChatGPT writes a whole story for you. That's not "augmenting" your workflow, that's just doing all the work for you. And don't tell me, "writing the prompt is the new form of art", the reality is that writing these prompts doesn't require a tiny fraction of the talent required to write a novel from scratch.
The printing press is a horrible example also, it didn't write anything for you, it just literally prints already written content. Photoshop just let you edit already taken photos.
Cameras require you to go to places, take trips, put massive effort into actually making content from scratch.
A better analogy would be an automated flying camera that just goes off by itself to a destination, takes its own photos, edits them, and sends them to you, processed, edited, finished. All you did was say "go to Victoria falls and take photos."
Yes artists have used tools, pens, then a typewriter, a word processor i.e. the implements for the process, but the tools didn't ever replace the most important part of the artist, the actual creative work and imagination in the brain. The AI tools are just replacing the brain AND the actual implements.
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So instead of adding your voice to the world you decided to give away your voice and abandon your humanity.
You obviously don't value your reader if you don't value yourself enough to speak with your own voice.
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To each their own, but to me specifically, and I know that many, many artists share this point of view, the idea of having some slop-generating algorithmic regurgitation system create the actual "creative" work that is supposed to be the basic definition of an artistic creation is both disgustingly vapid and far from art.
If you hate putting your own thoughts to writing so much that you offload its very essence to some machine through a few minutes of prompts, you're creating nothing, least of all any original creations and views of your own.
Comparing this to typing, editing, calculating and reprinting tools like the ones you mention is laughable and factually wrong. Even a calculator isn't the same. It doesn't create your mathematical equations for you, and a printing press or typewriter, camera or photoshop don't just brainlessly, mindlessly create your text or images for you.
Edit: If you're some content creator or PR manager with no artistic pretensions, and use AI because you just need some quick slop content for marketing filler, that's fine. It might turn clients off but at least you're not pretending to a creativity that you don't possess.
But to have AI create for you while calling yourself an artist is simply lazy intellectual dishonesty.
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