AI in Writing and Art…
I Messed Up Last Night…
On my Friday night listing of some Kickstarters I thought were good, I didn’t notice that one of them had used AI art. (It has been removed.)
Let me be very clear here now. AI art and AI writing was trained by wholesale copyright theft. For one company alone, I had over 200 titles stolen to help them train their stupidity. That company just settled for 1.6 billion on a class action suit and will more than likely be going out of business.
AI art was trained by wholesale theft as well and there are a ton of lawsuits pending. Some good artists friends had hundreds of paintings stolen to train AI art.
AI in the overall culture will finds its place, but at the moment, and for any future I can see, if you use AI in your writing or for art for your books or projects, this is how I feel.
- 1… You are stunningly lazy.
- 2… You are a thief.
- 3… You don’t respect other people’s work.
- 4… You are ignorant when it comes to copyright.
AI art (and anything done with AI writing) is not something that can be owned. There is no copyright protection or value attached.
So please do not send me anything to look at if you have used AI art or writing. I do not want to know you are a crook. I have been dealing this last two years with a major theft from our business, I don’t need idiots reminding me how much of my work and my friends work was stolen as well in this monster AI scam.
(You know, if the companies would have just approached the writers and artists and offered to pay a small amount per novel or art to train their AI, most of us would have said yes. But instead they just stole it. So f##k them and f##k you too if you use their stolen work. )
That clear enough?
12 Comments
Glyn Salisbury
Brilliantly said Dean. I am so fed up with seeing AI getting into everything, but more hacked off with so called writing gurus embracing it and pushing everybody to use it. Earning from theft. It’s not right. Neither is it ethical.
dwsmith
Exactly, Glyn.
Peter Michael Gray
Quite right, Dean. These are my feelings exactly.
Michael W Lucas
You know, I’ve been trying to write a semicivil “AI statement” for my web site for a while now. Reading yours, I think I’m just gonna go with “Using AI words or art? **** you, you ******* ****.”
Also, all my KS now have a FAQ stating that there’s no AI more advanced than the spreadsheet SUM function.
Ric Brady
Very well said.
Natalie K.
Couldn’t agree more, Dean. Though I hadn’t heard Anthropic (which I think is the company you’re referring to) was going out of business from the settlement. To be clear, I’d love to see ALL of those AI companies go out of business. But I thought the settlement they reached was to avoid a trial that could put them out of business.
allynh
I’ve been hearing about the AI nonsense since the 70s.
“In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable.
AI researcher Marvin Minsky (in 1970)”
The problem is, too many business people believe the hype and are thinking the new Chatbots are valid. There are dumb commercials on YouTube pushing AI systems and people are going for the easy answer.
It’s obvious that they do not actually read the final text, they skim the text. Skimming is not reading.
Harvey Stanbrough
Hey Dean, it’s also important that writers take a stand, and that our readers are aware we don’t use generative AI in our work. This series of disclaimers appears at the end of all my fiction works. Anyone may feel free to use it as-is or modified, for their own work. Any questions, they may email me at harveystanbrough(at)gmail.
DISCLAIMERS
1. This is a work of fiction, strictly a product of the author’s (my) imagination. It is the result of a partnership between me and the character(s) I accessed with my creative subconscious as I raced through the story with them, trying to keep up. Any opinions expressed by the character(s) are their own. I am only their recorder.
2. Any perceived resemblance-to, similarity-to, slights-of, or offenses-to any persons living or dead, and-or any events, groups, places, organizations, and so on are products of the reader’s imagination. Probably. In my world, intent still carries considerably more weight than perception.
3. In no part is this story the block-by-block, purloined construction of any sort of generative AI or even the artificial construct of any conscious, critical, human mind, including my own. What you read here is what actually happened there.
4. Finally, neither the author nor the publisher consents for any person, entity, or organization to use this work to train any form of generative AI, large language learning modules, or any similar technology that exists now or will exist in the future.
Peter Michael Gray
Good disclaimers, Harvey.
Desikan
Hi Dean,
Good reminder for all to keep evolving with times but stay centered on the basics.
Writing is an art but it is also a business. The fundamentals of any long term sustaining business is, ensure everyone involved even at any level (like giving a picture art for cover or interior chapters ) in creating the product is benefited by the success of the product. That is the only way to have a long term success.
The challenge today is, with too many intermediaries now dealing with various art forms online, it becomes difficult to understand how they are sourcing them. It is some effort but better to take time to check and understand their supply chains and how they conduct their business. Eventually it affects our success.
Thanks for this periodic reminder on this subject.
Fabien Delorme
Those AI-generated crap texts are now being used everywhere on blogs, on websites, and in books too (both fiction and non-fiction) to create cheap, easy content. Problem is, a lot of this content is riddled with errors. I remember that book on mushrooms that recommended eating deadly mushrooms (uh oh) because the publisher (we can’t call them an author) didn’t bother checking it before hitting publish. Hard to trust anything online anymore. Even academic papers are affected. It’s a real scourge.
The irony is that those AI bots stealing everything available online are now training themselves on the crappy content they generated. Meaning, at some point they will be slowly getting worse, destroyed by their own poison. Isn’t that ironic.
In the meantime, unfortunately, the web is getting worse, and for instance it’s getting harder and harder to find royalty-free images that aren’t AI-generated. It’s incredibly frustrating to find the perfect cover art, only to discover it wasn’t created by a person but AI-generated.
Sheila
The web is definitely getting worse, you see “AI” stuff everywhere. I used to search for low carb recipes, but all the sites began using the generative crap, which is a long blob of text with tons of SEO inserted, you have to get through all that (or just scroll past it) to get to the actual stuff about the recipe. And then most of the time the recipe is awful, so I wasted my time.
This is pretty much all you get if you do any searches online. And people on forums using “AI” to formulate answers, with the “research”, thinking they’re fooling everyone. Writers using it, wondering why their book won’t sell. People asking why their KDP account was terminated, their “AI” coloring book that they “thoroughly edited” and theft of trademarked stuff shouldn’t be a problem, right? It’s their unique creation!