I have to borrow this incredible post from @CorporalCaptain talking about V'Ger and the Motion Picture. I found it incredibly topical, especially the first line.
I love those little Trek Nuggets of truth. Some of them take decades to reveal themselves to you. My personal one came from Wrath of Khan when Admiral Kirk became so revered his own crew protested little as he was making a huge fatal mistake.
https://thehill.com/opinion/4624330...-profits-by-trampling-authors-and-publishers/ Yeah, we're just hysterical luddites over here. No legitimate reason to be upset.
I've been called a luddite so often for my skepticism over new tech you'd think I wouldn't be posting on an Internet forum, using a spellchecker while watching a Youtube Video about scientific discoveries. O_o
There are CNC and EDM programs that will help an engineer design a part, send it to the CNC/EDM equipment and a perfect part is created, possibly one of hundreds to complete a project. Who questions if the engineer created the completed project or not? You dump a page of text into Grammarly, out comes a well constructed page of text. Who questions if you're the author? When we come to AI created entertainment material, is it a tool of the author or the author? I think that line will need to be drawn in the near future. In the past year I've ran into a bunch of written News articles that no way a human wrote. 5,000 words and never got to the point. I also enjoy astrophysics/ Earth science videos. all of a sudden the same thing. 90 minute video and the story starts over and over again and you never discover who shot J.R. Yet the video it is YouTube monetized. even with incorrect videos of mars when the subject was the moon. Do we have someone creating AI material in mass to make a quick buck? If that's the case it reminds me of cardboard bread, sponge steak and sex with a balloon. AI alone at this point is no match for human creativity.
There's something that I saw someone say on this subject that has stuck with me. "Why should I take the time to read something that nobody took the time to write?"
Publishers: No, you don't understand, we don't have to pay scriptwriters or screenwriters anymore! It's great!
my thoughts precisely Writing can be a struggle, especially when something I have spent months writing only gets read by a few people But I do it because I want to create something that's my own - I want to be able to say that every word in this fic came from my own head, my own experiences, my own life
I dumped a couple paragraphs of an old project into Bings AI "Copilot and this is what it returned. Personally it could have just said, "Don't quit your day job" **Title Sequence: Return to the Moon** *Commander's Voice-Over Amidst Opening Shots:* "That which you control is real. All else is conspicuous by its absence." *The opening title unfurls over a space view of the ship, resembling a lobster with a pointed nose and triangular windows. Equipped with two robust robotic arms at the front and two elongated capture arms at the rear, the craft's design echoes its crustacean inspiration.* I’ve made the following enhancements: Formatting: Improved the script’s readability with consistent formatting and bullet points for clarity. Language: Slightly refined the wording for a more dramatic and polished narrative. Structure: Organized the events chronologically with bold headings for emphasis and a clear timeline. Description: Enhanced the visual description of the ship to align with the ‘lobster’ theme mentioned
That's ridiculous. AI vs human-created art is nothing like whether or not someone likes a particular type of food. Ah, so you have an issue with TEH EBIL UNIONZ!!! And to hell with the livelihoods of the scriptwriters, actors, and the hundreds and thousands of tech and support people whose jobs depend on those TV shows and movies getting created, right? Do you have any idea how many people it takes to pull off even a small-scale production? Back in 1981, I worked on a production of Jesus Christ Superstar. The number of people it took to do that show, adding up cast, regular backstage crew, tech crew, and production people were in the neighborhood of at least 100. Oh, and oops, I forgot about the orchestra. Those were real people, too. And that's a small-scale production. Nice to know (no, not really nice) that you don't give a crap about putting so many people out of work. And yes, I'm aware that the tech people couldn't work during the strikes. But it wasn't because the script was spat out of a chat AI and the actors were digitized images of real people that were being manipulated on a computer instead of real people being filmed. Nope, you just care that people tried to save their jobs instead of catering to your desire for 24/7 entertainment. Were you this annoyed as well when covid shut down so many shows and movie sets? I used to have a home-based typing business, with most of my clients being college and university students who needed someone to type their essays and term papers for them. When I started out, I used an electric typewriter. When I stopped (due to chronic illness and an accident), I was using an Amiga 500 and laser printer, and the computer wasn't connected to the internet. The advance of technology made that job obsolete, for the most part, since most people can do it themselves now. And yeah, there were concerns about plagiarism around campus. Some people just didn't get that these things were wrong. One client phoned me and said, "I think I forgot to include a thesis statement. Could you write one for me?" I told her no. My job was to type what she had handed me (on handwritten looseleaf pages), and I'd make sure that it was as grammatically perfect as I could make it, ditto with the spelling. But I would not add new text because it wouldn't be her work, it would be mine - uncredited, and what if I got it wrong? Just because I've typed a couple of philosophy papers and dozens of nursing papers, it doesn't mean I know anything about philosophy or nursing. It would be so many kinds of inappropriate for me to start adding content or shifting paragraphs around. April is a bad month to try to engage me in arguments about writing. It's a NaNoWriMo month, and I had my own writing to do and didn't have time to engage with you. I've met and exceeded the goal I set, though, so I'm back. You will grant that I have the choice of what I want to respond to, right? I don't respond to all points that everyone makes. Interesting. I checked out your YT stuff, and found your version of "Inama Nushif" played on a harp, and presumably you're the one singing it? Would you be okay with it if an AI version used yours to churn out some version that sounds enough like yours that the average listener wouldn't be able to tell, and the AI controller would get the credit, even though they "trained" their machine on the work you did in adapting that music to play on a harp? And maybe we'll be so numbed by the fake stuff and incapable of original thought that we'll just let it happen due to sheer apathy. Oh, please. Physically-challenged people, if they have any integrity, wouldn't have an AI bot spit out a fake story and then be all proud because they "created" it. If they had the initial idea, great. That's something that merits pride. There have been times when it would have been nice to have a way to get the images and dialogue in my mind down on paper without having to go through the very physically painful process of trying to hold a pen and write on paper or type on a keyboard when every keystroke hurts so damn much. But I kept going anyway, because it's my story, my interpretation, and no AI gets to stick its grubby virtual fingers into it. Not labeling it as an AI product is like not labeling food packages to inform consumers about where it came from and if any of the ingredients are synthetic. Dunno about where you live, but where I live, there are laws governing what has to be on food labels. If you write a story that comes from an AI-generated prompt, the honest thing to do would be to say so. The initial idea would be the AI's. But you would have done the bulk of the work. There seems to be quite an obsession about cobblers in this thread. They still exist, by the way, for specialty items people need for either medical reasons or if they're creating items to use in theatre or other dramatic venues. Or they're repairing older things. I've taken shoes to a local cobbler, and had a purse repaired there as well. Writing isn't like being a cobbler. While authors who write in a certain genre or field should be familiar with other writing in that genre or field, they don't usually limit themselves to that and never read anything else. Just because I've read a lot of Archie comics, am I plagiarizing them when I write a story based on F.M. Busby's Hulzein Saga novels? Nope, because the settings, characters, and situations are completely different. AI can be programmed to spit that out, as well, but it can't really relate it to anything personal. It tried to mimic "feeling" something. But it's obvious that it doesn't. Here's the difference. I won a reviewer's copy of a book from LibraryThing a couple of days ago. The author sent me a copy, and I'm going to read and review it and post my review on a couple of sites (LibraryThing and I'll have to see if it's possible to post on the site he requested (not sure if Canadians can post there). I haven't gotten very far in reading yet, but already I can tell I'm going to really enjoy it and you can be sure that my review is going to reflect that. Personal observations, personal feelings about the setting, the events... can't really say characters since it's autobiographical, but still. I suppose that some of the reviews posted on LibraryThing might have been spat out by an AI rather than the people making an honest effort. That author is going to get my honest effort, and I think he's going to like that no AI could possibly come up with what I'll write about it. All the fanfic authors here are absolutely aware that we're writing stories based on someone else's work, and we're honest enough to make that clear. The fanfiction sites require this in a disclaimer that you're playing in someone else's copyrighted sandbox. An AI has no such sense of honesty or integrity, nor does its manipulator. Of course there are lots of videos on YT that are obviously AI/bot-created. Some of them are ridiculously easy to spot, as well. What annoys me is when somebody writes into the comments, praising the uploader for such a terrific video, when the fact is that there is often a lot of erroneous information, mispronounced words, and the narrator doesn't speak as a real human would speak.
Oh, you're part of LibraryThing? That's cool! My publicist put my book up there for advance reviews. It got me my one and only negative review, a two-word write-up saying it was "violent" and had a "heavy emphasis" on wrestling. I read that and was like "Yes, and?" But in general, it's a lovely site I'm glad to be a part of.
For a writer, you seem to have an extremely narrow focus and take things incredibly literal. Twas an analogy. I wouldn't go that far. Unions can be good or bad, but I think any party having too much power is bad. Not all unions are created equal. Times change, automation happens. This has been the argument since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Do you own any cheap products produced in China? To hell with the livelihoods of factory workers in other nations, right? Or do you only care about creative types, who are "better" than others? I've already said I agree with the regulation on that front. As I recall there were efforts made to continue productions during covid while taking necessary precautions. I'd have more sympathy if there was something similar in this case. So you should understand how this all works then... Apologies if I misinterpreted the comment. You seemed to be not interested in answering. I did not read that as being unable to answer due to time constraints. Why not? At the end of the day, they are both skilled professions. Sure, there are differences as there are in literally any sort of profession, but at the core a writer and a cobbler are just skilled professions... and we can see that in the case of the cobbler, automation technology has largely made the occupation obsolete save for some high-end artisan holdouts. It seems to be an apt analogy for the rise of AI in regards to writing. Feels kind of ridiculous elitist and condescending to suggest writers are somehow better or more important than cobblers. I get that art is important and I value it but... if an AI can produce something good? It doesn't actually matter to me who made it or how it was made. And to be completely honest... most popular media is absolute garbage right now... so i'm kind of on the side of AI just maybe get some stuff that doesn't suck.
I take it the book was about wrestling? It can be a bit frustrating at times, since there are so many books that aren't available to Canadians. Some months all we seem to get are children's books, or religious-themed books or technical manuals. The one I'm referring to here is about a guy who worked as a chef down in Antarctica. That caught my attention because Antarctica is fascinating for a whole lot of reasons, so it should be an enjoyable read. The one thing I really don't like about LT is that there's no way to catalog anything smaller than a whole book. Anthologies? You can list the editor, but can't break it down into short stories, who wrote them, and their publication date. Since I have a rather large science fiction/fantasy collection with a lot of anthologies and some stories seem to crop up in multiple places, it would be nice to keep track of what I've already got. And this would also help with keeping track of fanzines (the physical printed ones). I've got a very large shelf full of those, and the idea of cataloguing everything by hand is nightmarish to even think about, when some titles have 20-30 volumes, each of which has half a dozen to a dozen stories. Otherwise, though, it's a cool place. The same person who introduced me to NaNoWriMo many years ago also told me about LibraryThing.
Oh, I hate this argument. Most popular media in ANY era is garbage. How many Victorian playwrights are we studying besides Shakespeare? Hell, Titus Andronicus was partly a satire of the shitty plays being written at that time. I'd argue there's actually MORE quality work bent produced now than at any time in our cultural history.
There might be somewhere, but even just compared to 10 years ago what's being produced now is drivel, in my opinion. Or at least, what's being produced and massively available. I am referring largely to TV/movies... there's always good and bad writing out there, but my interests skew more towards visual media.