this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Sure, great, but HOW? At the moment at least when a desire is held to profit from written work generated by AI, that desire and motivation comes from a human being. If the Authors Guild wants to confirm that a human being wrote something by basically communicating with that human about the work then they have no way to reliably determine if the human they're talking to generated it by writing down their thoughts or instructing an LLM.

If the quality level from AI work is similar enough to a traditionally written work that the text on its own doesn't clearly indicate machine authorship then the fact of the submission process and the communication between a human being and the Authors Guild could really be the only means by which this is done. So basically, charm them enough and now your AI generated text output could gain extra legitimacy courtesy the Authors Guild because it's now not just you implying you wrote it, it's the respected Authors Guild outright stating it isn't AI.

It also puts in to question some assumptions about this whole endeavour as well. If it's not a quality guarantee, only provenance, as in it can be bad writing but the Authors Guild attests it's bad human writing, then assumptions like "One cannot relate to a bot that does not have its own lived experiences to share" are undermined since that will only hold true on the basis of knowledge the reader has about the text, rather than the text itself resonating with the reader because human generated writing is inherently superior. If that knowledge can be so easily corrupted, it's worthless or at least only a couple of scandals away from being made so. It also gets very messy with things like the example they gave of KC Crowne whose book accidentally included some of the conversation they had evidently had with an LLM while writing the book. It is a hilarious smoking gun that the author used AI tools in the process of their writing, but funny as that is, the mistakenly included text shows that they're at least directing the output and seem to be using the AI to help them refine and make changes to their own writing. They're at least engaging in some form of process beyond simply commanding the machine to generate a book and then selling the result. Defence of 'AI artists' along similar lines to what I just laid out has been sharply criticised and that's pretty justified, right now at least, few would call this idea of directing the output of an LLM, this 'prompt engineering', the same thing as writing, but then again is this a question of degree? Or an absolute? Does the degree to which the author has apparently leaned on this tool affect how much value it has lost to a reader? If the mistakenly included prompt indicates that the author constructed their entire story through prompting, the illusion that the author created this work by synthesising and relating their own experiences is shattered but if it just indicates that they sometimes used it to work through problems while they wrote, is the connection to the author just as sullied, or now only partially? Or not at all? If the Authors Guild accept a submission and put their stamp attesting to its human provenance and later find out that for portions of the text the author consulted with chatGPT to help them work through ideas and test out other approaches are they going to revoke the inclusion in their database? Or is that only if its completely AI generated? In any case whatever answer they have for that can only apply to cases where they know exactly how or if any of the widely available AI tools were used.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

This just sounds like a feint by the AI companies to avoid feeding AI swill to other AIs. But like farm piggies, the AI must become cannibal.

[–] fujiwood 4 points 14 hours ago

I died a little just now.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 16 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Fredselfish 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah how about fucking books written by AI hsvs to label by fucking law. Sick of AI taking away the arts. My ex today was showing off a app that lets her create songs with AI. She played this song and had a singer everything was awesome wasn't to bad. But when asked who the singer was she explained how she was. She wrote the song and let AI pick the singer she just fine tumed the music.

At first I thought it was Chris Daughter because it sounded a lot like him. No doubt this app steals the vocals from somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

counterpoint (not that this makes it easier) is that lowering the skillset needed for people to express and communicate what’s in their head has always led to more art and diverse perspectives being shared. it’s upsetting to artists that the skill they’ve spent their whole lives developing has less value now, but allowing more people to create is far from a bad thing in a lot of cases

[–] ultrahamster64 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

It doesn't "lower skillset needed to create", that can be achieved by making lowcost/free but powerful tools to be widely available.

What it does is lowering the bar on making something that's pretending to be decent but in actuality don't have time and effort put in it. Which means that the only thing it is going to led to is massive amounts of slop

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

better tools will never lead to me being able to paint or draw without significant time and effort that i don’t have invested into practice

however i can express a fantasy world visually by describing it to AI - it’ll be kinda jank, but im still better able to communicate my imagination visually than i could otherwise without the help of someone who has skills to draw, paint, etc

[–] ultrahamster64 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

better tools will never lead to me being able to paint or draw without significant time and effort that i don’t have invested into practice

Not with that attitude...

In all seriousness, yes, yes they are. Maybe you can't paint like the medival masters, but you able to open photoshop and make collages/edits to express your inner world a thousand times more interesting and charming. There are people who draw with a mouse. They are expressing themselves, using generic technology, that is for the most part, available everywhere. Do you really need more?

Or are you just want to speedrun and skip all this boring "effort", "dedication", and just generate away your "very valuable" ideas en-mass for cheap?