Still Angrily Ranting About AI

In a post-truth internet, it’s not uncommon to have someone piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining, but with Artificial Intelligence it starts to get even more infuriating than usual. Not only are folks out there “creating” stuff with AI that by all rights needs no AI involvement at all, they can’t even be honest about it and instead go about pretending that they did all the work and deserve all the credit. This is annoying for what should be obvious reasons: the fact that AI has gobbled up everything across the internet from trash to treasure and mashed it all up in order to become the ultimate plagiarism machine being the first and the foremost. When you use AI to write a story or paint a picture, you’re making something that’s designed by a machine to be either average (as in it has averaged out all the choices it thinks you would like to make and come up with the most boring word choice/plot options) or derivative (as in it emulates the style of another writer and can never break out and be extraordinary). The long and short of this is that it’s never going to be great and it’s not too much of a stretch to imply that it’s not going to be good at all either.

Now, I personally think that AI should be burned at the stake like robotic witches and everyone who’s tied economic solvency to the AI Bubble (and let’s be very honest, it is a bubble and it will be popping) should be prosecuted for financial crimes. We should also be collectively sabotaging any and all data centers to drive the companies advocating for them and producing out of business as soon as humanly possible. Why yes, I do think tech terrorism is good actually and billionaires should start fearing for their lives. (For legal purposes, this is all a joke.)

Anyway, with all that said, if you’re going to use AI, you should be able to use it with your whole chest. You should be able to be proud of the fact that you’re using it and you should consider your efforts an advertisement for what AI can make for you. Why? Because you didn’t create it. You outsourced your creativity to a machine and everything you now have belongs to that machine and is simply stewarded by you. Be honest about how uncreative you are and let us all know that you were too lazy to work on your own stories or ideas or to gain skills in a certain area in order to make all those small decisions that lead to a developed sense of self and accomplishment. Why shouldn’t you be honest? Are you ashamed of utilizing the mass plagiarism machine?

Ao3 user passacig, a writer in the Heated Rivalry fandom, was recently involved in a particular controversy after it was discovered that they had left a piece of their dialogue with an AI generator within the text of their fanfiction. This has happened quite a few times now in both fanfiction and indie author spaces and it’s never something that is easily swallowed by readers when discovered. In this particular instance, the text was obvious as an AI response, reading: “Here's a smoother, more natural version with a bit of continuation to carry the scene” before the intended text of the story. Since Beta readers don’t generally speak like this, especially not within the text of the story itself, passacig’s explanation fell very flat when they claimed that they had been working through that passage with a “peer editor” and that line had been accidentally left in at the final draft.

This was so easily avoidable! First of all, do you not give your stuff a final read-through before you post it? Second of all, just be honest when you’re caught out, and if you’re asking me you should be disclosing your AI usage in the tags to rule out readers who might be angry that they were duped by the use of it in the first place. You want to avoid an internet controversy and call-out post? Just disclose your AI use! Yeah, you might have people who think you’re a lazy, illiterate troglodyte who can’t be bothered to write their own gay pornos, but at least you wouldn’t be blasted all over Al Gore’s internet as a liar and a fraud on top of all that, right?

passacig’s Ao3 profile is now unsearchable, suggesting to me that perhaps they either changed their username or have deleted their account to start fresh after their controversy which, in my humble opinion, is the coward’s way out. Either double down and produce your human peer editor or simply admit that AI was utilized to create and edit your work. I mean, if you were so willing to use it, why not become the example of what an author can do with it? Why not take it right on the chin and plant your feet where you put them?

Well. We all know why.

Grow a spine, troglodytes. We’re tired of your lies.