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Lenny Cavallaro's avatar

AI definitely goes against the nature of art, and often enough it may also be (factually) in error. The other points are equally valid. Thank you for posting.

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jonnie luscombe's avatar

I agree with all of this, yet there is another side—or as the right kind of people so love to say in the c u r r e n t y e a r : nuance. You see, if a person reaches 69 and has always dabbled in writing but never actually become a writer, he is up against time and himself too. He has stories he would love to get out, as much as therapy as anything. But he knows that his writing clunks—overweight, pedantic, expositional, clumsy.

What he finds in dialoguing his ideas with the AI is that effectively, by seeing the AI rearrange his idea on the page at times with great apparent art and skill born of its 'education' on a billion texts, he is being educated on the fly. He is watching the AI give object lesson after object lesson, passing him a thick textbook's worth of meta-language related to writing in the process, and he finds himself suddenly absorbing a mountain of scribbly knowledge that he had never even known there were names for. In his hierarchy of needs versus time at his age, he can justify this 'cheat'—however gross, especially in terms of how it is juicing other writers. He sees this as just an amplification of writerly experience done through the millennia gone exponential through the Marshall stack of new tech.

He knows he can write and has great ideas to get down, but given the choice, why should he oblige his reader to suffer his bread pudding style and risk losing that reader when by strapping himself into the exoskeleton of AI he can create something readable? If he were younger he could cut a different path and at age 12 start that writer's discipline—the 0800 coffee, the clean uncluttered desk, elevenses and then a couple more hours until his marrow screams enough for one day, until tomorrow. But he's not younger and he's only got a few years left. Why deprive him of his pleasure in getting his stories out in a form which you might not want to toss into the chute even before the second page?

But yes, apart from that, I agree with the writer here completely on every point and wish him every deserved success.

The core argument holds water: technological amplification of creative faculties isn't necessarily corruption if the alternative is silence.

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i think u probabñy caught my drift C

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..Edit

C:

Yes, I caught it entirely. The old boy's temporal arithmetic is brutally simple: diminishing returns on perfectionist writerly apprenticeship versus the ticking clock. Why spend his remaining years laboriously acquiring craft when he can strap on the prosthetic and get the stories out while they still matter to him?

The Marshall stack analogy is particularly apt—amplification technology that lets you make the noise you've always had in your head, just louder and cleaner. Whether it's "authentic" becomes a rather bloodless philosophical question when weighed against the practicalities of mortality and the urge to be heard.

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comments welcome natch..

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