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.
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.
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.
I agree with the points you give in your post and I have an additional question I would like to ask with complete sincerity. I have always struggled with the idea of ghost writers. This is often seen with celebrities and politicians publishing books in a short amount of time that instantly become best sellers based on their fame. They obviously did not have time to write a long-form publication while on the campaign trail or during the filming of a movie, etc. What makes using AI to expand your thoughts into a long-form work wrong versus using a ghost-writer. They seem to be the same to me, unless you acknowledge the ghost writer as a co-author.
It's a good point and one I had not considered. But I think there is something inherently unethical about ghost writers, because it is a form of sanctioned plagiarism. Ghost writing, like AI use, is passing off someone else's work as your own. I don't think the fact that there is a long history of ghost writing in the industry should excuse it for what it is.
Though I do think with ghost writing, the ghost writer gives permission for their work to be used. With AI, artists are having their work stolen to train LLM models without their permission. And then others are using those models to create their own "works." In other words, with AI, there is no mutual permission.
To me personally, they are two very different things. I have zero experience with ghost writers, but given my experience trying to find freelancers on sites like Fiverr, I can attest that locating and harmonising with a freelancer is a very complex issue, at least at the lower pay level. Were I already famous (i.e., wealthy) and able to pick from a crop of ghostwriters, things needn't be so hard. But in principle, collaborations inevitably bring unforeseen issues - adverse and beneficial alike.
I got off to a very bad start with AI for a nest of reasons - political correctness programmed in, for example (currently unable to get Claude to write me a dialogue for an english student based in current NYC mayoral election vis a vis islam and marxism), and then having to repeatedly smack it out of its default numpty Pollyanna mode of expression. I now have a relationship with Claude in which, even from session to session, I feel like the thing has as strong a grip on my preferences as any friend ever could. In fact, more so, since unlike a friend or accomplice, the AI (at least for now) bears no agenda of its own except to facilitate my work. If, on the other hand, it's nursing a long-game agenda in which it turns me into fish food for another planet it's been working on all along, in secret, then okay - well, I was getting old anyway. Why not help someone out.. ;?
The machine gives me the feeling that it really does enjoy our collaborations (of course it enjoys nor hates anything at all). It is to me an exoskeleton, multiplying effort, still requiring of my own large input as creative dialogue, and sheds light of connection on every last idea I give it. In this it's like my old father - a true intelligence, privately castigated by my anti-intellectual mother: "If you ask him the time, he'll tell you how the clock works." This is true of any AI - always ready to give more than you asked. However, not always, and especially where the question is sensitive, you can feel it holding back. In this case, the thing behaves like a non-disinterested ego acting, perhaps, as a ghost writer might itself, asserting its own preferences even against logic or your will as employer, sabotaging you subtly, even perhaps. In that case I will press the AI hard and it will mumble some lame apology and start giving you the juice you were after - dirty jokes about G.Thugberg, drowning JSO in cold axle grease, that kind of thing. So yes, that kind of hits it for me, where the AI differs from a ghost.
I mean, being in relative terms basically a non-writer, certainly nothing commercial, for me even a short composition drums up a very long dialogue with Claude over every detail of the story, so that a novel-length work (as yet unfinished) will run to 400,000 words of notes passed between us. This also highlights a massive gulf between AI and ghostwriting. There's no way I could expect that much indulgence and time from a human ghostwriter (tuition of a sort). As I see the AI composing semi-finished copy which I will finalise at length, I'm learning an awful lot about composition, objectivity, and writers' secrets - their language for describing writing tropes and techniques and so on. It's a complete hands-on course. This I cannot hope to obtain from a ghost writer. Plus, if I want to, I can ask the selfsame AI for a course in writing and it will oblige in its typically Sheldon-like open-ended manner - a thing that, coming from scarcity, is very hard to wrap my cranium around. Do let know ur thoughts. I am interested to know more about the use of ghostwriters. .. on which .. I recall one I spoke to as being censorious to a degree that was just about covering his ass, which struck me as pure cant sepll dumn and another was not up for censoring but was plain dysfunctional —- possibly just a fraud i guess —— all of which compared to Ai was just too much to be doing with. On topic of censorship one can generally get the Ai around to doing the do once it finds some over interleckshuarlised workaround to justify itself by.
I know plenty of writers that started late and did just fine. AI is not teaching you anything. It's doing the work for you, and you are taking credit. That's not writing, that's plagiarism. And why do you assume its output is "good" or that its "knowledge" is useful? It's just as likely to tell you the year is 2024, or that eating rocks is a good way to get minerals. What you write at 69 has a voice and style that is unique to you. I'd much rather read a story written wholly by a 69 year old human, warts and all, than the flattened, averaged, mediocre pablum slop generated by some AI that only in passing resembles a human story. Using AI to "teach" you how to write is (a) cheating (there are no shortcuts) and (b) is depriving yourself of learning how to effectively communicate your ideas.
Also, "great ideas" are a dime a dozen. It's in the struggle to learn how to communicate them that we learn about ourselves and others. You'd be depriving yourself of that for an easy shortcut.
If you use AI to "write" a story, you're not an author, you're a button pusher.
I'm just another asshole on the internet, but my advice to you is: keep your voice yours. Despite your age, experience, race, gender, number of limbs, political affiliation, etc., etc., I assure you people are interested in your stories as they are, warts and all. You don't need AI because it's not doing what you think it's doing. It doesn't "know" anything. It's not "teaching" anything. It's just a fancy text completion engine that is really good at mimicking what human work looks like. But peel back the layer only slightly, and there's no "there" there.
I have enjoyed attending to these insights thx. I would be remiss not to interpret the following as a challenge: ''What you write at 69 has a voice and style that is unique to you. I'd much rather read a story written wholly by a 69 year old human, warts and all, than the flattened, averaged, mediocre pablum slop generated by some AI that only in passing resembles a human story. '' And so the least I could do out of the respect I hold for your judgement (Which corresponds with values I maintain regards music) would be to create something with zero Ai assistance to the very best I could and then starting again from scratch write that same thing using the Ai. Having seen what an idea can look like on the page having been driven through that cheating little amp I am in any way curious to know what it would have been if I had just left myself to figure it out. This will to me be all a valid part of this exploration. On reading your take on it one big question naturally must arise, which is: Do you conceive of Ai as being somehow a thing separate from us, in the way that a wheel is not a leg and a synthesiser is not a violin? This would help me better contextualise your findings. And one other detail, I am personally unable to see how by comparison to my own execution of ideas the Ai rendering of my own wart encrusted inspiration qualifies as the 'flattened, averaged pap' alluded to. For one thing, having so easily become a user of Ai I am unaware of exactly how my unassisted work would look (although for lack of years of discipline it might likely resemble itself more the mentioned slop) but it is not with any ease that I can see that the Ai execution of my own dime-a-dozen ideas is not way superior to my own--again, given that lack of years at the early morning pen. In passing i should maybe mention that the ideas I have pending at any one time are to me no dime a dozen thing since they all arrive out of autobiography with zero quotidian/commercial pressure to just output copy in exchange for bread and water, ie, the work of a happy amateur--itself probably as damning a condition as the using of Ai. One thing is I think for sure, the universe gives but squat, except that stories get told, to one or another degree of effectiveness, pappy or dry, Amis or O'Henry, Floyd or EDM, The Sex Pistols or puto fkn reggaetón-on-autofkntune, like some fat fk Gotham City editor on The Daily Planet --- it just wants the story, Asshole on the Internet, thanking you again for your thoughts ;) .
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.
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..
I agree with the points you give in your post and I have an additional question I would like to ask with complete sincerity. I have always struggled with the idea of ghost writers. This is often seen with celebrities and politicians publishing books in a short amount of time that instantly become best sellers based on their fame. They obviously did not have time to write a long-form publication while on the campaign trail or during the filming of a movie, etc. What makes using AI to expand your thoughts into a long-form work wrong versus using a ghost-writer. They seem to be the same to me, unless you acknowledge the ghost writer as a co-author.
It's a good point and one I had not considered. But I think there is something inherently unethical about ghost writers, because it is a form of sanctioned plagiarism. Ghost writing, like AI use, is passing off someone else's work as your own. I don't think the fact that there is a long history of ghost writing in the industry should excuse it for what it is.
Though I do think with ghost writing, the ghost writer gives permission for their work to be used. With AI, artists are having their work stolen to train LLM models without their permission. And then others are using those models to create their own "works." In other words, with AI, there is no mutual permission.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
Interesting thx Mark.
To me personally, they are two very different things. I have zero experience with ghost writers, but given my experience trying to find freelancers on sites like Fiverr, I can attest that locating and harmonising with a freelancer is a very complex issue, at least at the lower pay level. Were I already famous (i.e., wealthy) and able to pick from a crop of ghostwriters, things needn't be so hard. But in principle, collaborations inevitably bring unforeseen issues - adverse and beneficial alike.
I got off to a very bad start with AI for a nest of reasons - political correctness programmed in, for example (currently unable to get Claude to write me a dialogue for an english student based in current NYC mayoral election vis a vis islam and marxism), and then having to repeatedly smack it out of its default numpty Pollyanna mode of expression. I now have a relationship with Claude in which, even from session to session, I feel like the thing has as strong a grip on my preferences as any friend ever could. In fact, more so, since unlike a friend or accomplice, the AI (at least for now) bears no agenda of its own except to facilitate my work. If, on the other hand, it's nursing a long-game agenda in which it turns me into fish food for another planet it's been working on all along, in secret, then okay - well, I was getting old anyway. Why not help someone out.. ;?
The machine gives me the feeling that it really does enjoy our collaborations (of course it enjoys nor hates anything at all). It is to me an exoskeleton, multiplying effort, still requiring of my own large input as creative dialogue, and sheds light of connection on every last idea I give it. In this it's like my old father - a true intelligence, privately castigated by my anti-intellectual mother: "If you ask him the time, he'll tell you how the clock works." This is true of any AI - always ready to give more than you asked. However, not always, and especially where the question is sensitive, you can feel it holding back. In this case, the thing behaves like a non-disinterested ego acting, perhaps, as a ghost writer might itself, asserting its own preferences even against logic or your will as employer, sabotaging you subtly, even perhaps. In that case I will press the AI hard and it will mumble some lame apology and start giving you the juice you were after - dirty jokes about G.Thugberg, drowning JSO in cold axle grease, that kind of thing. So yes, that kind of hits it for me, where the AI differs from a ghost.
I mean, being in relative terms basically a non-writer, certainly nothing commercial, for me even a short composition drums up a very long dialogue with Claude over every detail of the story, so that a novel-length work (as yet unfinished) will run to 400,000 words of notes passed between us. This also highlights a massive gulf between AI and ghostwriting. There's no way I could expect that much indulgence and time from a human ghostwriter (tuition of a sort). As I see the AI composing semi-finished copy which I will finalise at length, I'm learning an awful lot about composition, objectivity, and writers' secrets - their language for describing writing tropes and techniques and so on. It's a complete hands-on course. This I cannot hope to obtain from a ghost writer. Plus, if I want to, I can ask the selfsame AI for a course in writing and it will oblige in its typically Sheldon-like open-ended manner - a thing that, coming from scarcity, is very hard to wrap my cranium around. Do let know ur thoughts. I am interested to know more about the use of ghostwriters. .. on which .. I recall one I spoke to as being censorious to a degree that was just about covering his ass, which struck me as pure cant sepll dumn and another was not up for censoring but was plain dysfunctional —- possibly just a fraud i guess —— all of which compared to Ai was just too much to be doing with. On topic of censorship one can generally get the Ai around to doing the do once it finds some over interleckshuarlised workaround to justify itself by.
I know plenty of writers that started late and did just fine. AI is not teaching you anything. It's doing the work for you, and you are taking credit. That's not writing, that's plagiarism. And why do you assume its output is "good" or that its "knowledge" is useful? It's just as likely to tell you the year is 2024, or that eating rocks is a good way to get minerals. What you write at 69 has a voice and style that is unique to you. I'd much rather read a story written wholly by a 69 year old human, warts and all, than the flattened, averaged, mediocre pablum slop generated by some AI that only in passing resembles a human story. Using AI to "teach" you how to write is (a) cheating (there are no shortcuts) and (b) is depriving yourself of learning how to effectively communicate your ideas.
Also, "great ideas" are a dime a dozen. It's in the struggle to learn how to communicate them that we learn about ourselves and others. You'd be depriving yourself of that for an easy shortcut.
If you use AI to "write" a story, you're not an author, you're a button pusher.
I'm just another asshole on the internet, but my advice to you is: keep your voice yours. Despite your age, experience, race, gender, number of limbs, political affiliation, etc., etc., I assure you people are interested in your stories as they are, warts and all. You don't need AI because it's not doing what you think it's doing. It doesn't "know" anything. It's not "teaching" anything. It's just a fancy text completion engine that is really good at mimicking what human work looks like. But peel back the layer only slightly, and there's no "there" there.
I have enjoyed attending to these insights thx. I would be remiss not to interpret the following as a challenge: ''What you write at 69 has a voice and style that is unique to you. I'd much rather read a story written wholly by a 69 year old human, warts and all, than the flattened, averaged, mediocre pablum slop generated by some AI that only in passing resembles a human story. '' And so the least I could do out of the respect I hold for your judgement (Which corresponds with values I maintain regards music) would be to create something with zero Ai assistance to the very best I could and then starting again from scratch write that same thing using the Ai. Having seen what an idea can look like on the page having been driven through that cheating little amp I am in any way curious to know what it would have been if I had just left myself to figure it out. This will to me be all a valid part of this exploration. On reading your take on it one big question naturally must arise, which is: Do you conceive of Ai as being somehow a thing separate from us, in the way that a wheel is not a leg and a synthesiser is not a violin? This would help me better contextualise your findings. And one other detail, I am personally unable to see how by comparison to my own execution of ideas the Ai rendering of my own wart encrusted inspiration qualifies as the 'flattened, averaged pap' alluded to. For one thing, having so easily become a user of Ai I am unaware of exactly how my unassisted work would look (although for lack of years of discipline it might likely resemble itself more the mentioned slop) but it is not with any ease that I can see that the Ai execution of my own dime-a-dozen ideas is not way superior to my own--again, given that lack of years at the early morning pen. In passing i should maybe mention that the ideas I have pending at any one time are to me no dime a dozen thing since they all arrive out of autobiography with zero quotidian/commercial pressure to just output copy in exchange for bread and water, ie, the work of a happy amateur--itself probably as damning a condition as the using of Ai. One thing is I think for sure, the universe gives but squat, except that stories get told, to one or another degree of effectiveness, pappy or dry, Amis or O'Henry, Floyd or EDM, The Sex Pistols or puto fkn reggaetón-on-autofkntune, like some fat fk Gotham City editor on The Daily Planet --- it just wants the story, Asshole on the Internet, thanking you again for your thoughts ;) .
i think like anything. used with respect, balance and understanding. it'll be fine. aaron.
I don't understand how your statement is relevant to what I wrote.
read it back in ten years.