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| Moral? Sorry, I thought you said MONEY, that's what I care about. |
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It's Not What You Make, It's How You Learned To Make It
I first touched on this topic back in A.I. Started With Artists, But It's Coming For Authors, and there are some points I'd like to reiterate from that post. First and foremost, these programs are not intelligence, artificial or otherwise. They're just pattern-recognition software that sucks up data, and spits it back out at you. They're mimics that, more often than not, we anthropomorphisize so that we think they're smarter than they are. To reiterate, this is not a Terminator-style apocalypse; we are dealing with parrot programs that can do nothing except spit out various combinations of what's been put into them.
Which brings us to the second point. The reason people hate these programs is not because they're so much better than creators of all stripes. It's not because they, "allow anyone to make art/write a book," as so many out there claim when they get hate for using these programs. It's because they were fed stolen work to use as the basis for all of their creations. They are, quite literally, the product of theft. It's one of the main reasons the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that A.I. art cannot be copywritten.
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| Share these? With you? Why would I do that? |
There are, for example, programs out there that don't use stolen material to train on, but which still generate results that can be used from what's in their database. For example, I recently talked about The Medieval Fantasy City Generator by Watabou, which is something that I've used for my Sundara: Dawn of a New Age TTRPG setting. I've generated dozens of maps of fantasy cities and towns using the push of a button, and then once I have a map I can fill in the details myself, and breathe life into the project. There have been generators for character names, random writing prompts, and more available for decades, and there are a lot of writers who've made use of those.
The generative aspect of these programs isn't the problem. If you were to take a generator and train it on public domain works like H.P. Lovecraft stories, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, or even paintings from Renaissance masters, no one would have a problem with that. Whether you used the results of these programs as inspiration for your own stories, or just to create cool cover art, you wouldn't be stealing work from anyone. You couldn't copyright anything created with the program, either, but if you're just using it for inspiration (or you don't care about making money) then that wouldn't be an issue.
But that's not how these programs are being used. Instead, businesses and corporations are stealing the work already created by artists, and they're being used to try to rip off those artists, authors, screen writers, etc. A classic example is Jane Friedman, who had to fight Amazon to have books with her name on them that were written by A.I. removed. Because if a business can pay nothing to get the material they're selling, and then make pure profit off of it, they're going to do that. Period. End of story.
So if you're wondering why so many creatives are angry at the proliferation of so-called A.I. programs, examine the source material that they're trained on. Because there are dozens upon dozens of prompts, machines, and engines that can spit out everything from fantasy cities to story prompts, but those which don't use material that was stolen from creatives don't generate any outrage.
When you're taking sides on an issue like this, look at who's on which side of the line. Then ask yourself if tech bros and corporations have ever been the good guys when it comes to situations like this.
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