This is going to be a short one because I find the entire subject so demoralizing I don’t even want to recognize that it’s happening—but it is, indeed, happening.
A year ago I ran the words “ fantasy+author+handbook ” through an “AI” text generator, which had been used to pass the essay portion of standardized tests, and what it returned was gibberish. Unfortunately, the technology has, as technology is wont to do, significantly accelerated in the meantime, so that now we have “AI” generated text winning a poetry chapbook prize , and authors are now fending off contract clauses that give publishers permission to train “AI” systems using their text, which can only mean that publishers are looking to generate new “work” by an imitation of that author. This makes me want to…
I don’t know what it makes me want to do.
I’ve put quotes around “AI” because things like ChatGPT are in no way intelligent. They are in no way capable of independent creative thought. Instead, they are lines of code that algorithmically assemble parts of actual human writers’ work per the instructions of the user. These are called large language models, which is a fancy way of saying: plagiarism machines.
And that is all they are and all they ever will be.
And no, I will not entertain, nor should any reasonable person, the spurious argument that they are merely “tools,” somehow “in service to writers.” Apps like Word, Scrivener, and Grammarly are tools to help writers realize and communicate their writing. To include in that category anything that helps a “writer” copy text from real writers in a way that’s hard to trace because so many writers are being copied in so many bits and pieces, while the “writer” using that “tool” provides only the tiniest teaspoonful of creative input is aggressively ignorant and demeaning to everyone who’s ever actually pulled something new out of them to share with the world.
This is grotesque beyond all belief.
The past couple weeks I looked at Carl Jung’s “ Psychology and Literature ” with a critical eye, but in it he made this salient point: “What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.” Don’t you dare try to convince me that a large language model—any large language model—has a spirit and a heart.
What to do? I don’t know. Maybe we can hope the organizations and individuals who are trying to make this stop will be successful. If not, well, I guess I lived to see the beginning of the end of anything resembling the human species, because if they take art away from us, there is nothing left.
Who else needs a drink?
—Philip Athans
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Here is a book I actually wrote, with no LLM anywhere near it.
Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
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