I used to post religiously on Reddit’s /r/writingprompts
Reddit’s API was sold to train AI
There’s a good chance that some people out there are reading things inspired by my stories
I was never paid for this, and it should feel bad, but part of me naively hopes that through the digital lens of the internet and the cosmos, my small contribution has made their existence easier, or happier in some way.
Human creativity, and art, contains the soul or essence of its creator; everyone puts a small piece of themselves into their writing; a distant memory, an ambition, a dream, a memoir.
I don’t think we should stop writing creative works of art as a species. But I do think we should have a simple label on any new books, something that tells you whether it’s 100% whole milk or made from reconstituted milk powder. Like a fair trade label of a robot head.
I say this as someone who’s still currently building/working on foundational models full-time.
LLMs will kill my hobby, and have cost a few people I personally know their jobs already.
But we should keep on writing anyway despite all of that, because I feel people still want to read books made by humans.
Don’t give up.
Yes. And I feel a technical solution like watermarking would make things so much easier… We could just decide whether we want to read AI or human text.
- still want to read books made by humans.*
True. LLMs just regurgitate. Not just that, they have no point of view or inner life. I don’t care what they think, in the way I might with James Joyce, Franz Kafka or Sylvia Plath.
That said, much of creative work is semi-automated already.
Is there really much true creativity in Hollywood superhero movies or TV soap operas? That kind of content seems like it could be largely done by AI.
