There was a survey that was sent to authors today from Draft 2 Digital today that asked authors' opinions on tech companies approaching publishers to use their author's books to train new AI programs. Basically, the tech companies want to use human voice and human words with real emotion in order to train their AI programs to write and create just like a human can. It's already happening in the film and digital art industries. They think, less overheads, less money i pay my talent, the more money in the bank at the end of the day. Cha-ching! Woohoo!
But what is the cost?
Well, what was highlighted in the survey, which you read about here and participate in if you so wish, is that AI developers are approaching authors and publishers looking to license books to train their programs called LLMs (Large Language Models.)
Here's an excerpt and quote from the survey: ""
"Books – both fiction and non-fiction – are highly prized for LLM training due to their long form narrative structures which teach Natural Language Processing.
Common uses for these LLMs include powering personal productivity applications such as customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, and the drafting of written communications for marketing, customer service, and internal communications."
But the cost to authors in this instance would be the potentially very low one time licensing fee, for free use forever more of their intellectual property.
This is quite similar to what is happening to actors in the film and TV industry in Hollywood right now.
Actors can rock up to a studio and be paid $250 - $300 USD to have their whole body image scanned into a 3D CGI scanner, and then once the studios have that image, they can use it forever and not pay the actor a dime more, without permission from the actor. I heard this straight from an actor's mouth.
So i gave my 2 cents on the anonymous survey, which made me very cranky indeed.
I mean, I can go on forever about the threat to the human artist by AI.
AI cannot replicate human emotion.
AI cannot replicate human language patterns, diction or cadence.
AI cannot replicate the thoughts of a person.
When i write, i pour my real thoughts, emotions, fears, desires, hopes, dreams etc into my work.
When a painter paints, they create what they see in their mind on the canvas.
Writers do that too.
AI cannot do this.
All artificial intelligence will be able to do is create a very poor representation based on few keyword prompts typed into a server.
And artists will be out of work.
It's already happening with cover artists and books. Just have a look on Amazon. There are a ton of really bad AI written books on there and laughable, terrible AI cover art, which have people with three legs and seven fingers...
But the thing that terrifies me is this technology is being asked to replicate the words of authors without proper compensation or recourse. For example, imagine typing my name into one of these AI prompt websites with a phrase added like, "write me a fantasy book like L.L. Hunter"
Which will never happen on my watch, but the result would not only be laughable, but i doubt my readers would pay for that garbage.
Readers pick up certain books from certain authors because they like their words, their characters, their world building, etc. I know I want to read actual words from the actual author, not something spewed out by a robot.
I will always and forever write my own books and pay real artists to create art for me. I even write my own social media captions and this very blog which is probably full of errors, but i don't care, because a human wrote them.
Comments