On the non-use of AI in my writing process

> You need better arguments than "you don't like to use it yourself and prefer writing yourself"

Nobody needs a better argument than that to explain the title "On the non-use of AI in my writing process"

> You could never copyright your style, or else any music band that copies the general style of another band could have been sued and then the development of music would also have gone quite differently.

You cant copyright style or facts, but somehow the combination of the two is what newspapers rely upon.

> No, ideas, styles, claims, knowledge are by default part of the commons.

I can say this about 100% of things banned by laws. The laws are what changes us away from the default.

> This whole copyright and intellectual "property" idea is extremely new in human history. More people should know this fact. This has not been how people thought about culture before the ~1800s

Everything pre ~1800s was awful, so this is not a useful argument for or against anything.

> preventing others from talking about what they heard is tyrannical

Are you saying an AI is in the same category as a human in terms of what it is "tyrannical" to forbid it to produce? This is not a widely held position, even amongst people very impressed with what they can do. The justification given for why AI should be able to read all the things and write new outputs from them is that nobody objected when the same models working the same way were worse at it and could only produce e.g. (c. 2020) Google Translate. If they were reliant on some model being allowed to act like a human, they would be (and indeed frequently are anyway) facing questions about how to punish the models for breaking rules like humans get punished for breaking rules.

(Separately: For humans I kinda agree with what I just quoted from you, however it does also mean that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements should also be voided; the 'kinda' on my part says NDAs should have a maximum duration equivalent to a patent).

> The whole thing is often wrongly framed, with verbs like "consume", like "consuming content", which is just Orwellian language to describe having your eyes or ears open and remembering what you saw and heard. It doesn't consume a pdf to look at the words and read them. It doesn't consume a film to look at it being projected on a canvas. It doesn't consume a painting to step close and look.

IMO, that's like criticising the use of "master" in a git repo.

GenAI tools getting folded into workflows is IMO the endgame here. Using an LLM to review a story in progress and search for plot holes, contradictions and everything else he described seems like it would be really useful to me in the same way coding agents are great for diagnosing gnarly config and container issues. In my own use case, asking the LLM to find a way to close out a song verse when I can't find the right words has been awesome.

That seems like an advance on the toolchain described here:

https://www.thewritersforhire.com/11-great-organization-tool...

I’m not sure how you interpreted it all, but neither I was talking about any foreseeable future (I explicitly said that I dunno if LLMs are somewhat relatable to all this), nor I’m a religious type (I merely used a term “spirit” because this language was suggested in the thread).

Every example was picked and vetted from popsci books I’ve read, with real basis in neuroscience (in my layman understanding, obviously, so I could’ve gotten something wrong, but I trust that a bit more than an online diagnosis). That blending was a pretty naive mix of a bunch of sci-fi tropes, but point taken - proper writers indeed blur those lines a lot better than my mess of a post.

> You cant copyright style or facts, but somehow the combination of the two is what newspapers rely upon.

You can start a shitty newspaper by looking at all the stories in some other newspaper, then writing about the same facts while imitating a similar register and style.

> Are you saying an AI is in the same category as a human in terms of what it is "tyrannical" to forbid it to produce?

The AI is not an independent entity as of today. The tyranny is against humans who want to use computation to process information they have gathered by listening to public discourse, public art releases and so on.

> how to punish the models for breaking rules like humans get punished for breaking rules.

Again, AI is not an independent agent today, so the person who is using an AI program in a way that is illegal is the one that gets punished.

> however it does also mean that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements should also be voided; the 'kinda' on my part says NDAs should have a maximum duration equivalent to a patent

It's a matter of discussion whether such voluntary agreements should be allowed where someone agrees to refraining from such actions. We don't allow contracts about selling your organs, but this may not go as far.

> IMO, that's like criticising the use of "master" in a git repo.

No there is no similarity at all. "Consume content" is novel marketing language, because to them it's easier to think of everyone as "consumer" because sometimes they sell hamburgers or ice cream to them, sometimes they sell subscriptions to cable TV, sometimes subscriptions to SaaS, and they don't care too much what they sell. So from their POV it's all the same. Since the consumer is paying for access to something, they must be consuming that thing. When they watch TV, it's like eating the burger, from the point of view of someone optimizing sales. But this is pushing the entirety of humanity to see everything from such a narrow lens as advertisement. The same is with the word "content". There used to be musicians and authors, now you have "content creators". "Content" is a marketing word. It means all the stuff that's not an ad. In marketing, you interface with your "consumers" primariy by making them watch ads. But to watch the ad, they need some lure, and the catchall term to all that icky stuff a marketing person has to handle or touch, even briefly, that's not a warm and fuzz little ad, is "content". It's like "payload" in the shipping industry. Imagine if tomorrow we called everything phyiscal simply "payload". You are not a carpenter, you're a payload creator. You're not a car wash company, you're a payload cleaning company. etc.

I'm with you. If the last 30 years have proven anything it's that enthusiasm for tech industry hype is at best historically illiterate.