edit the question to: “How much do you care”
I love reading and am always on the hunt for a new book.
I’ve noticed an uptick in AI-generated books on Amazon. Often the AI books lack plot or experience of being human that leads to them reading as very machine-like. The author pages sometimes have AI generated photos too.
Oversaturation of this kind of content makes finding high quality, and human-authored text (which has more depth in my opinion) really hard. It’s also so frustrating for me because writing a book used to be a way to proclaim some sort of authority in storytelling, or if it’s non-fiction, a specific subject. Now, that hard work of creating authority is being shrunk down into some well-constructed prompts.
What are your thoughts on what finding books to read in the future will be like?
Do you care if a book is human authored or AI-created?
To what lengths do/would you go to find high quality reading by a human?
by PunAndInk
4 Comments
Yes, I care strongly.
The software that we call “AI” today is unethical. It exists thanks solely to its training data, and its training data was not acquired with the permission of its creators. The “AI”s that we have today are simply plagiarizing, but on a scale so vast that we humans have difficulty identifying exactly where each bit is plagiarized from.
Until we have generative AIs that are trained *entirely* on works that the authors have donated (or been paid for!) for that purpose, all books written by them are unethical.
To be clear: I’m not talking copyright and legalities. The ins and outs of how copyright works are complex, and how copyright and fair use apply to works generated by AIs are likely to be litigated in the near future. I’m only talking ethics, which is the more important thing anyway, imo.
art is the manifestation of human expression across all mediums. If it’s not made by a person trying to say something that reflects their worldview, it’s worthless
If AI pushes humans out of the market, literature past that year is dead to me. People will say there will always be a demand for human writing, but if it’s no longer possible to verify an actual person human wrote the story I’m reading, it will lose almost all value.
I don’t really see any point in reading (or watching, listening, playing, etc) anything created by “AI.” I read books in part to experience the product of someone else’s creativity. I want to subject myself to a transference of ideas and aesthetics from another person. I don’t read just to “have a good story” or whatever. Part of the experience of reading is being in conversation with the thoughts and artistry of another person. I will never knowingly or willingly read anything written by “AI.”