🧵there's a lot of Chatgpt and AIArt stuff out there. I personally feel strongly about it, only in its dearth of ethical or critical reception. Especially on the grounds of people using it for writing/art purposes and calling themselves "artists".
No work went into it, it's 1/8
just a machine. You put something in, something comes out. You're a loader, not a weaver. You're a lever-puller, not a painter.
You're not an "artisan", you just keep the threads from gumming up the machine that makes the textiles. That's all using AI, a digital machine, 2/8
makes you. So, no, I do not and never will subscribe to the notion that we stand at the same table because I write myself and you use AI.
You haven't honed your "voice", ached over grammar, wrote a sentence multiple times for its flow, doubted your vision, faced ridicule; 3/8
rinse & repeat. You had a moment of fancy and used a machine to scrape the love, blood, sweat and tears from other works and have it give you an approximate of your tiny vision
You're not an artist. This is one of the few areas I can speak definitively and with confidence on 4/8
I will not budge on this point. You're a usurper, an upstart shouldering your way to a table at which you have no business standing.
I suffer from doubt, from being self-critical to the point of killing my projects. I have so many aborted drafts on Twitter that could fill 5/8
a book. I often compare myself to many great writers; Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Tolkien, just to name a few. People that make me doubt I even belong at the writer's table although I have put in the work throughout my adult life and some of my teens to be there.
6/8
Just want my position clear. AI is not an art. Period.
It's a tool. A good tool; language-based, which is friendly to how we work as humans. I have tried it in order to put maths or complicated subjects into an easy-to-digest form. In that way, it's like a Wiki that you can 7/8
question. It does not, however, make me a physicist, or a historian, etc.
Rant over. Just felt I needed to put this out there for some reason. Just going with my gut, using a split moment of crackhead confidence to express myself without smothering my opinions outright. 8/8
In addition to the ethical issues surrounding how the AI is trained on the work of human artists and the lack of transparency about what inputs it's relying on to create texts or images... there's the problem that people are far more willing to ascribe competence, creativity, and thought to something that's basically a calculator.
They're relying on it to do things like write contracts or answer factual questions--and it can't do that. Not really. It can only appear to do that.